New Makers of Modern Culture

MALCOLM X (Malcolm Little/El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) 1925-65
US racial leader

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of a West Indian mother and black American father. His father, a Baptist minister and follower of Marcus Garvey, moved the family to Lansing, Michigan, when Malcolm was very small. His father's black nationalist beliefs were very unpopular in this overwhelmingly white community; the family home was burned and his father murdered. Malcolm, however, moved relatively easily among whites. It was not until he visited an older half-sister in Boston in 1940 that he discovered the sub-culture of black ghetto life. He was never the same again. After finishing the eighth grade, he left school and Michigan behind and moved to Boston. He quickly acquired a fascination for street life and became immersed in a world of 'hustling'—drugs, night life, theft and prostitution. He operated in Harlem during most of the Second World War, but in 1945 he returned to Boston, was soon arrested for burglary and sentenced to prison. He was not yet twenty-one years old.

Malcolm Little's first reaction to prison was blind rage. His anger began to take focus, however, when members of his family in Detroit began writing to him about their discovery of the 'natural religion of the black man'. From them he learned of the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the small black religious sect known as the Nation of Islam. Muhammad taught a version of history in which black Americans had a central and dominant role. The racial degradation which Malcolm had experienced was explained as being the work of the white devil (all whites in Western civilization). Malcolm now came to realize that his lifestyle and those of black Americans had been inhibited by self-hate and shame over their blackness. Complete rejection and withdrawal from whites was the answer, and this could only be accomplished by adhering rigidly to the Nation of Islam's programme of disciplined personal behaviour. Malcolm Little now had an explanation for his anger and a programme of redemption.

He was released from prison in 1952 and joined his family in Detroit where he applied formally for admission into the Nation and threw himself into the activities of the local mosque. He went to Chicago where Elijah Muhammad personally trained him as a Muslim minister and gave him the name Malcolm X. In 1953 he was sent East and quickly developed a reputation as a dynamic speaker who attracted new converts to the teachings of Muhammad. Malcolm X built a growing base of support in New York and founded the Nation's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. As America's news media responded to the spreading Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s, it also became more interested in other phenomena in black America. Malcolm saw this as an opportunity to put more blacks in touch with the saving teachings of Elijah Muhammad. His charismatic personality drew large crowds, and his message of hatred and rejection served as a stinging antithesis to the sermons of love and forgiveness being popularized by Martin Luther King, Jr. He was soon the best known black Muslim—more widely quoted and sought after than Elijah Muhammad. This popularity began to arouse jealousy in other Muslim leaders, however, and when Malcolm X sought to make the Nation of Islam more responsive and active in organizing among black communities, Elijah Muhammad consistently held him back. Distance appeared between prophet and minister. Finally, after an intemperate response to John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Malcolm X was ordered to be 'silent' in public, and by March 1964 pressure on him had reached the point that he knew he could no longer function nor was he wanted in the Nation of Islam. This was a shattering blow, for he always maintained that he owed his very salvation as a human being to the message and guidance of Elijah Muhammad.

Malcolm struggled to find a new perspective on his religious beliefs and his commitment to mass action by blacks. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca, meeting many leaders of the African and Arab nations and never escaping the international spotlight. His exposure to orthodox Islam deepened his spiritual devotion, but drew him away from the doctrinal and social narrowness of the 'Black Muslims'. He returned to the US more open to the possibility of reconciliation with whites (but only by maintaining separate groups) and committed to non-sectarian mass action. He formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity and had just begun to project a new mission for himself when he was assassinated by three members of the Nation of Islam at a public meeting in New York on 21 February 1965. Malcolm left his wife (whom he married in 1958), four children, and a vacuum in the black struggle for dignity and opportunity in America. He had an asset that no other black leader of the time had: he was from the masses, had suffered their plight, and had conquered the depths. After encountering Malcolm X's mass appeal other black leaders were forced to deal with some hard racial truths in America regarding their integrationist goals. He forced them to recognize the validity of a growing demand for 'black power'.

Lester C. Lamon

See: Malcolm X (with Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964); C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (1961); and John Henrik Clarke, Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (1969); Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of the Man Who Changed Black America (1991); William Stickland, Malcolm X: Make it Plain (1994); Robert L. Jenkins and Mfanya Donald Tryman (eds.), The Malcolm X Encylcopedia (2002).

See Also: Elijah Muhammad; Martin Luther King, Jr; and John F. Kennedy.

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