From The ISO-Boston-BLACK LIBERATION AND SOCIALISM-March 8th

BLACK LIBERATION AND SOCIALISM

a publlc forum sponsored by the International Socialist Organization
bostonsocialism.org \ Contact@bostonsocialism.org
(ph) 617-902-047$

Thursday, March 8

7pm

Freedom House

14 Crawford Street Dorchester MA 02121

"All my life, I believed that the fundamental struggle was Black versus white. Now I realize that it is the haves against the have-nots,"
— Malcolm X

OCCUPY 4 JOBS BLACK HISTORY FORUM! In Boston- Saturday-February 18th

OCCUPY 4 JOBS BLACK HISTORY FORUM! In Boston- Saturday-February 18th

February Is Black History Month

In his final days, Dr. King planned a mass OCCUPATION FOR JOBS

OCCUPY 4 JOBS BLACK HISTORY Forum!

Demand jobs/ housing, education and people's rights!

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18th 4:00 P.M.

Hear Larry Holmes, National Coordinator, OCCUPY 4 JOBS

SAVE GROVE HALL POST OFFICE - STOP POST OFFICE SHUTDOWNS!

NO THREE STRIKES LAW IN MASSACHUSETTS!

STOP MBTA FARE HIKES AND CUTS!

STOP THE RETURN TO RACIST, SEGREGATED "NEIGHBORHOOD"
SCHOOLS!

WPA-STYLE 30 MILLION JOBS PROGRAM - JOBS OR INCOME FOR
ALL

MONEY FOR JOBS, NOT FOR WAR AGAINST IRAN!

JOBS NOT JAILS!

Save the date - check iacboston.org for location

Occupy 4 Jobs Network c/o USW L. 875125 Colgate Rd, Roslindale, MA 02131

617-524-3507 Minister Don Muhammad, Temple 11, Nation of Islam

For info, call International Action Center 617-522-6626 or email occupy4jobsboston@gmail.com

On The 51st Anniversary Of The Freedom Riders- All Honor To Those Who Took To The Buses "Heading South"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Freedom Riders, a group of civil rights workers who valiantly tried, by example, to integrate interstate transportation in the South. We are not so far removed from those events even today, North or South.

February Is Black History Month

Markin comment:

I was in high school at the time of the freedom rides and was part of a support group sponsored by the Americans For Democratic Action (ADA, then an anti-Soviet Cold War left-liberal organization but very pro-civil rights in the South) that was raising money in order to sent more civil rights workers "heading South." Heading toward the danger not away from it. Honor those black liberation fighters.

***February Is Black History Month-Hats Off To Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Emmett Till case.



DVD Review

Free at Last: Civil Rights Heroes, film documentary, Image Entertainment, 2005


Every major (and most minor) progressive social struggle in America from the struggle for independence from Great Britain through to the struggle for slavery abolition up to the struggle for women’s rights and gender equality today has had more than its share of heroes and martyrs. The purpose of the documentary under review, Free At Last: Civil Rights Heroes, rightly, highlights some of those lesser known heroes and martyrs from the struggle for black civil rights that came to national prominence in the1950s and 1960s (although arguably that conscious struggle goes back to the 1930s and before).

Although, in the end the question of black equality had to be addressed (and still has to be addressed) nationally the thrust of the black civil rights movement that is featured in this film is the struggle for something like a democratic revolution by blacks and their supporters in the police state-like American South. That barbaric de jure and de facto Jim Crow system officially, as a matter state and social policy, held blacks in second class citizenship (or lower). The struggle to overcome that ingrained (and profitable, profitable for whites of almost all social strata) was almost, of necessity, going to create more than it share of heroes and martyrs.

The case of fourteen year old Chicago resident Emmett Till and his horrible murder at the hands of white marauders in Mississippi in 1955, the first of the three separate segments that make up the film graphically highlights the problem. For the mere allegation of “whistling at a white woman while black” (if that allegation had any substance) young Emmett was brutally mangled and thrown into the local river. When his mother, righteously, made a cause out of this bestial murder all hell broke loose, at least on the surface. And the case galvanized blacks and whites nationally, alerting many for the first time to the hard fact that something was desperately wrong down in Mississippi (and not just there). But justice, Mississippi justice, to paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, is justice deferred. As detailed in almost all the cases highlighted in the film those directly responsible for the actions against the civil rights workers were either never brought to justice or only after something like a long drawn out legal civil war. No one should forget that aspect of the struggle either.

The other cases highlighted from the assassinated Medgar Evers to the four Birmingham girls murdered in their church when it was bombed to the three civil rights workers slain in Philadelphia, Mississippi that drew nation-wide attention to slain white civil rights workers Viola Liuzzo and Reverend James Reeb, murdered for “being white while working for black civil rights” exhibit those same kinds of sickening results. Let me put it this way after viewing the film footage here, especially Bull Connor’s attack dogs being let loose on civil rights demonstrators in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama that was one of the first visual images that drove me into the civil rights struggle, I still wanted to throw something at the screen. And you wonder why fifty or so years later I still say Mississippi (or fill in your preferred state) goddam. Kudos here.

February Is Black History Month-The Truth-teller-Malcolm X on Racist America

Markin comment:

Read the entries below. Does that first entry sound like a man who was on the same page politically as "DeLawd," Martin Luther King? To pose the question is to give the answer. As close as I was to the King-led movement in those days Malcolm X could still stir me in a way King with all his obvious eloquence could never do. Truth to power-no question.

Malcolm X on Racist America

The text of this telegram to Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was read aloud by Malcolm X at a public rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unitv in Harlem on January 24. 1965.

Public Notice to George Lincoln Rockwell

"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary."

Discussion with American Ambassador in Africa

"He said, 'As long as I'm in Africa, I deal with people as human beings— For some strange reason color doesn't enter into it at all.'

"He said, 'But whenever I return to the United States and I'm talking to a non-white person, I'm conscious of it, I'm self-conscious, I'm aware of the color differences.'

"So I told him, 'What you're telling me, whether you realize it or not, is that it is not basic in you to be a racist, but that society there in America, which you all have created, makes you a racist.' This is true, this is the worst racist society on this earth. There is no country on earth in which you can live and racism be brought out in you— whether you're white or black—more so than this country that poses as a democracy. This is a country where the social, economic, political atmosphere creates a sort of psychological atmos¬phere that makes it almost impossible, if you're in your right mind, to walk down the street with a while person and not be self-concious, or he or she not be self-conscious— But it's the society itself."
*******
From Spartacist- May-June 1964

MALCOLM X

Of all the national Negro leaders in this country, the one who was known uniquely for his militancy, intransigence, and refusal to be the liberals' front-man has been shot down. This new political assassination is another indicator of the rising current of irrationality and individual terrorism which the decay of our society begets. Liberal reaction is predictable, and predictably disgusting. They are, of course, opposed to assassination, and some may even contribute to the fund for the education of Malcolm’s children, but their mourning at the death of the head of world imperialism had a considerably greater ring of sincerity than their regret at the murder of a black militant who wouldn't play their game.

Black Muslims?

The official story is that Black Muslims killed Malcolm. But we should not hasten to accept this to date unproved hypothesis. The New York Police, for example, had good cause to be afraid of Malcolm, and with the vast resources of blackmail and coercion which are at their disposal, they also had ample opportunity, and of course would have little reason to fear exposure were they involved. At the same time, the Muslim theory cannot be discounted out of hand because the Muslims are not a political group, and in substituting religion for science, and color mysticism for rational analysis, they have a world view which would encompass the efficacy and morality of assassination, a man who has a direct pipeline to God can justify anything.

No Program

The main point, however, is not who killed Malcolm, but why could he be killed? In the literal sense, of course, any man can be killed, but why was Malcolm particularly vulnerable? The answer to this question makes of Malcolm's death tragedy of the sharpest kind, and in the literal Greek sense. Liberals and Elijah have tried to make Malcolm a victim of his own (non-existent) doctrines of violence. This is totally wrong and totally hypocritical. Malcolm was the most dynamic national leader to have appeared in America in the last decade. Compared with him the famous Kennedy personality was a flimsy cardboard creation of money, publicity, makeup, and the media. Malcolm had none of these, but a righteous cause and iron character forged by white America in the fire of discrimination, addiction, prison, and incredible calumny. He had a difficult to define but almost tangible attribute called charisma. When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing-his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived. He had entered prison a burgler, an addict, and a victim. He emerged a Muslim and a free man forever. Elijah Muhammad and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam were thus inextricably bound up with his personal emancipation. In any event, at the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary, to the creation of a successful mass movement. Lacking such a program, he could not develop cadres based on program. What cadre he had was based on Malcolm X instead. Hated and feared by the power structure, and the focus of the paranoid feelings of his former colleagues, his charisma made him dangerous, and his lack of developed program and cadre made him vulnerable. His death by violence had a high order of probability, as he himself clearly felt.

Heroic and Tragic Figure

The murder of Malcolm, and the disastrous consequences flowing from that murder for Malcolm's organization and black militancy in general, does not mean that the militant black movement can always be decapitated with a shotgun. True, there is an agonizing gap in black leadership today. On the one hand there are the respectable servants of the liberal establishment; men like James Farmer whose contemptible effort to blame Malcolm's murder on "Chinese Communists" will only hasten his eclipse as a leader, and on the other hand the ranks of the militants have yet to produce a man with the leadership potential of Malcolm. But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike ad a heroic and tragic figure* in & dark period of our common history. •

Bay Area Spartacist Committee, 2 March, 1965

February Is Black History Month-From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-The Life And Legacy Of Malcolm X

Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.

The Life And Legacy Of Malcolm X

Introduction

"You're living at a time of revolution...people in power have misused it and now a better world has to be built."
— Malcolm X

On 21 February 1965 Malcolm X was shot dead minutes before he was about to address a rally in Harlem, New York. As with the firebombing of his home a week earlier, the finger was automatically pointed at the Nation of Islam with whom Malcolm had split the previous year.

Threatened by his radical ideas and appeal to young blacks, the FBI had Malcolm X under surveillance. Speculation continues that the capitalist state itself used its own agents to eliminate their number one public enemy.

Of what there is no doubt is that after the murder the American state drew a huge sigh of relief. One of the most vocal, uncompromising opponents of their system had apparently been silenced. However history continues to show that revolutionary ideas can never be silenced.

The assassination of Malcolm X spawned the Black Panther Party. In Seize The Time, the story of the Black Panthers, Co-founder Bobby Seale tells us the tremendous effect the killing of Malcolm X had on him: "I got mad, I put my fist through a window. I told them all, I'll make my own self into a Malcolm X, and if they want to kill me they'll have to kill me...That a big change for me...Malcolm X had an impact on everybody like that". The next year the Black Panther Party was formed. They represent the highest point in the civil rights movement that engulfed the US for over two decades. They took Malcolm's message of self-defense for blacks and translated it into action. During the 1970s they became a focal point for young blacks wanting to fight back against the racist police and state in America. They inspired youth and blacks internationally with their preparedness to fight racism and police brutality. They too posed a threat to the American state. At one stage300 of their leaders were imprisoned on various trumped up charges. Many more were gunned down by police.

For many youth today - black and white - the life and ideas of Malcolm X a great inspiration. The X icon we see depicted on T-shirts, baseball caps etc. represents a lot more than merely a fashion accessory. It shows a layer of people groping for the ideas and strategy to take them forward. There're few if any obvious leaders that young people today identify with. Internationally the leaders of the labor movement certainly have no attraction. Their "do nothing" policy does nothing but frustrate radical youth looking for away out of the conditions they are condemned to live in.

In the 1990s little has changed. The situation certainly hasn't improved for most blacks in the US or Britain. Every social statistic from education to housing to employment finds blacks at the bottom of the heap. The rise of racism and fascism across Europe has resulted in blacks being brutalized and murdered. The public lynchings that were commonplace for decades in the US have not gone away, they have merely been replaced with less visible racist attacks and murders. In New York alone there were 1,110 "hate crimes" committed against blacks and Jews in 1992. There are over 300 white supremacy groups active in the United States. Against this background Malcolm's message of fighting back "by any means necessary" is as relevant as ever.

Big business has jumped on the bandwagon of a man who wholeheartedly denounced their system. They attempt to sanitize his message and make a profit out of doing so! A mass industry has developed that expects to net over £63million in 1993 from the sale of X merchandise, including board games, crisps and air fresheners!

Eighty four percent of young black Americans consider Malcolm X their hero. However it is claimed that only one in four of those aged under 24 know what he actually stood for. Almost every black leader in America now attempts to claim the mantle of Malcolm - even those reformist leaders embroiled in the Democrat Party that Malcolm consistently condemned. Louis Farrakhan, current leader of the Nation of Islam, while quick to sing the praises of Malcolm X today, joined in denouncing him at the time of Malcolm's split with the Nation. He wrote in the Nation's main publication: "such a man as this is worthy of death."

There is much debate over which direction Malcolm's ideas were going in the last year of his life. Militant believes that his experiences and international outlook was leading him to understand that the system had to be overthrown. There is no doubt however that he was an internationalist and a revolutionary, who clearly perceived the rottenness of world capitalism.

Militant have produced this pamphlet to trace the life and ideas of Malcolm X and the civil rights movement and most importantly to explain their relevance today. His courageous stand must not be forgotten and his ideas must be built on. In the 1990s we must draw the same conclusions that Malcolm X and hundreds of other heroic blacks drew in the course of their struggle. Only a revolutionary fight to change society will truly lead to black liberation. But Militant goes further. We fight for a socialist society based on the needs of working-class people, black and white. We believe that only a society run democratically by ordinary people will end once and for all the racism and exploitation that is part and parcel of this capitalist system.

Andrea Enisuoh, 1993

The Early Years

"They called me the angriest Negro in America."
— Malcolm X



Malcolm Little was born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. Malcolm was still very young when after threats from the Ku Klux Klan his family was forced to move to Omaha. He was only six years old when his father was savagely murdered by a local white supremacy group. The same group had earlier torched his family's home.

At school he proved a promising pupil with the talents and enthusiasm that exist in all young people. Unfortunately, as with numerous other young blacks even today, the system was unable or unwilling to develop those talents and aspirations. Instead they were to be crushed. He was told by his teacher that his dream to become a lawyer was "unrealistic for a Nigger."

After school Malcolm turned to a life of petty crime. He spent some time in state detention centers. In 1945 he was sentenced to 8-10 years in prison for burglary. There is little doubt that the severity of his sentence was provoked by the outrage of the jury after they were told that Malcolm had been assisted by his white mistress.

For the first 20 years of his life Malcolm experienced nothing but racism. It was those experiences that alienated him, firstly from whites, but also from the whole American system. It was later that he began to realize that the "American system" that failed to offer him any hope of a decent future was the capitalist system. Militant believes that the political consciousness of individuals is formed by their day-to-day experiences. It was Malcolm's own conditions and accumulated experiences that eventually led him to the correct conclusion: "You can't have capitalism without racism."

During his first year in prison Malcolm expressed his frustration and despair in the only way he knew. He deliberately alienated himself, not only from prison guards but also other inmates.

Eventually he used his time to educate himself. He began classes in English and Latin and read so voraciously, even after lights out, that he permanently impaired his vision.

It was in prison that Malcolm eventually converted to the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim organization espousing separatism as the way forward for the black race. It was this radical religion, described to him as "the natural religion for the black man" that seemed to offer him a way out. Malcolm grasped it with his heart and soul.

The Nation of Islam (Black Muslims)

"Any time I have a religion that won't let me fight for my people, I say to hell with that religion. That's why I am a Muslim."
— Malcolm X



The Nation of Islam was founded in 1931 by Wallace D Fard. He presented himself as a Muslim prophet and preached a message of "black redemption within Islam". He claimed "the Asiatic Black Man" had been the original inhabitant of the earth. The white race had been given 6,000 years to rule and eventually whites and white Christianity would be destroyed. Elijah Muhammad, who became leader of the Nation after Fard disappeared, developed this. He claimed originally that the black race had inhabited the moon and that at one time the moon and earth were one. A black scientist, Yakub, supposedly caused an explosion that separated the two. The first people to inhabit the earth were members of a black tribe called Shabazz. While these theories seem, they are no more so than the Christian theory of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. However, white Christianity in all its permutations has been developed over centuries. It has been used to justify slavery, racism and imperialism. It is a religion that the ruling class needed and continue to uphold.

The attraction of the Nation of Islam to blacks was its apparent ability to voice the anger and discontent that existed in every black community. In terms of rhetoric they were amongst the strongest advocates of black pride but their separatist outlook and refusal to actively engage in the civil rights struggle left them spectating from the sidelines of the movement. They produced proud books on black history. Discarding their surnames as marks of their slave past, they replaced them with the suffix "X". Converts had to follow a strict code of discipline - no pork, tobacco, alcohol, drugs or extra marital sex. Engagement in political activity with non-Muslims was not permitted. Until their demand for a separate state was met Muslims were to have no social, political or religious contact with whites. They demanded self-determination; an independent black state in America or a return to Africa.

As Marxists, Militant would argue that this policy is fundamentally flawed. We believe that the sustained division of the working class along racial lines will greatly weaken the potential of the struggle against capitalism. It can also aid the policy of the ruling class to keep divisions running through the class. It was to keep black and white workers divided that the ruling class created and nurtured organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

While holding this position we do not arrogantly condemn blacks attracted to nationalist ideas. We would support the right to self-determination for any nation, but we also have a duty to point out that under the capitalist system this is unrealistic. We need only look to Zionism - the establishment of Israel on a capitalist basis - to illustrate the point Israel is no safe haven for Jews. It is an armed camp for US imperialism. The creation of a separate black state in America would pose even more difficulties. By the l960s, blacks did not make up the majority in any one state. Two in three blacks lived in the cities so for a black nation to be created, tens of millions of blacks and whites would have to be forcibly uprooted.

Black nationalism is not black racism. Of course, taken to ludicrous extremes, it can be thoroughly reactionary. Louis Farrakhan today uses Black Nationalism to try to justify black capitalism. Malcolm X as a leader of the Nation of Islam met with the Ku Klux Klan to discuss ways of ensuring separatism. However many ordinary blacks who conclude that there is no road out of this capitalist system turn to the ideas of separatism. The job of Marxists is not to dismiss blacks drawn to these conclusions but to show that struggle for a socialist revolution is the only true road to black liberation.

From having just a few hundred supporters initially, by the early 1960s the Black Muslims had 100,000 members. The liberation struggles sweeping Africa and Asia at the time undoubtedly affected blacks in the US. Racial pride was stimulated amongst the whole of the black population. It was on the tide of this new wave of confidence that the Nation of Islam was able to grow. Malcolm X was one of their foremost ministers; his oratory skills attracted a new section of youth towards the religion. Even the media and press hyped up the Black Muslims. A section of the ruling class recognized that they would eventually be forced to make concessions to the black masses of America. They deliberately portrayed the Nation as the nasty vicious side of the black movement, thus bolstering the respectable non-violent mainstream of Martin Luther King.

It was a conscious strategy of the Nation of Islam to target prisons as a recruitment ground. This can be traced back to 1942 when Elijah Muhammad and 62 of his followers were convicted of draft evasion (their religion does no tallow them to serve in the armed forces) and jailed for three years. While in prison Muhammad recognized the fertile ground that existed for any radical ideas amongst what was known as the black underclass. After the war much time and energy was devoted specifically to winning over prisoners.

But to many, the Black Muslims were rife with contradictions. It wasn't enough for them to simply attack white society and preach black unity. In the early 1960s demonstrations, sit-ins and marches swept almost every state. At a time when militant blacks were involved in mass action the Nation were seen to be doing nothing. They would attack the strategy of the mainstream civil rights movement and yet offer no alternative struggle outside the confines of their own organization.

Malcolm X became a popular leader of the Nation. He threw himself into his work and into the black community. He was catapulted to fame in the press. Much more able than Elijah Muhammad to gauge the killings of young blacks, he became frustrated by the restraints of the organization. When he eventually split with them in 1964 he said: "If I harbored any personal disappointment whatsoever, it was that privately I was convinced that our Nation of Islam could be an even greater force in the black man's overall struggle if we engaged in more action. It could be heard increasingly in the Negro communities 'Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything.'" Although the eventual split was put down to "internal differences" there is no doubt that his desire to politically organize blacks in action was unimportant factor. At his first press conference after the split he still defended the Nation, Elijah Muhammad and their 'back to Africa' policy. But he did say: "separation back to Africa is a long term program and while it is yet to materialize 22 million of our people who are still here in America need better food, clothing, housing and jobs right now...Now that I have more independence of action, I intend to use a more flexible approach toward working with others to get a solution to this problem."

The Civil Rights Movement

"The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is interrelated...racism, poverty, militarism and imperialism. Evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society."
— Martin Luther King

"If George Washington didn't get independence for this country non-violently...and you taught me to look upon heroes, then it's time for you to realize - I have studied your books well."

— Malcolm X



The tremendous Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s shook America to its very foundations. It was a movement that in one or another touched every black family in the US. Internationally throughout Africa, the Caribbean and even Europe blacks were imbued with a new confidence. It seemed on every continent a liberation struggle was taking place. America the 'land of the free' was no exception.


Jim Crow (Racial Segregation)

This was a struggle that had to be fought Blacks in America did not just face poverty, but a degrading, racist social system commonly known as Jim Crow (racial segregation). In the South rights to vote, organize, even to assemble were taken away from blacks. Segregated schools, transport, public toilets etc. condemned blacks to the worst conditions.

Jim Crow was not simply some nasty piece of legislation that evolved over the. It was a carefully worked out, carefully executed, social system devised by the ruling class. At times of economic crisis the ruling class often use racism to divide working people. It is also used to drive down wages and working conditions thus providing pools of cheap labor. Before World War Two in the South there were vast amounts of land and yet an enormous shortage of labor. Taking away the rights of blacks enabled the bosses to force them to work for pitifully low wages. After World War Two the mechanization of agriculture solved the bosses problem and blacks were literally driven off the land. There now existed, after the war, a labor shortage in the factories of the North. Migration of huge numbers of blacks to the North began. This continued through the 1950s and 1960s and created the black ghettos we see there today.

During World War Two over 3 million blacks registered for the army. Over 500,000 fought and many died "to defend democracy" in racially segregated units. Those that returned did so in the knowledge that things would never be the same again. Blacks came back wanting, expecting and prepared to fight for change.


1954 Supreme Court Ruling

There had often been struggles through the courts by blacks to end segregation, but before 1954 they had little effect. Now the ruling class realized there had to be change. Throughout Africa and Asia there were huge movements for independence, against military and economic domination by Imperialism. Colonial rule in its previous form was coming to an end. Imperialist America found itself having to negotiate with new, confident black governments. To uphold their position of influence the US had to try to convince these governments that they were the friends of blacks. They therefore looked to produce cosmetic changes at home.

This was the reason for the 1954 Supreme Court Ruling that deemed segregation in schools illegal. But rather than satisfy blacks in the US it led to them demanding more. Blacks demanded the right to vote and boldly went to register.


Lynchings

There was always strong resistance to the dismantling of Jim Crow. The Southern Democratic Party, made up of white small property owners was based on this racist system. While industrialization benefited big capitalist firms, the small property owners still needed to exploit blacks to make their profits.

To sustain the Jim Crow system lynchings and murders became commonplace. Blacks who registered to vote were assassinated and any blacks that fought for their rights in any way were met with a reign of terror.

Lynchings became an integral part of the Jim Crow system. Far from being an aberration they became an American institution. Many people traveled for miles see the lynching of a black take place, with discounts introduced on the railroads for those traveling to a lynching. Rallies with Democratic Party speakers were held before some lynchings took place and photographs of the events were even taken and sold as souvenirs.

In 1955 things began to change. Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy from Chicago was visiting family in Mississippi. Coming from the North he was seen by Southern whites to have ideas above his station. The final straw came when he sweet-talked' a white woman. For this "crime" he was beaten, shot through the head and his body mutilated. Yet this was not allowed to become just another lynching. His mother had his body shipped back to Chicago and demanded an open casket funeral so the whole world could see what America had done to her son. Over 250 000 people came to view the body. Jet magazine carried a picture of Emmett's mutilated body that sent shockwaves through every black community. Meetings were called in every black ghetto. Demands for troops to be sent to Mississippi to protect blacks spread, not only through the North, but also through the South. Till's mother demanded a meeting with President Eisenhower but this was refused. Instead the FBI was sent to investigate who was organizing the protests. A mock trial with an all white jury let the lynchers off scott free. Everywhere demands for action for demonstrations could be heard. The tide had begun to turn.

Against this background the mass movement began to evolve. In Montgomery, Alabama, action began. In December 1955 Rosa Parks, an activist in the National Association for the Advancement of Black people (NAACP), made her stand.

The bus system in Montgomery was totally segregated, with priority given to whites for the best seats. While 70% of the passengers were black they had to board at the backs of the buses. If all the white seats were taken then whites could demand that blacks gave up their seats. When a white demanded Rosa Parks' seat she refused saying, she was tired from work and tired of giving in. For this she was arrested and fined $ 10. She along with E D Nixon, a black trade union organizer, decided it was time to fight back. They used her case to organize one-day boycott of the buses.

Through the churches, which were the backbone of the black community the campaign was organized. Ministers who were the traditionally accepted leaders of the black community were approached to lead the campaign. One of those that accepted was a new minister in town, Martin Luther King. He went on to become the most famous leader of the Civil Rights movement.


Montgomery Bus Boycott

The whole black community in the area rallied behind the boycott. As the boycott spiraled from one day to almost a year, its demands got bolder. While initially the campaign simply demanded sensitive treatment for blacks on buses, they soon realized they had to go the whole way and they demanded the end of segregation on buses.

Even with support from the whole community it was a long, hard struggle. A complex system of private cars had to be used to transport blacks. Martin Luther King put out a call for 100 station wagons to come to Montgomery to be used as free shuttle services. Some sympathetic whites even gave lifts to blacks. Even so many were forced to walk miles every day to get to work. But the resolve hardened each day. When asked by a reporter why she was walking, one middle aged black woman replied, "For me, my children and my grand children."

The resolve of racist whites also hardened. The white Citizens council developed as the main organization against the boycott and grew massively during this period. Violence spiraled and during the campaign at least eight bombings took place. The Ku Klux Klan held highly visible, intimidatory rallies. Nevertheless six months into the boycott another began in Florida, forcing the bus company there out of business. Eleven months on the battle was won. Enormous pressure forced the desegregation of Montgomery buses and a small taste of what mass action could achieve left the black community hungry for much more.

After the Montgomery boycott Martin Luther King became greatly respected for his leadership qualities. However Malcolm X was quick to condemn his ideas of pacifism and non-violence as ideas that disarmed the black community. "You don't have to criticize Reverend King, his actions criticize him. Any Negro who teaches other Negroes to turn the other cheek is disarming that Negro."


Segregation in Schools

The late 1950s saw the famous Brown vs. Brown case that ruled against segregation in schools. But it would take a lot more than paper legislation to have any effective change.

In Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957, came the first major confrontation to desegregate schools. Nine black teenagers were set to attend a school in Little Rock and the state Governor Orval Faubus, a Democrat, had initially been elected with the backing of groups like the NAACP and the trade union movement. But, once in office he soon shed his liberal image. Playing on the discontent that existed amongst whites to integration, he became a hardened segregationist. Refusing to enforce any law to integrate schools. Racist mobs rallied to physically stop the black teenagers getting to the school. Pressure forced President Eisenhower to act. He sent Federal troops to ensure passage for the blacks students. The fact that the state had been forced to intervene represented another victory for the black movement and greatly demoralized the racists.


Sit-Ins and Freedom Rides

Until the early 1960s the struggles of blacks against segregation had mainly consisted of local action. 1960 changed that and the movement rapidly spread from state to state with young people playing a key role.

It began with the sit-in movement. A new generation inspired by the movements already taking place in the US and internationally, decided they too should get involved. They would enter lunch bars and demand to be served and when they were refused they would literally sit-in! The invasion of the bar meant that its owners lost money. Eventually the police would be called and the youth, predominantly students, would be arrested. Many were beaten. Every time a group was arrested another group would come to take their place. Thousands were arrested and many were expelled from school but the sit-ins continued.

Then came the Freedom Rides where black and white students would board buses and travel through the Southern states. These actions were taken to force the integration of buses that had already been passed in law. Many of the freedom riders were beaten and brutalized by racist mobs. But still the Freedom Rides continued.

It became clear to the youth that they needed their own organization to discuss the strategies and actions they needed to take. They were invited by Martin Luther King to form the youth wing of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization that although had a strong pacifist thread, supported direct acts of disobedience. But this offer was rejected and instead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was formed. While still defending the tactic of non- violence, this was for them a tactic not a principle.


Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King evolved as the most important leader of the Civil Rights Movement. His principles of pacifism were the dominant feature of the movement for a long period. But once youth entered the scene of battle it was much harder for him to hold this line. Faced with beatings, lynching and petrol bombings, the idea of non-violence somehow did not ring true. Figures like Malcolm X with his message of militant action, became a much more attractive focus for young blacks. Malcolm totally rejected the idea of turning the other cheek and he advocated black people defending themselves "...by any means necessary. If someone puts a hand on you, send him to the cemetery."

While King believed that mass peaceful protests would convince the government to implement reforms Malcolm X soon became one of the most vocal opponents of King's strategy for the movement After the famous 250,000 strong 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his well remembered "I have a Dream," speech, Malcolm X was later to comment "While they're dreaming, our people are living a nightmare." Malcolm was not alone in criticizing aspects of King's leadership. He was effectively voicing the thoughts of many younger activists. Anne Mood who was at the Washington demonstration recalled: "I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers to discover we had dreamers instead of a leader leading us. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton, Mississippi, we never had time to sleep much less to dream."

After King was presented with the Nobel peace Prize Malcolm again used the opportunity to highlight their different approaches. "He got the Peace Prize, we got the problem. I don't want the white man giving me medals. If I'm following a general and he's leading me into battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards or awards. I get suspicious of him, especially if he gets a peace award before the war is over."

However even Martin Luther King was to talk of revolution towards the end of his life. In 1967 he commented "For the last 2 years we have been a reform movement...But after Selma and the Voting rights Bill (1965) we moved into a new era which must be an era of revolution. What good does it do a man to have integrated lunch counters if he can't buy a hamburger?" This was too much for the ruling class. King started supporting marches of striking workers and was gunned down as he prepared to march with refuse workers in Memphis.

The Last Year

"We are seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter."
— Malcolm X



Behind the Split

Malcolm's eventual split with the Nation of Islam was finally provoked by the death of John F Kennedy. Unlike the leaders of the mainstream movement Malcolm had never sown illusions in Kennedy or the big business Democrat Party. Kennedy had come to government on the back of the Civil Rights movement. In 1960 when he closely beat Richard Nixon he had received 68% of the black vote. But like US President Clinton today, he soon ditched many of his election promises. For this Malcolm rightly denounced him: "Kennedy ran on a platform as a white liberal three years ago and said all he had to do was take out his fountain pen put his name on some paper and our problem could be solved. He was three years in office before he found where his fountain pen was...and the problem isn't solved yet". It was therefore true to form for Malcolm to refuse to be silent after Kennedy's death. Elijah Muhammad ordered his members not to publicly comment on the issue. Yet when quizzed by the press Malcolm said simply "The chickens have come home to roost. Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad." An outraged Muhammad suspended Malcolm for ninety days. During that period Malcolm was not to speak publicly on behalf of the Nation. After the 90 days the suspension was not lifted, it had in reality become an expulsion. This was not a real surprise to Malcolm and reflected the growing differences between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. On March 8 1964 Malcolm formally announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam to build a new organization.

It was clear that Malcolm and Muhammad had begun to differ on the question of how to struggle long before the split. In 1962 the Los Angeles Police, in a highly provocative attack, gunned down seven black Muslims. Sixteen were arrested and charged with "criminal assault against the police."

Malcolm was shipped to LA to deal with the case. He automatically recognized the huge potential that existed to unite Muslims and non-Muslims in a campaign against police brutality. Mass meetings were organized immediately. Media coverage raised the awareness of the campaign. Material was produced that aimed to cross religious divides leaflets pointed out that "It was a Muslim mosque this time; next it will be the Protestant church, the Catholic cathedral, the Jewish synagogue." But Malcolm's plans to launch a massive nation-wide campaign were eventually vetoed by the leadership. It was quickly becoming clear that Malcolm represented the militant tendency within the organization. Elijah Muhammad's conservative tendencies were holding things back. In a statement after the split Malcolm made it clear where he now stood. Talking about the new organization he was to launch he said: "It's going to be different now, I'm going to join in the fight wherever Negroes ask for my help and I suspect my activities will be on a greater and more intensive scale than in the past."

Malcolm did not want to be left on the sidelines of the great revolutionary struggle that was sweeping America. But the Black Muslims abstentionist message of "boycott the civil rights struggle, have nothing to do with the white man and his society" made it inevitable that unless he broke with them he would be left on the sidelines. The break came at the height of the civil rights movement, when Malcolm X realized he had to take part in the struggle.

A week before his assassination Malcolm X publicly revealed that the leaders of the Black Muslims had been colluding with the Ku Klux Klan and Rockwell, the leader of the US Nazi Party. They had looked to giving Elijah Muhammed financial aid. In return he was to continue churning out the separatist message and at the same time keep the heat off racist organizations. This graphically shows how Black Nationalism could play into the hands of the racists. In the course of struggle Malcolm X was forced to question whether Black Nationalism was the correct philosophy. He did not break with the idea of blacks organizing separately but he recognized using the term Black Nationalist was setting him apart from "true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth." he said, "Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black Nationalism? If you notice, I haven't been using that expression for several months now."


Muslim Mosque Inc.

Malcolm's new organization, the Muslim Mosque Inc. aimed to organize in action both Muslims and non-Muslims. While he was still a committed black nationalist, his aim being the return of Blacks to Africa, he saw this as a long way off. He wanted the Muslim Mosque Inc., working alongside other civil rights groups to spearhead a campaign for decent housing, education, jobs etc. He correctly saw the crucial importance that youth would play in any radical organization saying "Our accent will be on the youth. We need new ideas, new methods, new approaches. We are completely disenchanted with the old, adult established politicians. We want some new, more militant faces."

He also began to develop his ideas on self-defense for black communities. "Concerning nonviolence: It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of racial attacks." He called for blacks to take up their legal right to own a shotgun or rifle. Where the state refused to intervene in communities under attack he said those communities should form rifle clubs. "We should be peaceful, law abiding - but the time has come for the American Negro to fight back in self-defense whenever and wherever he is being unjustly or unlawfully attacked. If the Government thinks I am wrong for saying this then let the government start doing it's job."

However from it's inception the Muslim Mosque Inc received little funding or support from established civil rights groups. The SNCC refused to enter into any sort of working alliance. The media also refused to portray the new direction that Malcolm was moving in. In his own words he was "caught in a trap". He wanted to build an all-black organization "whose ultimate objective was to help create a society in which there could exist honest white-black brotherhood." Perhaps the leaders of the Civil Rights movement recognized just what a threat Malcolm's new leftward direction posed. He was now more than just an angry black man. He was beginning to work out tactics and strategies that would mobilize blacks into action. Now more than ever he posed a threat to the leadership of the civil rights movement He was evolving into a revolutionary and challenging not just racism, but the whole of the capitalist system.

Malcolm spent just 50 weeks apart from the Nation of Islam before he was assassinated. But even in that brief time his political thinking changed dramatically. He spent over half this time abroad touring Africa and the Middle East. This was biggest factor to change his way of thinking. "They say travel broadens your scope," he said "and recently I've had the opportunity to do a lot of it. While I was traveling I noticed that most of the countries that have recently emerged into independence have turned away from the so-called capitalistic system in the direction of socialism." "Most of the countries that were colonial powers were capitalist countries...You can't have capitalism without racism."

Initially he still rejected the idea of black and white workers uniting against oppression. "They'll never do it with working-class whites. The history is that working-class whites have been just as much against not only working Negroes but all Negroes period. I think one of the mistakes Negroes make is this worker solidarity thing. There's no such thing -it didn't even work in Russia." But history tells another story. Blacks, in struggles against racial oppression, have always looked to unite with other oppressed groups. During the great slave revolts of the past, black slaves formed strong alliances with Native American Indians. During the Civil War, alliances were formed with northern trade unionists and in 1880, black and white small farmers came together to form the Populist movement to defend their common interests.

Again after visits abroad Malcolm's position on this began to change. "In my recent travels into the African countries and others, it was impressed upon me the importance of having a working unity among all peoples, black as well as white. But the only way that this is going to be brought about is that the black ones have to be in unity first." He went on to say: "We will work with anyone, with any group, no matter what their color is, as long as they are genuinely interested in taking the type of steps necessary to bring an end to the injustices that black people in this country are inflicted by."

Even on the issue black nationalism, Malcolm's thoughts began to change. "I used to define Black Nationalism as the idea that the black man should control the economy of his community, the politics of the community and so forth. But when I was in Africa in May, in Ghana, I was speaking with the Algerian ambassador who is extremely militant and is a revolutionary in the truest sense of the word...When I told him my political, social and economic philosophy was black nationalism, he asked me where did that leave him? Because he was white. He was an African but he was Algerian and to all appearances, a white man. And I said I define my objective as the victory of Black Nationalism - where did that leave him? Where does that leave revolutionaries in Morocco, Egypt, Iraq and Mauritania? So he showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries, dedicated to overthrowing the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary. So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of Black Nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black Nationalism? And if you noticed I haven't been using the expression for several months. But I would still be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of black people in this country."


Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU)

In June 1964 Malcolm announced the formation of the Organization of Afro American Unity. Self Defense of Afro Americans was an important feature in the program of this organization.

A voter registration drive was launched in the black community to make "every unregistered voter an independent voter." This in no way detracted from his position that the two capitalist parties of America: The Republican Party and the Democrat Party should in no way be supported by black people.

The OAAU launched a petition to be presented to the United Nations Human Right Commission, calling for the prosecution of the US government for their crimes against Afro Americans. While this may have been an effective propaganda campaign, that was all it could ever be. The United Nations has never and will never be an international upholder of justice. Rather it plays the role of a cover for US interests. We need only look at its role today in the Gulf war with the UN's refusal to lift a finger against Israel despite that government's treatment of Palestinians. Its role has never been to protect the rights of small countries or oppressed minorities.

If anyone was clear what a threat to the system he posed then Malcolm himself knew. He experienced weekly diatribes against him in the Nation of Islam newspaper, the firebombing of his home, FBI surveillance. He himself said, "Anything I do today, I regard as urgent. No man is given but so much to accomplish whatever his life's work...l am only facing facts when I know that any moment of any day, or any night, could bring me death." Malcolm X was assassinated before he was able to effectively translate his new ideas into action. He was buried at the age of 40 but as the next chapter shows, his ideas lived on.



The Black Panther Party

"Working class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative, oppressive ruling class. Let me emphasize again - we believe our fight is a class struggle not a race struggle."
— Bobby Seale, co-founder Black Panther Party



The death of Malcolm X spawned a new, determined layer of black youth. Having tried and tested the strategy of peaceful, non-violence they had found it wanting. They were now prepared for a different kind of action.

The Black Panther Party formed in 1966, drew much inspiration from the ideas of Malcolm X. They rejected pacifism and reformism in favor of militant action and self-defense against racists. They were the logical development of the struggle onto a higher level.

From their formation in Oakland, California, support grew rapidly for the Black Panthers. Their uncompromising Ten-point program called for full employment, decent housing and education for blacks. They demanded that blacks should be exempted from military service because they did not want to defend the American racist government. Most popular of all was their demand for an end to police brutality. Many young blacks, sick of daily harassment from the police were attracted to the Panthers, not only their program but their ability to organize a fight on these issues. Yet the Black Panthers went further, they recognized that to effectively change things they had to fight for an end to capitalism and for the establishment of a socialist society.

They are most famous for exercising their legal right to carry guns. This they used to patrol their communities and monitor the actions of the police.

They also established free food, clothing and Medicare programs for the poor. Much of this was financed by money they demanded off local business. They campaigned for democratic control of the police, for blacks to register as voters and called for a 30-hour week, without loss of pay to create more jobs from the unemployed.

All over America Panther chapters were formed. Panthers drafted into the army during the Vietnam War formed groups there. Panther caucuses were also set up within trade unions.

The state was terrified of the potential for the Panthers to gain mass support. White youth were in rebellion against the Vietnam War. Forty five percent of blacks fighting in Vietnam said they would be prepared to take up arms to secure justice at home.

The government replied to the movement, on the one hand, with concessions to the mass of blacks but they also meted out vicious repression to the most militant black leaders. At one stage, out of a leadership of 1000 three hundred of these were awaiting trial. Thirty-nine Panthers were gunned down in the street by the police.

Prisons became a fertile place where Panther members would recruit and educate other blacks. George Jackson, a young black, was won to the Panthers in this way. When he was eighteen he was convicted of robbery. After poor legal advice he had pleaded guilty expecting a sentence of one year or less. He was sentenced to one year to life imprisonment. Technically the parole board should determine when a prisoner on this sentence could be released. Racist violence was commonplace in the prisons. Any black that fought back would lose their parole. This happened to Jackson year after year.

As revolutionary socialists the leaders of the Black Panthers looked to other revolutionary leaders for guidance. They looked to Mao-Tse-Tung in China and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Although both had successfully carried through revolutions the vital missing ingredient in both cases was a working class leadership and workers democracy. The main mistake of the Panthers was not to clearly recognize the crucial role of the organized working class, both black and white in the struggle for socialism. The Panthers needed to organize black workers and appeal to white workers to form a united struggle to change society. Genuine Marxism would have advised the Panthers to win over the workers not by them robbing the rich to feed and defend the poor but by agitating for working people to take action to defend and feed themselves - by strikes and mass protests which would have given them the confidence of their own strength. This would prepare the movement for the greater confrontations with the ruling class that would inevitably be necessary to change society. In Revolutionary Suicide, Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Party said, "we were looked upon as an ad-hoc military group, acting outside the community fabric and too radical to be part of it. We saw ourselves as the revolutionary vanguard and did not fully understand that only the people can create the revolution. And hence the people did not follow our lead in picking up the gun."

We believe nevertheless that the Black Panthers represented a great step forward in the movement against racial oppression.

Some try to claim that the Panthers stood for black separatism. This is totally incorrect In Seize the Time, Bobby Seale, the other founder of the Black Panthers stressed, "We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. We fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism."

They recognized that the working class could not afford to let racial or national prejudices divide them. Speaking about black separatists within the movement Bobby Seale said: "Those who want to obscure the struggle with ethnic differences are the ones who are aiding and maintaining the exploitation of the masses. We need unity to defeat the boss class - every strike shows that. All of us are laboring class people...in our view it is a class struggle between the massive proletarian working class and the small minority ruling class. Working class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative ruling class."

There is no doubt that the potential of the Panthers organizing terrified the American state. J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, declared them the number one threat to the internal security of the US. The state tried to stamp them out in any way they could. Yet even now the message of the Black panthers can be heard. Internationally from the Middle East to the Caribbean to Britain; groups carrying their name have been formed. From Malcolm X to the Black Panthers to the present day the ideas of struggle and of socialist revolution live on.



Conclusion - Change the System

"The system cannot produce freedom for the Afro American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. "
— Malcolm X



Governments, press and media would have us believe that much has improved for blacks since the days of the civil rights movement. Yet the illusion they try to create flies in the face of reality. Yes there maybe more black MPs, mayors and businessmen, but facts show that for the vast majority of black people nothing has fundamentally changed.


America

The scenes of wealth and happiness we see portrayed on television in The Cosby are a world apart from the average black family in the United States. Of the urban underclass in America 59% are black. The average white household is 32 times more wealthy than the average black household. One in three of the black population lives below the poverty line.


Britain

In Britain the unemployment rate amongst blacks is twice that of whites. While making up just 4.4% of the population blacks make up over 20% of the prisoners on remand.

These figures show that the few black "high flyers" have become totally removed from the reality of life for black people.

After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, violent protests swept over 100 cities in America, 146 people were killed in riots that shook the government In response to the racial upheavals of the time the Kerner Commission was set up by President Johnson to investigate the causes. It drew the conclusion: "Our nation is moving towards two separate societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal," (with the likelihood of more and more blacks) "extending support to extremists who advocate civil disruption." The ruling class realized that unless reforms were carried out, revolutionary upheavals would develop. The Commission concluded that it would be unrealistic to try to abolish the ghettos i.e. poverty. Instead it recommended a strategy to take "substantial numbers of Negroes into the society outside the ghettos." Black tokenism followed and a practice that in essence amounted to a policy of liberation one at a time. For some this was of benefit. The number of black businesses rose 50% in the six years after 1970. But for most blacks things stayed the same. America, the richest, most powerful country in the world was unable to solve the problems facing ordinary African Americans.

After the upheavals of the early 1980s in Britain - Moss Side, Toxteth, London, Bristol - the ruling class tried a similar strategy here. To take the heat out of the struggle black leaders were drawn into the Government sponsored Race Relations Industry. Thousands of documents were written about meaningless equal opportunity programs and a small minority of blacks has well paid jobs within this industry. Many in effect have turned their back on the struggle. But for most blacks nothing has changed.

This system, capitalism, has miserably failed as far as black people are concerned. Also for white workers and youth this system has nothing to offer. Every major black struggle against racial oppression has been forced to draw the conclusion that unity against class oppression is imperative.

The anti-slavery movements, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton all traveled down the road of believing black liberation could be achieved under capitalism. They were however forced to conclude the need for revolution and class unity.

Militant calls on all people, black-and white who want to fight racism to join us. But our battle will not stop at challenging the evils of racism. This entire system has to be changed. We fight for a socialist society that would eradicate racism, oppression and exploitation once and for all. Join with the Militant in the campaign for socialism internationally.

On Martin Luther King Day- The Truthteller-Malcolm X on Racist America

Markin comment:

Read the entries below. Does that first entry sound like a man who was on the same page politically as "DeLawd," Martin Luther King? To pose the question is to give the answer. As close as I was to the King-led movement in those days Malcolm X could still stir me in a way King with all his obvious eloquence could never do. Truth to power-no question.

Malcolm X on Racist America

The text of this telegram to Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was read aloud by Malcolm X at a public rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unitv in Harlem on January 24. 1965.

Public Notice to George Lincoln Rockwell

"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary."

Discussion with American Ambassador in Africa

"He said, 'As long as I'm in Africa, I deal with people as human beings— For some strange reason color doesn't enter into it at all.'

"He said, 'But whenever I return to the United States and I'm talking to a non-white person, I'm conscious of it, I'm self-conscious, I'm aware of the color differences.'

"So I told him, 'What you're telling me, whether you realize it or not, is that it is not basic in you to be a racist, but that society there in America, which you all have created, makes you a racist.' This is true, this is the worst racist society on this earth. There is no country on earth in which you can live and racism be brought out in you— whether you're white or black—more so than this country that poses as a democracy. This is a country where the social, economic, political atmosphere creates a sort of psychological atmos¬phere that makes it almost impossible, if you're in your right mind, to walk down the street with a while person and not be self-concious, or he or she not be self-conscious— But it's the society itself."
*******
From Spartacist- May-June 1964

MALCOLM X

Of all the national Negro leaders in this country, the one who was known uniquely for his militancy, intransigence, and refusal to be the liberals' front-man has been shot down. This new political assassination is another indicator of the rising current of irrationality and individual terrorism which the decay of our society begets. Liberal reaction is predictable, and predictably disgusting. They are, of course, opposed to assassination, and some may even contribute to the fund for the education of Malcolm’s children, but their mourning at the death of the head of world imperialism had a considerably greater ring of sincerity than their regret at the murder of a black militant who wouldn't play their game.

Black Muslims?

The official story is that Black Muslims killed Malcolm. But we should not hasten to accept this to date unproved hypothesis. The New York Police, for example, had good cause to be afraid of Malcolm, and with the vast resources of blackmail and coercion which are at their disposal, they also had ample opportunity, and of course would have little reason to fear exposure were they involved. At the same time, the Muslim theory cannot be discounted out of hand because the Muslims are not a political group, and in substituting religion for science, and color mysticism for rational analysis, they have a world view which would encompass the efficacy and morality of assassination, a man who has a direct pipeline to God can justify anything.

No Program

The main point, however, is not who killed Malcolm, but why could he be killed? In the literal sense, of course, any man can be killed, but why was Malcolm particularly vulnerable? The answer to this question makes of Malcolm's death tragedy of the sharpest kind, and in the literal Greek sense. Liberals and Elijah have tried to make Malcolm a victim of his own (non-existent) doctrines of violence. This is totally wrong and totally hypocritical. Malcolm was the most dynamic national leader to have appeared in America in the last decade. Compared with him the famous Kennedy personality was a flimsy cardboard creation of money, publicity, makeup, and the media. Malcolm had none of these, but a righteous cause and iron character forged by white America in the fire of discrimination, addiction, prison, and incredible calumny. He had a difficult to define but almost tangible attribute called charisma. When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing-his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived. He had entered prison a burgler, an addict, and a victim. He emerged a Muslim and a free man forever. Elijah Muhammad and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam were thus inextricably bound up with his personal emancipation. In any event, at the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary, to the creation of a successful mass movement. Lacking such a program, he could not develop cadres based on program. What cadre he had was based on Malcolm X instead. Hated and feared by the power structure, and the focus of the paranoid feelings of his former colleagues, his charisma made him dangerous, and his lack of developed program and cadre made him vulnerable. His death by violence had a high order of probability, as he himself clearly felt.

Heroic and Tragic Figure

The murder of Malcolm, and the disastrous consequences flowing from that murder for Malcolm's organization and black militancy in general, does not mean that the militant black movement can always be decapitated with a shotgun. True, there is an agonizing gap in black leadership today. On the one hand there are the respectable servants of the liberal establishment; men like James Farmer whose contemptible effort to blame Malcolm's murder on "Chinese Communists" will only hasten his eclipse as a leader, and on the other hand the ranks of the militants have yet to produce a man with the leadership potential of Malcolm. But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike ad a heroic and tragic figure* in & dark period of our common history. •

Bay Area Spartacist Committee, 2 March, 1965

Remembering Malcolm and Manning-By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2011

Remembering Malcolm and Manning-Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental social change in a deeply troubled world.
By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2011

And finally, I am deeply grateful to the real Malcolm X, the man behind the myth, who courageously challenged and transformed himself, seeking to achieve a vision of a world without racism. Without erasing his mistakes and contradictions, Malcolm embodies a definitive yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership should be measured. -- Manning Marable, Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, 2011, 493
Professor Manning Marable was a member of the Political Science and Sociology Departments at Purdue University during the 1986-87 academic year. His scholarship, activism, and ground-breaking books and articles inspired faculty and students even though his stay at our university was brief. His classic theoretical work, "How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America," along with over 20 books and hundreds of articles, inspired social science scholarship on class, race, and gender.

His weekly essays, "Along the Color Line," were published in over 250 community newspapers and magazines for years. He once told me that writing for concerned citizens about public issues was the most rewarding work he ever did. He was a role model for all young, concerned and committed scholar/activists. -- Harry Targ, Purdue University Black Cultural Center Newsletter, April, 2011
I just finished reading the powerful biography of Malcolm X authored by Manning Marable. My encounter with this book was as fixating and transforming as I remember was my reading of Malcolm’s autobiography in the 1960s.

While I lack the deep sense of Malcolm X’s impact on African American politics and cultural identity that others have, I feel compelled to write something about this reading experience. (Bill Fletcher’s review and analysis of the Marable biography provides much expertise on the subject. “Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography Controversy: A Response to Critics," from The Black Commentator, July 7, 2011.)

During my first year at Purdue University in north central Indiana in 1968, I requested to teach a course called “Contemporary Political Problems.” Since I was on the cusp of becoming a political activist in belated response to the civil rights and anti-war movements, I thought I could use this course to have an extended conversation with students about where we needed to be going intellectually and politically.

My plan was to assign a series of books that reflected different left currents, politically and culturally, and get us all to reflect on their value for understanding 1968 America and what to do about it. We read Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Herbert Marcuse, the Port Huron and Weatherman statements, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

While my students and I embraced, endorsed, or rejected various of these authors, we were profoundly impacted by the power of Malcolm X’s personal biography and transformations from the streets to the international arena. As the word got out about the course, and largely because of Malcolm X, sectors of the Purdue campus got the word that there was a new “radical” in the political science department. Therefore, I owe my growing enrollments to Malcolm X.

More important, during the second semester in which I taught the course, I had a very quiet and respectful African American student in the class. He was a member of Purdue’s track team. One day, after he showed up at the local airport sporting a very thin, almost invisible, mustache the track coach ordered him off the plane. Why? Because he had unauthorized facial hair. His modest symbolic act, growing the mustache, set off extended protest activities over several weeks.

Shortly before this incident, we had spent a couple of weeks in class discussing Malcolm X’s autobiography. During one class period this very quiet person announced to the rest of us that we should consider ourselves lucky that he chose to participate in this class.

I saw him 40 years later for a fleeting moment. He remembered me and said that he had read Malcolm X’s autobiography for the first time in my class. The student’s emerging boldness and his articulated sense of pride must have had something to do with his reading of Malcolm X.

Reflecting on the Marable biography, I was struck by the capacity of people to change their ways of thinking, their ideologies, and their practice. Marable attributes some of Malcolm X’s development to his conscious desire to reinvent himself and to do so as he told his life story to Alex Haley, his autobiographical collaborator.

Despite the world of racism, repression, and theological rigidity Malcolm experienced, Marable records how Malcolm X’s experience and practical political work were in fact transforming.

Different people gleaned different things from reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, and the same is true of a reading of Manning Marable’s stirring and frank biography. While those of us on the left were most inspired by the last two years of Malcolm X’s life, my student was probably impacted as much by Malcolm’s developing sense of pride and self-worth in a society that demeaned and ridiculed people of color

Reading Malcolm and Marable reminds us that, while we bring change through our organizational affiliations, each individual can have a role to play in achieving that change. Not all of us can be Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Dolores Huerta, or Mother Jones. But we can make a difference.

In addition, Manning Marable makes a particularly strong case for Malcolm X as an internationalist. The United Nations had adopted a Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 but human rights discourse was not part of the language of international relations until Malcolm X demanded the international community address the issue.

For Malcolm X, United States racism, while violating the civil rights of its Black and Brown citizens, was also violating the fundamental human rights of peoples at home and abroad. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was working to build a coalition of largely former colonial states to demand that each and every country, and particularly the United States, respect the human rights of all peoples. Multiple problems including racism, poverty, disease, hunger, political repression, and sexual abuse were problems at the root of twentieth century human circumstance AND the United States was a major violator of human rights.

Marable describes in great detail Malcolm X’s frenetic travels through Africa and the Middle East to build a coalition of Black and Brown peoples to demand in the United Nations and every other political forum the establishment of human rights. Bombing Vietnamese people and killing Black children in Birmingham were part of the same problem.

And, this campaign was being launched at the very same time that the countries of the Global South were struggling to construct a non-aligned movement to retake the resources, wealth, and human dignity that had been stripped from peoples by colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. This was the position that Dr. Martin Luther King came to in 1967, as articulated in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York. Malcolm X was introducing this global human rights project in 1964.

Marable’s Malcolm X therefore transformed himself from a minor street hustler, to a Black Muslim, to a visible world leader advocating a global human rights agenda. This is the Malcolm X that has meant so much to us over the years, along with his insistence that Black and Brown people be accorded respect everywhere and that they should honor and respect themselves.

But, Marable carefully documents Malcolm X’s flaws as well as his strengths. He was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, not unsympathetic to violence, and a man engaged in intense, some times petty, political struggles with his organizational colleagues.

Manning Marable humanizes Malcolm X. Humanizing our heroes makes our efforts to pass the messages and symbols of the past to newer generations of activists more convincing. Young people do not need to see progressive heroes as untainted by their own humanity. And when we present those who make a contribution to building a better world to new generations, the examples of their flaws make it clear that no one is beyond personal and political redemption.

Finally, the biographer, Manning Marable, as my statement at the outset suggests, was a profoundly important scholar/activist. Marable used his historical knowledge, social scientific analytical skills, and political values to craft a career of writing and activism that impacted his students, his academic colleagues, and his fellow socialists in the struggle for a better world.

Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental social change in a deeply troubled world.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

Also see:
BOOKS / Tony Bouza: Manning Marable's 'Malcolm X' / The Rag Blog / July 11, 2011

The Rag Blog

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism (1947)

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism (1947)

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism

Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other CLR James texts. Standard american spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication

The following article by C.L.R. James appeared under a pseudonym in the 7 April 1947 issue of LABOR ACTION, newspaper of the Workers Party of the United States.

Negroes and Bolshevism
The American government is today building up its campaign against the Communist Party, “the Reds.” Readers of LABOR ACTION know that the Workers Party has been the unswerving foe of the Communist Party. But we oppose the Communist Party because it betrays the revolutionary struggle. We attack it because, in its slavish subservience to the Moscow bureaucracy, it uses Negroes and the American labor movement purely to advance the projects and policies of Russia. Many Negroes know this. And they are filled with a deep skepticism of political movements which are in any way radical. At this time it will be useful to recall exactly what Bolshevism was and will always be. There are many lessons for Negroes, not only in judging political parties in general but in judging and forming organizations of their own.

Mass Action

First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle. All other political parties depend on parliamentary means, on petitions, telegrams to Senators, mass meetings at which “important” and “distinguished” politicians speak. Bolshevism does not disdain parliamentary means. But fundamentally it relies upon mass action – mass demonstrations of workers, strikes, picketing, mobilizing workers in order to bring the pressure of organized labor and its allies upon the capitalist states. Let us illustrate the difference by an example. In the years before World War I, the Bolsheviks elected about half a dozen members to the Duma – the Russian Parliament. These elected representatives at once became very active about bills, the budget, parliamentary procedure, etc. They went for advice to Lenin, who was living in exile. Lenin laughed heartily and told them what amounted to this:

“Don’t bother about their bills and their budget and their parliamentary procedure. When you turn comes stand up and tell them about the lives of the workers, tell them about all the exploitation and oppression by the classes they represent and then tell them that it would not be long before the workers will rise in their revolutionary wrath and sweep capitalism and its dishonest thieving parliaments into the dustbin.”

Something at once becomes clear. The Bolshvik deputies were not begging the capitalist politicians and the capitalist state for anything. They were not even speaking to the parliamentarians. They were speaking to the workers outside. They were using the Parliament as a forum to make revolutionary propaganda, to force the attention of the more backward workers, to make the middle classes listen, to expose the fraud of parliamentarism. Naturally the revolutionary party holds its own meetings, etc.

But its main interest in the capitalist Parliament was to use it for mobilizing the workers against capitalism and all its works.

Policy for Negroes

The Negroes of the United States would do wonderfully if they could impose upon any Congress or municipal candidate exactly some such policy. “You want to go to Congress by our vote. What do you propose to do there? Are you going to maneuver with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party? Are you going to waste your time and our votes by arguing with Bilbo and Pappy O’Daniel and Taft and Pepper, that liberal from Florida who gets into Congress by preaching white supremacy? You are of no use to us. Go there not to convince and bargain with them, but to say loudly what we want and say it so that the nationa and all the world will hear. Then you will get our vote. Otherwise we have no use for you.” Bolshevism carried to an extraordinary pitch of skill this use of parliaments for revolutionary purposes. For example, the federal government every years passes financial bills for the salaries of a system ridden by Jim Crow. Would a Bolshevik vote for this? No, he would denounce the system and refuse to give his vote for this iniquitous measure. But if during the discussion of details of the bill, there was a division over whether the lowest ranks of government employees should have an increase of ten percent or not, a Bolshevik would speak in favor and vote in favor.

If parliamentary procedure allowed he would move for the reduction of all cabinet members’ salaries, just in order to expose the injustices of the system. If it were possible to get such motion passed, he would vote for it. But then, when it came to the final vote, he would vote a loud and resounding “No,” indicating thereby his repudiation of the whole system. That is the Bolshevik method. There is absolutely no reason why a Congressman elected by Negroes should not carry it out. The appropriations for war? No. And not a mere vote but a detailed exposure of the whole system. And having made these speeches and carried out these actions in Congress, the Congressman who acted in this way on behalf of the Negro people would do more good for Negroes than the whole Democratic Party.

Don’t Need “Friends”

Exactly the same policy is the Bolshevik policy for a labor Congressman. “Friends of labor” in Congress are no good to thw working class movement. “Friends of Negroes” are no good in Congress to the Negro people. They are no good on City Councils. All they do is to confuse and corrupt the people’s political thinking. Now we ask the Negroes: has this or anything like this been the policy of Ben Davis, for example, the Communist Party member on the New York City Council? One year he is supporting Leham and Mead. Then comes an upheaval in the Communist Party. Browder is thrown out. Foster comes in, a new policy is announced and – Ben Davis supports Mead and Lehman! A genuine Bolshevik is distinguished by the consistency of his opposition to all aspects of the capitalist system. He votes for or supports only those specific things which benefit the workers and the oppressed and he opposes everything else. Now it seems to us that a Negro community like Harlem would create a stir that would be felt in all parts of the country if it demanded of its candidate that his main task in and out of Congress or municipality was to denounce the system and use parliamentary forms and practices as a tribune for the education of the people. The great crime of the Communist Party is that it has prostituted the very name of Bolshevism in the service of Moscow, The American capitalist class is out to break these Stalinists. Negroes cannot stand aside and see this happen without protest. It is an invasion [sic] of democratic rights. But our way of defeating these corrupting rats is to put forward labor and Negro candidates who, by a genuinely revolutionary policy, will educate the people both as to the crimes of American imperialism and the betrayals of the Moscow stooges.

The missing Malcolm -An Interview with Manning Marable -ISR Issue 63, January–February 2009

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The missing Malcolm
An Interview with Manning Marable

MANNING MARABLE is a professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City, and the founder of the Center for Contemporary Black History (CCBH) at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous works, including How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1983), Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), and Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006). His current works in progress include a new comprehensive biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2009).

Simon J. Black, a freelance writer and PhD student at York University in Toronto, interviewed Dr. Marable in New York City. You can find his writing at www.simonjblack.com.

DR. MARABLE, when we speak of W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, we are not only speaking of great intellectuals and civil rights leaders, but of democratic socialists. Malcolm also moved to the left in his later life. Much of this has been suppressed or written out of mainstream civil rights history. What effect has that had on how African-Americans relate to the left and how the left, Black and white, relates to the African-American community?

AFRICAN-AMERICANS who identify themselves with socialism or left projects have been drawn to that body of politics based on their realization that racialized injustice is not simply a dynamic of color, but, rather, has something very directly to do with accumulated disadvantage driven by market economics and by the hegemony of capital over labor. Black people in the United States and the Americas who came here were brought here involuntarily due to the demand for labor and the unquenchable thirsts on the part of those who own capital and invested in means of production to find the cheapest way to develop a labor pool to exploit and to extract surplus value that is accrued to them through excess profits.

The engine that drove the trans-Atlantic slave trade was capital, as Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery pointed out fifty and sixty years ago. Malcolm, on Jan. 15, 1965, a month before he dies, does an interview in Canada, I believe in Toronto, where he says, “All my life, I believed that the fundamental struggle was Black versus white. Now I realize that it is the haves against the have-nots.” Malcolm came to the realization, King came to the realization, that the nature of the struggle was between those who have and those who are dispossessed. [Frantz] Fanon came to this same conclusion in Wretched of the Earth. So this led to what some scholars have written about as Black Marxism, the tradition of Black radicalism that comes organically from the critical reality of the super exploitation of Black labor worldwide and a response to that politically. That is, that we didn’t gravitate toward Marx simply because we liked his beard or we were seduced by his manipulation of prose, even though I loved the 18th Brumaire. Rather, we were attracted to Marx because it helped to illuminate and make clear the objective material circumstances of poverty, unemployment, and exploitation in Black people’s lives. Which is why we became socialists or Marxists, because we understood that there could not be a path toward Black liberation that was not simultaneously one that challenged the hegemony of capital over labor.

IN YOUR new biography of Malcolm, Malcolm X: A Life of the Invention, you discuss three missing chapters from Alex Haley’s collaboration with Malcolm, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. What’s happened to them? And what’s their importance to understanding Malcolm’s life?

THEY’RE IN the safe of an attorney named Gregory Reed. He’s in Detroit, Michigan. They’re in his safe. And, he has them and doesn’t show them to people. Now why does he have them? How did that happen? Well, in late 1992, I believe October, there was an auction of the Alex Haley estate and for $100,000, he bought these chapters that were discarded from the autobiography.

Alex Haley was the ghostwriter and co-author of the book. You have to remember that Haley went on to great fame as the author of Roots, one of the largest-selling books in American history and a docudrama on television that had a profound impact on race relations in the late 1970s. Haley was deeply hostile to Malcolm X’s politics. He was a Republican, he was opposed to Black nationalism, and he was an integrationist. He had been in the Coast Guard for twenty years. But, he also knew a good thing when he saw it.

A charismatic, handsome, articulate Black leader who had a controversial past as a hustler, a pimp, a drug addict, a numbers runner, “Detroit Red,” “Little Gangster,” “Little Bugsy Siegel,” who supposedly terrorized the Harlem community in the 1940s and went to jail and was given ten years in prison. He goes through a metamorphosis, he becomes a Black Muslim, he comes out, he explodes onto the scene. He creates seventy to eighty new mosques in less than ten years, turns a small sect of 400 people into fifty- to one hundred thousand by 1960–62. Then, he turns more overtly to politics, he breaks from the Nation of Islam (NOI), he builds two new organizations, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated in March 1964 and the Organization of Afro-American Unity in May 1964. He goes to Africa and the Mideast. He is treated as the head of state. He is welcomed at the Fateh by the Saudi royal household. He sits down with Gamal, eats breakfast with Anwar Sadat in Egypt. He caucuses and meets and gets to know Che Guevara while he’s in Africa, as he alludes to in a talk in 1964 at the Audubon Ballroom. So Malcolm is this extraordinary figure, dies at the age of thirty-nine. It’s a hell of a story. Haley understood that. And so, it was on those terms he agreed to work with Malcolm to write the book. But, what Malcolm didn’t know was that Haley already was compromised and had basically been a purveyor of information—a kind of, not informant, but a client of the FBI in this disinformation campaign against the NOI. Haley had collaborated with the FBI. Malcolm never knew that. In the summer of sixty-four when Malcolm was in Egypt, Haley was taking the book manuscript and giving it to an attorney, William O’Dwyer, rewriting passages of the book trying to get it passed as Malcolm’s survey. Malcolm’s on the run, people are trying to kill him, they’re trying to poison him in Egypt. He’s not going to have time to look at the book carefully. Then, he dies.

Haley adds a seventy-nine-page appendix to the book where he has his own integrationist and liberal Republican interpretation. And then, they have M.S. Handler of the New York Times writing in the front of the book. I mean, you know Malcolm respected Handler. But this is not who you want to lead in to a Black revolutionary’s text. So Haley did a variety of things to reframe the book. And, toward the end of the book, there’s a lot of language in it that simply doesn’t sound like Malcolm. It doesn’t sound like him. There’s a lot of information that is just wrong in the book. They misspelled “As-Salamu Alaykum” several times. They give the story of Johnson Hinton. They have Hinton Johnson. They put the date of this very tragic beating of this brother who’s in the Nation, Brother Johnson, in 1959, rather than the year it actually occurred, which was April 1957. So there are simple mistakes in dates, of names, events that clearly show Malcolm did not have access to the final manuscript. He didn’t see it. And it was published nine months after Malcolm’s death. Betty Shabazz was in no shape to check and recheck facts. So all that says to me is you have to read the autobiography very, very carefully, very suspiciously. It’s a wonderful book. It is a great work of literature. But it is a work of literature. It is not an autobiography. It’s a memoir. And it’s gone through the prism of Haley who was a Republican, integrationist, and a defender of U.S. power. You should read the anticommunist articles he wrote for the Reader’s Guide in the mid-fifties on Hungary. This is the man you’re dealing with. So we must be very careful. I learned I had to deconstruct the autobiography to write the biography. If you go to www.malcolmxproject.net, you will see my biography, the architecture of that, and how I had to deconstruct the autobiography. That’s why we put up the Web site.

WHAT DO you suspect is contained in these missing three chapters?

WELL, I’VE seen them for about fifteen minutes. I met with Gregory. I’ve written about this in my book, Living Black History, which came out last year. Living Black History has a whole chapter on this. I couldn’t use it in the autobiography, but I had to tell the story to somebody. I talked with Gregory on the phone. He’s an attorney. He bought it for $100,000. He wanted to make money off of the material. So I phone him up, we talk. He says, “Fly out to Detroit. Meet with me. Come to my law office. There, I’ll show you the chapters.” As honesty suggests, I get to Detroit. He said, “Don’t come to my office. Are you downtown?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Meet me at this restaurant in an hour.” I go there. He’s about a half hour late. He eventually shows up. And he’s carrying a briefcase. And then he said, “I’ll let you see these for fifteen minutes.” I’ve flown from New York and I have fifteen minutes to read the text. “I’ll let you sit here and read them and I’ll leave and I’ll come back.”

I’m sitting here frantically reading these pages. But it only takes me a few minutes to recognize what they are. They were obviously written sometime between August 1963 to December 1963. There’s a presumption in the text that Malcolm is still in the Nation of Islam. So he hasn’t broken with the Nation yet. What they call for is the construction of an unprecedented Black united front, uniting all Black organizations, led by, get this, the Nation of Islam. So Malcolm is envisioning the Nation actively participating in antiracist struggles and building various types of capacities: economic strategies, housing strategies, health-care strategies with the NAACP, with the Urban League, with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). So he wanted to push this religious kind of semi-Islamic organization into Black civil society in an aggressive way. He wanted to open up the Nation. And, I strongly suspect that Malcolm’s drive and push to reach out to the civil rights community and SNCC and CORE is what got him into trouble inside of the NOI, because the bulk of the NOI had been thoroughly against Malcolm’s proselytization efforts that brought in tens of thousands of new members. The old guard felt threatened by that. Then on top of that, since April 1962, the turning point in Malcolm’s career was the murder of Ronald Stokes in the Nation of Islam’s mosque in Los Angeles. Malcolm flies out to LA and spends over a week there and he calls for a grand coalition, very much like the coalition he talked about in the deleted chapters, with CORE, the NAACP, with SNCC that would be anti-police violence against Black people. And, he was talking about the Nation of Islam participating in that coalition. Elijah Muhammad said “time out,” called Malcolm down and said “you better chill that out and get the hell out of Los Angeles.” Malcolm was deeply embarrassed and humiliated that they had to end the mobilization after they had a member murdered by the LAPD. Other men in the Nation in the mosque were dragged outside, strip-searched naked to humiliate them. And Malcolm had mobilized people and he had to back down.

Malcolm came back to New York and by July 1962 is speaking at a Local 1199 union protest. I have a photo of him speaking at a protest rally in July for the labor union, King’s favorite union, 1199, the largest union today in New York City. In Christmas time in 1962, two members of the Nation, who were selling Muhammad Speaks in Times Square, get arrested by the police. How does Malcolm respond? He puts 140 to 150 Fruit of Islam members—the paramilitary organization, the men in the NOI—demonstrating in Times Square on New Year’s Day. Elijah Muhammad called for no demonstrations, no overt political activity. That’s not what Malcolm’s doing. That’s exactly what he’s doing. And he starts doing that a year and a half before the silencing, before the break.

So you know what happens? The Nation of Islam’s newspaper Muhammad Speaks in late 1962 stops covering Malcolm X. If you go through methodically the last year from December 1962 through December 1963, guess what? You see Malcolm once in his own newspaper. And he’s the national spokesman. You see him more often in the New York Times. And this is like a year before the break. So you can already see where he’s going. It doesn’t take a mind reader to see that Elijah Muhammad only used the “chickens coming home to roost” statement [by Malcolm X, in response to John F. Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination] as an excuse to do what they wanted to do, which was to eliminate Malcolm’s influence, curb his politics. I think that they believed he would submit. Most of Malcolm’s closest followers within the Nation thought he would also submit. They weren’t prepared for a break. Malcolm contemplated a break. I think maybe he wasn’t prepared either. But he did anticipate a possibility of it.

He began, in early 1964, talking with a number of people outside of the Nation of Islam to develop the OAAU, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. When he left the Nation, very few members of the NOI went with him, perhaps maybe 100. The mosque in Harlem had as many as 7,000 members. Only 100–150 left. They became the Muslim Mosque Incorporated (MMI), and Sunni Muslims. But the OAAU was the secular organization with largely working-class and middle-class Blacks and many professionals, writers like Huey and Mayfield, historians like John Henrik Clark. The key organizer was Lynn Shifflet of NBC News, a producer, a young Black woman in her late twenties. There were real tensions between the OAAU and the MMI over ideology and their relationship to Malcolm, because Malcolm increasingly was moving toward the politics of the OAAU, away from the MMI, even though these were people who had put their lives on the line to leave the NOI out of personal loyalty to him. So there were tremendous tensions between these two groups, which I will document in the biography.

SO THE Organization of Afro-American Unity really is the culmination of, or the product of, the development of Malcolm’s thought that was written about by Haley in these last three chapters?

THE CHAPTERS that are missing are written prior to the split. Haley says that Malcolm changed his mind after he went to Mecca and decided to deep-six the chapters. Maybe that’s true. We’ll never know. What is true is that it would be nice to print the things that were deleted, put an addendum and appendix on the autobiography. It would be nice to see it. Well I’m not sure. Don’t hold your breath. I saw it for fifteen minutes. Maybe I’m the lucky one. But eventually they will appear. We will see them.

There has been an active suppression of Malcolm’s work and his intellectual legacy for more than forty years. And the suppression has been deliberate and for various reasons. First, many of the key people in his entourage in the Nation and in the OAAU had to go underground. I just interviewed this week James 67X Shabazz (Abdullah Razzaq) who went underground and lived in Guyana for nineteen years, because he was threatened with murder and also threatened by the FBI. So it’s only now in his mid-seventies that he’s returned to the United States several months a year. He lives in Brooklyn with his son. James 67X was Malcolm’s chief-of-staff and his secretary for many years. The others who were closest to Malcolm are now dead. There is Herman Ferguson who is the best eyewitness to the murder. I’ve interviewed him several times and I’m interviewing him once more next week, which will be fun. His eyewitness to the murder, his recount to me, which has partially been published in my journal Souls, is absolutely stunning and it raises many questions about the assassination.

We have, over the last seven years, worked very hard to develop a forensic accounting of the murder. And, we believe we have figured out how the murder took place. That is, the forensics of it. We think we know how that happened. We don’t know who gave the order. But I can tell you what our theory is. The murder took place on February 21, 1965, as a result of the culmination of three separate groups. There was no classic conspiracy, no direct collusion, but, rather, a convergence. Three things had to happen for the murder to take place, and they all did. Law enforcement, the FBI and the NYPD, and its Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), which was its red squad, actively wanted to do surveillance disruption of Malcolm X and possibly eliminate him; certainly the FBI, because their nightmare was seeing King and Malcolm embrace. That was their nightmare. And they realized much to their horror that they were far better off with Malcolm in the Nation of Islam than outside of it, because then he was being treated like a head of state in Africa. They had never anticipated that he would be a houseguest of a Saudi royal family, or that he would be speaking to parliaments from Kenya to Ghana to French Guinea. Malcolm goes to Alabama, three weeks before he’s murdered and reaches out to Dr. King. King is in prison after leading demonstrations. Malcolm goes to Coretta Scott King and he says, “I want you to convey to your husband my deepest respect for him and that I am not trying to undermine Dr. King’s work. My goal is to be to the left of Dr. King, to challenge institutional racism so that those in power can negotiate with King. That’s my role.” So Malcolm understood what his role was. This was the FBI’s nightmare. And so they actively wanted to curtail his influence, if not silence him permanently.

Then you have the Nation of Islam. But what people need to understand is that there were different points of view in the NOI about Malcolm. Some of the leadership, especially in Chicago, the national secretary John Ali, the national head of the Fruit of Islam Raymond Shareef, Elijah Muhammad’s son-in-law Herbert Muhammad, the sons of Elijah Muhammad, Jr., and several others wanted to silence Malcolm permanently. Joseph X, who was a captain of the Fruit of Islam and the Northeast regional security director at Mosque No. 7, formerly Malcolm’s associate and friend, as was John Ali—they actively sought to eliminate him, to blow him up with bombs, to kill him, or firebomb his home or whatever. But other members of the Nation of Islam were against the murder and it is questionable if Elijah Muhammad ever gave the order. It could have been a situation very much like Henry II and Thomas Becket where somebody’s ridding him of his priest. So he doesn’t have to give the order, but the deed is done. It’s understood what needs to be done. But he doesn’t technically give the order.

Then there’s a third group and that’s Malcolm’s own entourage. There were police informants in the group. Gene Roberts who tries to resuscitate Malcolm after he’s shot is an NYPD police officer. He’s a police officer who walks right directly out of the line of fire only seconds before the fuselage goes off—maybe by accident, maybe by design. What is true is that whenever Malcolm spoke, there were at least two dozen cops. There were only two police officers in the Audubon that day and they were assigned as far away in the distance as possible in the building. They were in the rows, in very small-rows in a ballroom adjacent to the large grand ballroom, but separated by a wall and then a vestibule. It was impossible for them to protect Malcolm. There was one police officer in a small park directly across the street from the entrance of the Audubon. No other police officers. They’d been pulled back to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital four blocks away. No captain, and the guard is usually sitting in the second floor in a booth where they collect money that directly faces the ballroom. You have to walk right past it to get out of the building. No police in the building. Why?

Malcolm gets shot. The hospital, they try to get the ambulance. They can’t get an ambulance. It’s only four blocks away. So men run to the hospital’s emergency room, grab a gurney, and carry his body in a gurney in the street. Seems odd, doesn’t it? His own men, no one checks for weapons at the door. None of the guards are armed. I’ve gone through New York’s Municipal Archives, the police reports of all the guards that day, of every guard. We’ve gone through all that. We know who they were and their names and the changes of the guards. There were three changes of the guards. One around 2:00, one around 2:30, and one about 2:55. We know that several people who were guarding Malcolm that day were not generally part of the OAAU and were assigned to sensitive positions. Guards like William George, who normally guarded Malcolm on the roster were assigned to be as far away from him as possible that day at the front of the building, not next to Malcolm on the rush. The guards who were there rolled out of the way. And Malcolm was naked and alone on the stage.

There’s only one man who could have placed the guards there that way and that was Malcolm’s head of security, Reuben Francis. Francis is the one who does shoot Hayer, who did indeed shoot Malcolm. But Hayer is interviewed very briefly by the NYPD, he’s arrested briefly. They let him go on bond. Then he disappears off planet Earth. And the FBI said, “We can’t find him. We believe he’s in Mexico.” But prior to his disappearance, he’s not even called to the grand jury, even though he’s the only one who shot anybody who was an assassin.

The NYPD doesn’t even interview Capt. Joseph, the head of the Fruit of Islam, at Mosque No. 7, even though, to a room of over 120 people, he cold orders Malcolm’s death. There are witnesses to this. And the FBI doesn’t interview him? We found a folder that said Joseph X and it was empty. There were six men who killed Malcolm, not three. Two of the men who were incarcerated and given life sentences were innocent, Norman Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson. They were innocent. They were sent to prison for life. Why? They weren’t even physically there. Johnson used to be Malcolm’s chauffeur. He used to stand out in the rain in front of Mosque No. 7 or in the snow, holding and reserving a parking space for Malcolm when he drove up. He used to phone him and tell him that he was coming before he arrived. Once a month, he went to go grocery shopping for Betty, Malcolm’s wife. You would know this guy if he came to kill you. Everybody would’ve known him if he had walked into the Audubon that day. He wasn’t there that day. Butler was an enforcer for Capt. Joseph. He was a notorious thug in the Nation. They would have known if they walked into the Audubon that day. The two men weren’t there that day and yet they were convicted of murdering Malcolm X. Why?

I believe the district attorney was protecting informants within Malcolm’s group and within the NOI. And perhaps some of those informants were collaborators and committed the crime. So they convicted the wrong people to cover and protect the anonymity of their own agents. That’s a theory. I can’t prove it, but I think we ought to explore it and we should reopen this case. And, hopefully my book will help reopen it. William Kunstler tried to reopen it back in 1977–78 and he failed because he didn’t have the evidence I have. Hopefully, we can reopen it again.

THE DOMINANT understanding of Malcolm’s life and meaning in mainstream American popular culture really comes from two sources: Haley and Spike Lee’s film. Spike Lee’s interpretation of the assassination shows a Malcolm, who seems to be prepared for his own martyrdom and orders his guards not to be armed on that day, in a way that King with his mountaintop speech also appears to be prepared for what he seems to think is his inevitable fate. Is that a damaging interpretation?

NO, IT’S not and it may be true. Malcolm clearly knew he was going to die. He didn’t know when and I strongly suspect that Malcolm was not going to run away from death and he had the courage to face death. Not that he wanted to die, he didn’t have a death wish. But he had the courage to face death. There is a story, a very influential legend within Shia Islam, about Ali and his grandson Husayn, both of whom perished in a kind of murder in the cathedral, in the case of Ali in the mosque, and in his grandson’s case at Karbala where he was killed in, I believe, 682 in common era. About four years later, women came to Karbala, in today’s Iraq, and began to beat themselves and lament that they had not protected the grandson of Ali. In Shia, Ali is the Shia that we have today. They still gather every year at Karbala. Now hundreds of thousands and maybe a million people lament the events of Karbala. There is nothing greater in Shia Islam than martyrdom, the embrace of death for a higher belief. And to some extent, I think that Malcolm embodied that at that moment. Not that he sought death, but that he did not fear it. That he saw in his martyrdom a way to transcend death that there would be a life after death. I’m sure he was familiar with the legend. Who knows? Perhaps that influenced his actions.

WHAT WILL your biography broadly do to assert a new Malcolm X, itself a reinvention of Malcolm X, as your book is titled, because he reinvented himself many times? What will it do to displace Haley and Spike Lee as the dominant understanding of Malcolm X’s life and meaning?

THERE ARE three core things in the book. The first is what I call a kind of a life of reinvention. Malcolm’s tale is a hero’s tale that’s not unlike Odysseus—a story of travel, of learning, of experience, of ordeals and tests, a classic kind of hero story. It’s a classic Greek story, which frequently or usually ends in death. But at the end, there’s a broader, richer, deeper, critical consciousness that’s achieved. The thing about that story is that Malcolm’s growth comes through a series of artful creative reinventions. He reinvents himself even to the point these reinventions have different names. He was “Jack Carlton” in the summer of 1944. When he was nineteen years old, he wanted to break into show biz and he was at Lobster Pond bar on Forty-Second Street in Midtown Manhattan working as a drummer and professional dancer for about three or four months. He doesn’t write about that in the autobiography. You just have to find out about that. He worked in a bar and grill in Harlem, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, alongside of the funniest dishwasher and server in Harlem, a guy who had red hair. Malcolm had red hair. So they called Malcolm “Detroit Red” cause nobody had ever heard of Lansing, Michigan, and they called the brother from Chicago “Chicago Red.” His last name was Sanford. We know him today better as Red Foxx, the comedian. So Malcolm and Red Foxx worked in the same restaurant in 1943 and early 1944. He does mention something of this in the autobiography. Malcolm in prison called himself at times Malachi Shabazz. He was Malcolm X. He was El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He had many, many different names: “Detroit Red,” “Homeboy,” “Mascot,” “Satan” when he was in prison. Yet, through these transformations, he was able to navigate brilliantly a life of reinvention.

What makes Malcolm different from every signature Black figure in American history is that he combines the two central characters of Black folk culture. He is both the trickster and the minister. He’s both. That’s “Detroit Red”—the hustler, the gambler, the outlaw. And, he is also the minister who saves souls, who redeems lives, who heals the sick, who raises the dead. He’s both. King is one. Jesse Jackson is one. Malcolm’s both and he understood the streets and the lumpen proletariat. I hate that phrase, but it comes from Marx. As well as, he saw himself as a minister and an Amun, a cleric. He was always this. And he embodied the cultural spirit of Black folk better than anyone else. When I asked one student about a decade ago, “What was the fundamental difference between Malcolm and Martin?” He said, “Dr. Marable, that’s easy. Martin Luther King, Jr., belongs to the entire world. Malcolm X belongs to us.” There is a tremendous degree of identification on the part of people of African descent, and globally on the part of Muslims, invested in the figure of Malcolm. The very first postage stamp honoring Malcolm X was issued not by the United States but by the Ayatollah Khomeini government of Iran, in 1982, by the Shia Muslims. Perhaps they knew something that everybody else didn’t know.
The second theme in the book is a spiritual journey and Malcolm’s growth in a spiritual sojourn from the periphery of Islam represented by the Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam. There was a price in the journey because he also had to embrace Nasser’s definition of what Islam was in the Pan Arab world. So we have some excellent very interesting articles and speeches Malcolm gave in Cairo. The writings that he did, very critical of the state of Israel in the summer and September 1964, cast Malcolm in a very interesting kind of light as it relates to the Arab struggle and the Palestinian struggle, that heretofore, in the United States, we have rarely seen.

The third theme is betrayal. Malcolm had a capacity ethnographically to read an audience better than any public speaker of his generation. He knew people. He could walk into an audience, read it and give a brilliant address. He could debate at Harvard and Oxford, as well as on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue/Seventh Avenue. He was just a remarkable public speaker. But where his failure came was his consistent inability to make critical accurate judgments of the people closest to him who would betray him. And those included his two brothers Philbert and Wilfred Little who sided with Elijah Muhammad against Malcolm; his chief protégé Louis X/Louis Farrakhan who proclaimed Malcolm to be a man worthy of death, who led the jackal’s course leading to his murder. How do we explain Farrakhan? I sat down with Louis for nine hours in an interview a year and a half ago. We had a fascinating conversation about it. The question I ruminate over is, how much of it is true? Then we have Joseph X, the leader of the Fruit of Islam at Mosque No. 7, who Malcolm had promoted, pulled out of the gutter in Detroit in 1952–53, raised him up to be his chief right-hand person, who then would be betray and try to murder him. John Ali, who had been Malcolm’s secretary at Mosque No. 7, who he promoted to the national leadership, who then conspired to murder him. A variety of people. His closest personal friend Charles Kenyatta had been turned out by the police and was probably a police agent, Malcolm’s best friend, which I’ve only just discovered last week because I just got the file. We have some interesting info. So I think between this data and the other things, a big chunk of the book is about the forensic discussion of the murder and our theory of the murder. I think people will have more than enough information.

LET’S BRING this full circle. We’re now sitting in your office in 2007 in Bloom?berg’s New York. We’ve gone through a period of social cleansing that was Giuliani’s New York, characterized by police brutality, intense gentrification, privatization of public housing. And I was today at Friday Juma at the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque in Harlem and the message today was one about homosexuality, as an abnormal and immoral practice. The other message was about self-help and the idea of the community needing to raise itself up and take care of its own problems. What does the Malcolm X of your book say to this current political economic conjuncture?

WELL, AN honest representation of Malcolm should show the whole person and his trajectory and his evolution. The trajectory of Malcolm was increasingly anti-corporate capitalist. He talked about the need not to appeal to the United States to redress grievances, but to take the criminal to court, that is, the court of world opinion at the United Nations. He called for what is today known as a South-South dialogue, that is, between the Caribbean, Blacks in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia that would span across continents that would be in part Arab and Muslim, and part Black and Brown. And, he envisioned a global kind of jihad of worlds against Western imperialism and a need for people who had experienced colonialism to take back the power through international bodies that built broad-based unity transnationally. That was what Malcolm’s politics were. It was not bootstrap capitalism, nor was it gentrification. Nevertheless, once you’re dead, your image is up for grabs. By 1972, Richard Nixon had invited, and Betty Shabazz had agreed to be on the dais of the re-elect Richard M. Nixon for president dinner party in Washington, D.C. This was only six or seven years after Malcolm X’s assassination. So once you’re murdered, you can’t control what people who had some sort of relationship to you—whether they’re married to you, or they’re political affiliates or associates—what choices they make. Sad but true. It is particularly sad that from the masjid or mosque, one hears a kind of message that’s more appropriate to Booker T. Washington than Malcolm X. But, nevertheless, the struggle continues.