“What do you think you would do after 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow and lynching? Do you think you would respond nonviolently?” Those were some of the key questions Malcolm X posed to American society.
Although slavery had been abolished in the US in 1865, the so-called Jim Crow laws continued to cement everyday discrimination against Black people until 1964. There were artificial barriers to their right to vote in some states, and in many they weren’t allowed to sit next to white people on buses or in restaurants.
“Malcolm X addressed precisely the issues that were burning on the minds of oppressed African Americans,” Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, author of the biography “Malcolm X: The Black Revolutionary,” told DW.
His message to African Americans was clear: Be self-confident! Fight for your rights “by any means necessary” — even with violence.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Les Payne (1941-2018) recalled in his Malcolm X biography how a 1963 speech by the activist freed him, as if by a “flashing sword blow,” from the “conditioned feeling of inferiority as a Black man” deeply rooted in his psyche.
That was precisely Malcom X’s goal.
A childhood marred by racism
Born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm Little’s childhood near Detroit was marked by poverty and violence. He was six years old when his father was found dead; according to various accounts, he had been murdered by white supremacists. With seven children and little money, Malcom’s mother was completely overwhelmed and became mentally ill. Malcolm was placed in various foster families and institutions; he later spoke in his autobiography of the “terror of the very white social workers.”
Despite his difficult beginnings, he was a good student, the only Black person in his class. A key experience had a profound impact on him: His favorite teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Malcolm replied that he would like to study law. But the teacher, using an offensive racist slur to describe him, told him that wasn’t a realistic goal for a boy like him.
The young Malcolm was completely disillusioned. His grades dropped dramatically, and at 15, he moved to Boston to live with his half-sister Ella Collins, and later to New York. He supported himself by doing odd jobs before becoming a petty criminal. In his early 20s, he was imprisoned for various burglaries.
“Here is a Black man caged behind bars, probably for years, put there by the white man,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “You let this caged-up Black man start realizing, as I did, how from the first landing of this first slave ship, the millions of Black men in America have been like sheep in a den of wolves. That’s why Black prisoners become Muslims so fast when Elijah Muhammad’s teachings filter into their cages by the way of other Muslim convicts.”
The mentor Malcolm X refers to, Elijah Muhammad, was a Black separatist and the leader of the Nation of Islam, a religious-political organization of African Americans outside of Islamic orthodoxy.
Fight against the ‘white devils’
Nation of Islam (NOI) “claims that all Black people are inherently children of God and good, and all white people are inherently evil and children of the devil,” explains Waldschmidt-Nelson. “What made this very attractive to Malcolm and many other prison inmates, of course, is that someone would come along and say, ‘You are not to blame for your misery; it is the blue-eyed devils who made you go astray.'”
After joining NOI, he started calling himself Malcolm X, because African Americans’ surnames had historically been assigned by their slave owners. Therefore, NOI members rejected their slave names and called themselves simply “X.”
He spent his seven years in prison educating himself and remained a member of NOI for 14 years. Leader Elijah Muhammed appreciated the young man’s intellectual acumen and oratory skills and made him the organization’s spokesperson.
In his speeches, Malcolm X repeatedly denounced the “white devils.” Although he lived in the northern states of the US — the “Promised Land” for Black people from the even more restrictive southern states — he no longer placed any hope in white “liberals” there either. After all, he had personally experienced how Black people were treated as second-class citizens throughout the US.
Malcolm X was long scornful of Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement. He criticized King’s famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington about a free and united America, united across all racial barriers, as unrealistic: “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of 22 million Black people who are the victims of Americanism. […] And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
Pilgrimage to Mecca — and a change of heart
After becoming disillusioned with the organization’s leader, Malcolm X broke ranks with the Nation of Islam in March 1964.
That same year, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca — and his image of the “white devils” began to waver. “He was deeply impressed by the hospitality and warmth with which he was greeted, even by white Muslims in Saudi Arabia,” writes Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson in her biography. “And then, in the last year of his life, he turned away from this racist doctrine,” she told DW.
He set himself a new task: “Malcolm X wanted to create an alliance of all oppressed people of color against white colonial oppression,” says the biographer.
On a trip to Africa, governments praised his intention, but he couldn’t count on their support: “Of course, they were all dependent on US development aid, and most African governments wouldn’t have operated openly against the US at the time.”
Instead, Malcolm X became the focus of the CIA. The Nation of Islam was also on his heels. “He knew he was going to be assassinated, and it was also a conscious decision on his part to face it,” says Waldschmidt-Nelson. “He probably said to himself: I can’t give up now. After his experience in Mecca, Malcolm had embarked on a completely new path, open to collaborating with King’s civil rights movement and, if necessary, with white people as well.”
But that never happened. On February 21, 1965, he was shot dead during a lecture by members of the Nation of Islam. He was only 39 years old.
A renewed legacy
In the 1980s, hip-hop artists celebrated Malcolm X’s legacy by sampling his speeches in their music: “All that became very resonant,” says Michael E. Sawyer, professor of African American literature and culture at the University of Pittsburgh. “It was a way to create this kind of resurgence of Black identity as also a political identity.” The songs served as political declarations of war on white racism, police brutality and the impoverishment of the Black underclass.
In 1992, Spike Lee adapted Malcolm X’s autobiography into a film starring Denzel Washington, which also contributed to turning the revolutionary figure into an icon forging many Black people’s cultural identity.
Today, as the current US administration is whitewashing history to understate the role racism played in shaping the country, and with the MAGA movement opposed to any criticism of America’s alleged past glory, Malcolm X’s words remain more relevant than ever:
“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”
This article was originally written in German.
