Global Issues
Fifty-five years after his assassination, we still get much wrong about Malcolm X -By Omar Suleiman
Every semester in which I teach a course on Muslims in the Civil
Rights Movement at Southern Methodist University, I give my students a
selection of quotes from both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X and
ask them to guess who said what. So for example, I will posit the
following two quotes and ask for their proper ascription:
“Ignorance of each other is what has made unity impossible in the past.
Therefore, we need enlightenment. We need more light about each other.
Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates
patience, and patience creates unity. Once we have more knowledge
(light) about each other, we will stop condemning each other and a
United front will be brought about.”
“The majority of white
Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the
Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to
fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying
racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception
and comfortable vanity.”
And every single time, they have been
unable to identify the first quote as belonging to Malcolm, and the
second to Martin. But it is not just a few students that have gotten it
wrong. The American education system and most mainstream portrayals of
Martin and Malcolm have been simplistic and sanitising.
Martin
is the perfect hero who preached non-violence and love, and Malcolm the
perfect villain who served as his violent counterpart, preaching hate
and militancy. The result is not just a dishonest reading of history,
but a dichotomy that allows for Dr King to be curated to make us more
comfortable, and Malcolm X to be demonised as a demagogue from whom we
must all flee. Reducing these men to such simplistic symbols allows us
to filter political programmes according to how “King-like” they are.
Hence, illegitimate forms of reconciliation are legitimised through King
and legitimate forms of resistance are delegitimised through Malcolm X.
Malcolm was never violent, not as a member of the Nation of
Islam, nor as a Sunni Muslim. But Malcolm did find it hypocritical to
demand that black people in the United States commit to non-violence
when they were perpetually on the receiving end of state violence. He
believed that black people in the US had a right to defend themselves,
and charged that the US was inconsistent in referencing its founding
fathers’ defence of liberty for everyone but them.
Malcolm
knew that his insistence on this principle would cause him to be
demonised even further and ultimately benefit the movement of Dr King,
which is exactly what he had intended. Just weeks before his
assassination, he went to Selma to support Dr King and willingly
embraced his role as the scary alternative. In every interview, in his
meeting with Dr Coretta Scott King, and elsewhere, he vocalised that the
US would do well to give the good reverend what he was asking for, or
else.
But he never actually said what the “or else” was, placing a greater
urgency on America to cede to King’s demands. Malcolm had no problem
playing the villain, so long as it led to his people no longer being
treated like animals. And while King may have been steadfast in his
commitment to non-violence, the thrust of Malcolm fully served its
purpose.
As Colin Morris, the author of Unyoung, Uncolored,
Unpoor wrote, “I am not denying passive resistance its due place in the
freedom struggle, or belittling the contribution to it of men like
Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Both have a secure place in history. I
merely want to show that however much the disciples of passive
resistance detest violence, they are politically impotent without it.
American Negroes needed both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X …”
But it was not just that Malcolm and Martin had complementary
strategies to achieve black freedom, they also spoke to different
realities. Malcolm spoke more to the Northern reality of black Americans
who were only superficially integrated, whereas Martin spoke to the
Southern reality where even that was not possible.
Malcolm also spoke to the internalised racism of black
people that was essential to overcome for true liberation. As the late
James Cone states, “King was a political revolutionary. Malcolm was a
cultural revolutionary. Malcolm changed how black people thought about
themselves. Before Malcolm came along, we were all Negroes. After
Malcolm, he helped us become black.”
That is why, despite the
diminishing of Malcolm in textbooks and holidays, he has been
consistently revived through protest movements and the arts. He has
lived through the activism of the likes of Muhammad Ali and Colin
Kaepernick, inspired the black power movement, and been an icon for
American Muslims on how to exist with dignity and faith in a hostile
environment.
And even in those claims to Malcolm as a symbol,
Malcolm himself in the fullness of his identity is erased. In
championing his movement’s philosophy, some seek to secularise him,
intentionally erasing his Muslim identity. And in championing his
religious identity, others seek to depoliticise him. This was a tension
that Malcolm noted in his own life, saying: “For the Muslims, I’m too
worldly. For other groups, I’m too religious. For militants, I’m too
moderate, for moderates I’m too militant. I feel like I’m on a
tightrope.”
Muslims too should be cautious not to sanitise
Malcolm, as the US has sanitised Dr King. To restrict Malcolm solely to
his Hajj experience is similar to restricting King solely to his “I have
a dream” speech. Malcolm was a proud Muslim who never stopped being
black. And while he no longer subscribed to a condemnation of the entire
white race, he was unrelenting in his critique of global white
supremacy.
Malcolm was consistently growing in a way that
allowed him to not only champion his own people’s plight more
effectively but to tackle a broader set of interconnected issues. And
while history seems to posit Malcolm as his polar opposite, Dr King had
begun to articulate many of the same positions that made Malcolm so
unpopular.
In the words of the great James Baldwin, “As concerns Malcolm and Martin, I watched two men, coming from unimaginably different backgrounds, whose positions, originally, were poles apart, driven closer and closer together. By the time each died, their positions had become virtually the same position. It can be said, indeed, that Martin picked up Malcolm’s burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see, and for which he paid with his life. And that Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop.”
Perhaps it is time we ask why we only seem to celebrate one of them.