This critical analysis of how Malcolm X has been conceived and interpreted by scholars and writers was initially written for the late Joe Wood’s fine 1992 anthology, Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. I had written several drafts of the essay and had sharpened my arguments, honed my analysis, and deepened my engagement with the vast body of literature on Malcolm that fit under the four categories of interpretation I developed. Wood was quite pleased, but suddenly, at the end of this arduous process, he told me that he wouldn’t be using my essay. I was quite disappointed. Wood offered little explanation except to ask if I hadn’t been involved in other projects where my work, having been assigned, was not ultimately used. It was only later, a few years before Wood’s tragic death in 1999 on a solo hiking expedition in the Longmire area of Mount Rainier—a real loss for black letters—that I discovered that he had been heavily influenced in his decision by a mentor from his Yale days whose essay did appear in Wood’s collection—Adolf Reed Jr. Reed’s great disdain for me and my work, and that of other black scholars, would be later aired in an infamous Village Voice diatribe against black public intellectuals.
Fortunately, what began badly proved to be a boon. A “popular” version of this chapter, under the mighty advocacy and pen of editor Rosemary Bray, appeared in November 1992, as a 5,000-word lead essay for the New York Times Book Review. Further, my rejection led me to write my own book on Malcolm, a decision that resulted in two auspicious events: the publication ofMaking Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X, which was named a Notable Book of 1994 by the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, and one of the “outstanding black books of the twentieth century” by Black Issues Book Review. My partnership with Liz Maguire as my editor and intellectual compatriot, a professional relationship that blossomed into a friendship, has lasted over eight books and four publishing houses! This chapter is the first section of Making Malcolm, and is one of the scholarly efforts of which I am most proud.
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I think all of us should be critics of each other. Whenever you can’t stand criticism you can never grow. I don’t think that it serves any purpose for the leaders of our people to waste their time fighting each other needlessly. I think that we accomplish more when we sit down in private and iron out whatever differences that may exist and try and then do something constructive for the benefit of our people. But on the other hand, I don’t think that we should be above criticism. I don’t think that anyone should be above criticismMalcolm X.
—MALCOLM X: THE LAST SPEECHES
THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF MALCOLM X have traced a curious path to black cultural authority and social acceptance since his assassination in 1965. At the time of his martyrdom—achieved through a murder that rivaled in its fumbling but lethal execution the treacherous twists of a Shakespearean tragedy—Malcolm was experiencing a radical shift in the personal and political understandings that governed his life and thought.1 Malcolm’s death heightened the confusion that had already seized his inner circle because of his last religious conversion. His death also engendered bitter disagreement among fellow travelers about his evolving political direction, conflicts that often traded on polemic, diatribe, and intolerance. Thus Malcolm’s legacy was severely fragmented, his contributions shredded in ideological disputes even as ignorance and fear ensured his further denigration as the symbol of black hatred and violence.
Although broader cultural investigation of his importance has sometimes flagged, Malcolm has never disappeared among racial and political subcultures that proclaim his heroic stature because he embodied ideals of black rebellion and revolutionary social action.2 The contemporary revival of black nationalism, in particular, has focused renewed attention on him. Indeed, he has risen to a black cultural stratosphere that was once exclusively occupied by Martin Luther King Jr. The icons of success that mark Malcolm’s ascent—ranging from posters, clothing, speeches, and endless sampling of his voice on rap recordings—attest to his achieving the pinnacle of his popularity more than a quarter century after his death.
Malcolm, however, has received nothing like the intellectual attention devoted to Martin Luther King Jr., at least nothing equal to his cultural significance. Competing waves of uncritical celebration and vicious criticism—which settle easily into myth and caricature—have undermined appreciation of Malcolm’s greatest accomplishments. The peculiar needs that idolizing or demonizing Malcolm fulfill mean that intellectuals who study him are faced with the difficult task of describing and explaining a controversial black leader and the forces that produced him.3 Such critical studies must achieve the “thickest description” possible of Malcolm’s career while avoiding explanations that either obscure or reduce the complex nature of his achievements and failures.4
Judging by these standards, the literature on Malcolm X has often missed the mark. Even the classic Autobiography of Malcolm X reflects both Malcolm’s need to shape his personal history for public racial edification while bringing coherence to a radically conflicting set of life experiences and coauthor Alex Haley’s political biases and ideological purposes.5 Much writing about Malcolm has either lost its way in the murky waters of psychology dissolved from history or simply substituted—given racial politics in the United States—defensive praise for critical appraisal. At times, insights on Malcolm have been tarnished by insular ideological arguments that neither illuminate nor surprise. Malcolm X was too formidable a historic figure—the movements he led too variable and contradictory, the passion and intelligence he summoned too extraordinary and disconcerting—to be viewed through a narrow cultural prism.
My intent in this chapter is to provide a critical path through the quagmire of conflicting views of Malcolm X. I have identified at least four Malcolms who emerge in the intellectual investigations of his life and career: Malcolm as hero and saint, Malcolm as public moralist, Malcolm as victim and vehicle of psychohistorical forces, and Malcolm as revolutionary figure judged by his career trajectory from nationalist to alleged socialist. Of course, many treatments of Malcolm’s life and thought transgress rigid boundaries of interpretation. The Malcolms I have identified, and especially the categories of interpretation to which they give rise, should be viewed as handles on broader issues of ideological warfare over who Malcolm is, and to whom he rightfully belongs. In short, they help us answer: Whose Malcolm is it?
I am not providing an exhaustive review of the literature, but a critical reading of the dominant tendencies in the writings on Malcolm X.6 The writings make up an intellectual universe riddled with philosophical blindnesses and ideological constraints, filled with problematic interpretations, and sometimes brimming with brilliant insights. They reveal as much about the possibilities of understanding and explaining the life of a great black man as they do about Malcolm’s life and thought.
In the tense and confused aftermath of Malcolm’s death, several groups claiming to be his ideological heirs competed in a warfare of interpretation over Malcolm’s torn legacy. The most prominent of these included black nationalist and revolutionary groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, under the leadership of James Farmer and especially Floyd McKissick), the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.7 They appealed to his vision and spirit in developing styles of moral criticism and social action aimed at the destruction of white supremacy. These groups also advocated versions of Black Power, racial self-determination, black pride, cultural autonomy, cooperative socialism, and black capitalism.8
Malcolm’s death also caused often bitter debate between custodians of his legacy and his detractors, either side arguing his genius or evil in a potpourri of journals, books, magazines, and newspapers. For many of Malcolm’s keepers, the embrace of his legacy by integrationists or Marxists out to re-create Malcolm in their distorted image was more destructive than his critics characterizing him in exclusively pejorative terms.
For all his nationalist followers, Malcolm is largely viewed as a saintly figure defending the cause of black unity while fighting racist oppression. Admittedly, the development of stories that posit black heroes and saints serves a crucial cultural and political function. Such stories may be used to combat historical amnesia and to challenge the deification of black heroes—especially those deemed capable of betraying the best interests of African-Americans—by forces outside black communities. Furthermore, such stories reveal that the creation of (black) heroes is neither accidental nor value neutral, and often serves political ends that are not defined or controlled by black communities. Even heroes proclaimed worthy of broad black support are often subject to cultural manipulation and distortion.
The most striking example of this involves Martin Luther King, Jr. Like Malcolm X, King was a complex historic figure whose moral vision and social thought evolved over time.9 When King was alive, his efforts to affect a beloved community of racial equality were widely viewed as a threat to a stable social order. His advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience was also viewed as a detrimental detour from the proper role that religious leaders should play in public. Of course, the rise of black radicalism during the late 1960s softened King’s perception among many whites and blacks. But King’s power to excite the social imagination of Americans only increased after his assassination.
The conflicting uses to which King’s memory can be put—and the obscene manner in which his radical legacy can be deliberately forgotten—are displayed in aspects of the public commemoration of his birthday. To a significant degree, perceptions of King’s public aims have been shaped by the corporate sector and (sometimes hostile) governmental forces. These forces may be glimpsed in CocaCola commercials celebrating King’s birthday, and in Ronald Reagan’s unseemly hints of King’s personal and political defects at the signing of legislation to establish King’s birthday as a national holiday.
King’s legacy is viewed as most useful when promoting an unalloyed optimism about the possibilities of American social transformation, which peaked during his “I Have a Dream” speech. What is not often discussed—and is perhaps deliberately ignored—is how King dramatically revised his views, glimpsed most eloquently in his Vietnam era antiwar rhetoric and in his War on Poverty social activism. Corporationsponsored commercials that celebrate King’s memory—most notably, television spots by McDonald’s and Coca-Cola aimed at connecting their products to King’s legacy—reveal a truncated understanding of King’s meaning and value to American democracy. These and other efforts at public explanation of King’s meaning portray his worth as underwriting the interests of the state, which advocates a distorted cultural history of an era actually shaped more by blood and brutality than by distant dreams.
Many events of public commemoration avoid assigning specific responsibility for opposition to King’s and the civil rights movement’s quest for equality. On such occasions, the uneven path to racial justice is often described in a manner that makes progress appear an inevitable fact of our national life. Little mention is made of the concerted efforts—not only of bigots and white supremacists, but, more important, of government officials and average citizens—to stop racial progress. Such stories deny King’s radical challenge to narrow conceptions of American democracy. Although King and other sacrificial civil rights participants are lauded for their possession of the virtue of courage, not enough attention is given to the vicious cultural contexts that called forth such heroic action.
Most insidious of all, consent to these whitewashed stories of King and the 1960s is often secured by the veiled threat that King’s memory will be either celebrated in this manner or forgotten altogether. The logic behind such a threat is premised on a belief that blacks should be grateful for the state’s allowing King’s celebration to occur at all. These realities make the battle over King’s memory—waged by communities invested in his radical challenge to American society—a constant obligation. The battle over King’s memory also provides an important example to communities interested in preserving and employing Malcolm’s memory in contemporary social action. As with King, making Malcolm X a hero reveals the political utility of memory and reflects a deliberate choice made by black communities to identify and honor the principles for which Malcolm lived and died.
For many adherents, Malcolm remained until his death a revolutionary black nationalist whose exclusive interest was to combat white supremacy while fostering black unity. Although near the end of his life Malcolm displayed a broadened humanity and moral awareness—qualities overlooked by his unprincipled critics and often denied by his true believers—his revolutionary cohorts contended that Malcolm’s late-life changes were cosmetic and confused, the painful evidence of ideological vertigo brought on by paranoia and exhaustion.
All these interpretations are vividly elaborated in John Henrik Clarke’s anthology Malcolm X: The Man and His Times.10 Clarke’s book brings together essays, personal reflections, interviews, and organizational statements that provide a basis for understanding and explaining different dimensions of Malcolm’s life and career. Although its various voices certainly undermine a single understanding of Malcolm’s meaning as a father, leader, friend, and husband (after all, it includes writers as different as Albert Cleage and Gordon Parks), the book’s tone suggests an exercise in hero worship and saint making, as cultural interpreters gather and preserve fragments of Malcolm’s memory.
Thus even the power of an individual essay to critically engage an aspect of Malcolm’s contribution or failure is overcome by the greater urgency of the collective enterprise: to establish Malcolm as a genuine hero of the people, but more than this, a sainted son of revolutionary struggle who was perfectly fit for the leadership task he helped define. But moments of criticism come through. For instance, in the course of a mostly favorable discussion of Malcolm’s leadership, Charles Wilson insightfully addresses the structural problems confronting black protest leaders as he probes Malcolm’s “failure of leadership style and a failure to evolve a sound organizational base for his activities,” concluding that Malcolm was a “victim of his own charisma.”11
At least two other writers in the collection also attempt to critically explore Malcolm’s limitations and the distortions of his legacy by other groups. James Boggs deplores both the racism of white Marxist revolutionaries who cannot see beyond color and the lack of “scientific analysis” displayed by Malcolm’s black nationalist heirs whose activity degenerates into Black Power sloganeering. And Wyatt Tee Walker, King’s former lieutenant, criticizes Malcolm for “useless illogical and intemperate remarks that helped neither him nor his cause,” while emphasizing the importance of Malcolm’s pro-black rhetoric and his promulgation of the right to self-defense.12 At the same time, Walker uselessly repeats old saws about the vices of black matriarchy.
But these flutters of criticism are mostly overridden by the celebrative and romantic impulses that are expressed in several essays. Fortunately, Patricia Robinson’s paean to Malcolm X as a revolutionary figure stops short of viewing black male patriarchy as a heroic achievement. Instead, she sees Malcolm as the beginning of a redeemed black masculinity that helps, not oppresses, black children and women. But in essays by W. Keorapetse Kgositsile, Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, and Albert Cleage, Malcolm’s revolutionary black nationalist legacy is almost breathlessly, even reverentially, evoked.
Cleage especially, in his “Myths About Malcolm X,” seeks to defend Malcolm’s black nationalist reputation from assertions that he was becoming an integrationist, an internationalist, or a Trotskyist Marxist, concluding that “if in Mecca he had decided that blacks and whites can unite, then his life at that moment would have become meaningless in terms of the world struggle of black people.”13 Clarke’s book makes sense, especially when viewed against the historical canvas of late ’60s racial politics and in light of the specific cultural needs of urban blacks confronting deepening social crisis after Malcolm’s death. But its goal of redeeming Malcolm’s legacy through laudatory means makes its value more curatorial than critical.
Similarly, Oba T’shaka’s The Political Legacy of Malcolm X is an interpretation of Malcolm X as a revolutionary black nationalist, and The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X, edited by Benjamin Karim, attempts to freeze Malcolm’s development in the fateful year before his break with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.14 T’shaka is an often perceptive social critic and political activist who believes that “the scattering of Africans throughout the world gave birth to the idea of Pan-Africanism,” and that the “oppression of Blacks in the United States cannot be separated from the oppression of Africans on the African continent and in the world.”15
Such an international perspective establishes links between blacks throughout the world, forged by revolutionary black nationalist activity expressed in political insurgency, material and resource sharing, and the exchange of ideas. In this context, T’shaka maintains that Malcolm was a revolutionary black nationalist who “identified the world-wide system of white supremacy as the number one enemy of Africans and people of color throughout the world.” He argues that Malcolm’s internationalist perspective on revolutionary political resistance was specifically linked to African experiments in socialist politics, contending that Malcolm rejected European models of political transformation. Not surprisingly, T’shaka is sour on the notion that after his trip to Mecca, Malcolm accepted and expressed support for black-white unity, and he characterizes beliefs that Malcolm began to advocate a Trotskyite socialism as “farfetched statements.”16
Although he gives a close reading of Malcolm’s ideas, T’shaka’s treatment of Malcolm is marred by largely uncritical explorations of Malcolm’s rhetoric. He fails to challenge Malcolm’s philosophical presuppositions or even critically to juxtapose contradictory elements of Malcolm’s rhetoric. In effect, he bestows a canonical cloak on Malcolm’s words. Nor does T’shaka give a persuasive explanation of the social forces and political action that shaped Malcolm’s thinking in his last years. Understanding these facts might illuminate the motivation behind Malcolm’s utopian interpretations of black separatist ideology, which maintained that racial division was based on blacks possessing land either in Africa or in the United States. Although T’shaka, following Malcolm’s own schema, draws distinctions between his long-range program (that is, return to Africa, which he claims Malcolm never gave up) and short-term tactics (that is, cultural, psychological, and philosophical migration), he doesn’t prove that Malcolm ever resolved the ideological tensions in black nationalism.
Karim’s The End of White World Supremacy is an attempt to wrench Malcolm’s speeches from their political context and place them in a narrative framework that uses Malcolm’s own words—even after his break with the Nation of Islam—to justify Elijah Muhammad’s religious theodicy. Such a move ignores Malcolm’s radically transformed self-understanding and asserts, through his own words, a worldview he eventually rejected. Karim, who as Benjamin Goodman was Malcolm’s close associate through his Nation of Islam phase until his death, says in his introduction that Muhammad gave Malcolm “the keys to knowledge and understanding,” that this is “one key point in Malcolm’s life that is still generally misunderstood, or overlooked,” and that these speeches “represent a fair cross section of his teaching during that crucial last year as a leader in the Nation of Islam.”17
Karim’s introduction to the speeches winks away the ideological warfare that helped drive Malcolm from the Nation of Islam, and ignores evidence that Malcolm grew to characterize his years with Muhammad as “the sickness and madness of those days.”18 Here we have Malcolm the master polemicist telling twicetold tales of Mr. Yacub and white devils, a doctrine he had long forsaken. Here, too, is Malcolm the skillful dogmatist deriding Paul Robeson for not knowing his history, when in reality Malcolm grew to admire Robeson and tried to meet him a month before his own death.19 The political context Karim gives to the speeches attempts to transform interesting and essential historical artifacts from Malcolm’s past into a living document of personal faith and belief.
Karim’s shortcomings reveal the futility of examining Malcolm’s life and thought without regard for sound historical judgment and intellectual honesty. Serious engagement with Malcolm’s life and thought must be critical and balanced. The most useful evaluations of Malcolm X are those anchored in forceful but fair criticism of his career that hold him to the same standards of scholarly examination as we would any figure of importance to (African-) American society. But such judgments must acknowledge the tattered history of vicious, uncomprehending, and disabling cultural criticism aimed at black life, a variety of criticism reflected in many cultural commentaries on Malcolm’s life.20
The overwhelming weakness of hero worship, often, is the belief that the community of hero worshipers possesses the definitive understanding of the subject—in this instance, Malcolm—and that critical dissenters from the received view of Malcolm are traitors to black unity, inauthentic heirs to his political legacy, or misguided interpreters of his ideas.21 This is even more reason for intellectuals to bring the full weight of their critical powers to bear on Malcolm’s life. Otherwise, his real brilliance will be diminished by efforts to canonize his views without first considering them, his ultimate importance as a revolutionary figure sacrificed to celebratory claims about his historic meaning. Toward this end, Malcolm’s words best describe the critical approach that should be adopted in examining his life and thought:
Now many Negroes don’t like to be criticized—they don’t like for it to be said that we’re not ready. They say that that’s a stereotype. We have assets—we have liabilities as well as assets. And until our people are able to . . . analyze ourselves and discover our own liabilities as well as our assets, we never will be able to win any struggle that we become involved in. As long as the black community and the leaders of the black community are afraid of criticism and want to classify all criticism, collective criticism, as a stereotype, no one will ever be able to pull our coat. . . . [W]e have to . . . find out where we are lacking, and what we need to replace that which we are lacking, [or] we never will be able to be successful.22
Within African-American life, a strong heritage of black leadership has relentlessly and imaginatively addressed the major obstacles to the achievement of a sacred trinity of social goods for African-Americans: freedom, justice, and equality. Racism has been historically viewed as the most lethal force to deny black Americans their share in the abundant life that these goods make possible. The central role that the church has traditionally played in many black communities means that religion has profoundly shaped the moral vision and social thought of black leaders’ responses to racism.23 Because freedom, justice, and equality have been viewed by black communities as fundamental in the exercise of citizenship rights and the expression of social dignity, a diverse group of black leaders has advocated varied models of racial transformation in public life.
The centrality of Christianity in African-American culture means that the moral character of black public protest against racism has oscillated between reformist and revolutionary models of racial transformation. From Booker T. Washington to Joseph H. Jackson, black Christian reformist approaches to racial transformation have embraced liberal notions of the importance of social stability and the legitimacy of the state. Black Christian reformist leaders have sought to shape religious resistance to oppression, inequality, and injustice around styles of rational dissent that reinforce a stable political order. From Nat Turner to the latterday Martin Luther King, Jr., black Christian revolutionary approaches to racial transformation have often presumed the fundamental moral and social limitations of the state. Black Christian revolutionary leaders have advocated public protest against racism in a manner that disrupts the forceful alliance of unjust social privilege and political legitimacy that have undermined African-American life.
In practice, black resistance to American racism has fallen somewhere between these two poles. At their best, black leaders have opposed American racism while appealing to religion and politics in prescribing a remedy. Whether influenced by black Christianity, Black Muslim belief, or other varieties of black religious experience, proponents of public morality combined spiritual insight with political resistance in the attempt to achieve social reconstruction. Any effort to understand Malcolm X, and the cultural and religious beliefs he appealed to and argued against in making his specific claims, must take these traditions of prophetic and public morality into consideration.
Of the four books that largely view Malcolm’s career through his unrelenting ethical insights and the moral abominations to which his vision forcefully responded, Louis Lomax’s When the Word Is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World and James Cone’s Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? treat the religious roots of Malcolm’s moral vision. Peter Goldman’s The Death and Life of Malcolm X and Lomax’s To Kill a Black Man expound the social vision and political implications of Malcolm’s moral perspective. Moreover, both Lomax’s and Cone’s books are comparative studies of Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm’s widely perceived ideological opposite. The pairing of these figures invites inquiry about the legitimacy and usefulness of such comparisons, questions I will take up later.24
Lomax’s When the Word Is Given is a perceptive and informal ethnography of the inner structure of belief of the Nation of Islam, a journalist’s attempt to unveil the mysterious concatenation of religious rituals, puritanical behavior, and unorthodox beliefs that have at once intimidated and intrigued outsiders. Although other, more scholarly critics have examined Black Muslim belief, Lomax is a literate amateur whose lucid prose and imaginative reporting evoke the electricity and immediacy of the events he describes.25
Lomax is also insightful in his description of the cultural forces that helped bring Black Muslim faith into existence. He artfully probes how the Nation of Islam proved essential during the 1950s and 1960s for many black citizens who were vulnerably perched at the crux of the racial dilemma in the United States, seeking psychic and social refuge from the insanity of the country’s fractured urban center. In Lomax’s portrait, it is at the juncture between racist attack and cultural defense that Malcolm X’s moral vocation emerges: he voices the aspirations of the disenfranchised, the racially displaced, the religiously confused, and the economically devastated black person. As Lomax observes, the “Black Muslims came to power during a moral interregnum”; Malcolm “brings his message of importance and dignity to a class of Negroes who have had little, if any, reason to feel proud of themselves as a race or as individuals.”26
Despite the virtue of including several of Malcolm’s speeches and interviews, which compose the second half of the book (including an interview during Malcolm’s suspension from the Nation), the study’s popular purposes largely stifle a sharp analysis of Malcolm’s moral thought. Lomax provides helpful historical background of the origins and evolution of the Black Muslim worldview, linking useful insights on the emergence of religion in general to Islamic and Christian belief in Africa and in the United States. But his study does not engage the contradictions of belief and ambiguities of emotion that characterized Malcolm’s moral life. In fairness to Lomax, this study was not his final word on Malcolm. But his later comparative biography of Malcolm and King is more striking for its compelling personal insight into two tragic, heroic men than for its comprehension of the constellation of cultural factors that shaped their lives.
Cone’s Martin and Malcolm and America, on the contrary, is useful precisely because it explores the cultural, racial, and religious roots of Malcolm’s public moral thought.27 Cone, the widely acknowledged founder of black theology, has been significantly influenced by both King and Malcolm, and his book is a public acknowledgment of intellectual debt and personal inspiration. In chapters devoted to the impact of Malcolm’s northern ghetto origins on his later thought, the content of his social vision, and the nature of his mature reflections on American society and black political activity, Cone discusses Malcolm’s understanding of racial oppression, social justice, black unity, self-love, separatism, and self-defense that in the main constituted his vision of black nationalism.28
Cone performs a valuable service by shedding light on Malcolm’s religious faith and then linking that faith to his social ideals and public moral vision, recognizing that his faith “was marginal not only in America as a whole but in the African-American community itself.”29 Cone covers familiar ground in his exposition of Malcolm’s views on white Americans, black Christianity, and the religious and moral virtues of Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslim faith. But he also manages to show how Malcolm’s withering criticisms of race anticipated “the rise of black liberation theology in the United States and South Africa and other expressions of liberation theology in the Third World.”30
The most prominent feature of Cone’s book is its comparative framework, paralleling and opposing two seminal influences on late-twentieth-century American culture. It is just this presumption—that Malcolm and Martin represented two contradictory, if not mutually exclusive, ideological options available to blacks in combating the absurdity of white racism—that generates interest in Cone’s book, and in Lomax’s To Kill a Black Man.31 But is this presumption accurate?
As with all strictly imagined oppositions, an either-or division does not capture what Ralph Ellison termed the “beautiful and confounding complexities of AfroAmerican culture.”32 Nor does a rigid dualism account for the fashion in which even sharp ideological differences depend on some common intellectual ground to make disagreement plausible. For instance, the acrimonious ideological schism between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois drew energy from a common agreement that something must be done about the black cultural condition, that intellectual investigation must be wed to cultural and political activity in addressing the various problems of black culture, and that varying degrees of white support were crucial to the attainment of concrete freedom for black Americans.33 Although Washington is characterized as an “accommodationist” and Du Bois as a “Pan-African nationalist,” they were complex human beings whose political activity and social thought were more than the sum of their parts.
The comparative analysis of King and Malcolm sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of the public-moralist approach to Malcolm’s life and career. By comparing the two defining figures of twentieth-century black public morality, we are allowed to grasp the experienced, lived-out distinctions between King’s and Malcolm’s approaches to racial reform and revolution. Because King and Malcolm represent as well major tendencies in historic black ideological warfare against white racism, their lives and thoughts are useful examples of the social strategies, civil rebellion, religious resources, and psychic maneuvers adopted by diverse black movements for liberation within American society.
The challenge to the public-moralist approach is to probe the sorts of tensions between King and Malcolm that remain largely unexplored by other views of either figure. For instance, it is the presence of class differences within black life that bestowed particular meanings on King’s and Malcolm’s leadership. Such differences shaped the styles each leader adapted in voicing the grievances of his constituency—for King, a guilt-laden, upwardly mobile, and ever-expanding black middle class; for Malcolm, an ever-widening, trouble-prone, and rigidly oppressed black ghetto poor. These differences reflect deep and abiding schisms within African-American life that challenge facile or pedestrian interpretations of black leaders, inviting instead complex theoretical analyses of their public moral language and behavior.
The comparison of King and Malcolm may also, ironically, void the self-critical dimensions of the public-moralist perspective, causing its proponents to leave unaddressed, for instance, the shortcomings of a sexual hierarchy of social criticism in black life. Although Cone is critical of Malcolm’s and Martin’s failures of sight and sense on gender issues, more is demanded. What we need is an explanation of how intellectuals and leaders within vibrant traditions of black social criticism seem, with notable exception, unwilling or unable to include gender difference as a keyword in their public-moralist vocabulary. A comparative analysis of King and Malcolm may point out how they did not take gender difference seriously, but it does not explain how the public-moralist traditions in which they participated either enabled or prevented them from doing so.
By gaining such knowledge, we could determine if their beliefs were representative of their traditions, or if other participants (for example, Douglass and Du Bois, who held more enlightened views on gender) provide alternative perspectives from which to criticize Malcolm and Martin without resorting to the fingerpointing that derives from the clear advantage of historical hindsight.
As Cone makes clear, Malcolm and Martin were complex political actors whose thought derived from venerable traditions of response to American racism, usefully characterized as nationalism and integrationism. But as Cone also points out, the rhetoric of these two traditions has been employed to express complex beliefs, and black leaders and intellectuals have often combined them in their struggles against slavery and other forms of racial oppression.
Lomax, by comparison, more rigidly employs these figures to “examine the issues of ‘integration versus separation,’ ‘violence versus nonviolence,’ ‘the relevance of the Christian ethic to modern life,’ and the question ‘can American institutions as now constructed activate the self-corrective power that is the basic prerequisite for racial harmony?’”34 Lomax is most critical of Malcolm, leading one commentator to suggest that Lomax’s assessment of Malcolm betrayed their friendship.35 Lomax points out the wrongheadedness of Malcolm’s advocacy of violence, the contradictions of his ideological absolutism, and the limitations of his imprecisely formulated organizational plans in his last year. His criticisms of King, however, are mostly framed as the miscalculations of strategy and the failure of white people to justify King’s belief in them. Lomax’s vision of Malcolm loses sight of the formidable forces that were arrayed against him, and the common moral worldviews occupied by King and his white oppressors, which made King’s philosophical inclinations seem natural and legitimate, and Malcolm’s, by that measure, foreign and unacceptable. One result of Lomax’s lack of appreciation for this difference is his failure to explore King’s challenge to capitalism, a challenge that distinguished King from Malcolm for most of Malcolm’s career.
Another problem is that we fail to gain a more profitable view of Malcolm’s real achievements, overlooking the strengths and weaknesses of the moral tradition in which he notably participated. Malcolm was, perhaps, the living indictment of a white American moral worldview. But his career was the first fruit as well of something more radical: an alternative racial cosmos where existing moral principles are viewed as the naked justification of power and thought to be useless in illumining or judging the propositions of an authentically black ethical worldview. Not only did Malcolm call for the rejection of particular incarnations of moral viewpoints that have failed to live up to their own best potential meanings (a strategy King employed to brilliant effect), but, given how American morality is indivisible from the network of intellectual arguments that support and justify it, he argued for the rejection of American public morality itself. Malcolm lived against the fundamental premises of American public-moralist judgment: that innocence and corruption are on a continuum, that justice and injustice are on a scale, and that proper moral choices reflect right decisions made between good and evil within the given moral outlook.
Malcolm’s black Islamic moral criticism posed a significant challenge to its black Christian counterpart, which has enjoyed a central place in African-American culture. Malcolm challenged an assumption held by the most prominent black Christian public moralists: that the social structure of American society should be rearranged, but not reconstructed. Consequently, Malcolm focused a harshly critical light on the very possibility of interracial cooperation, common moral vision, and social coexistence.
A powerful vision of Malcolm as a public moralist can be seen in Goldman’s The Death and Life of Malcolm X. Goldman captures with eloquence and imagination the Brobdingnagian forces of white racial oppression that made life hell for northern poor blacks, and the Lilliputian psychic resources apparently at their disposal before Malcolm’s oversized and defiant rhetoric rallied black rage and anger to their defense. Goldman’s Malcolm is one whose “life was itself an accusation—a passage to the ninth circle of that black man’s hell and back—and the real meaning of his ministry, in and out of the Nation of Islam, was to deliver that accusation to us.” Malcolm was a “witness for the prosecution” of white injustice, a “public moralist.” With each aspect of Malcolm’s life that he treats—whether his anticipation of Black Power or his capitulation to standards of moral evaluation rooted in the white society he so vigorously despised—Goldman’s narrative skillfully defends the central proposition of Malcolm’s prophetic public-moralist vocation.36
Goldman’s book is focused on Malcolm’s last years before his break with Muhammad, and tracks Malcolm’s transformation after Mecca. Goldman contends that this transformation occurred as process, not revelation, and that it ran over weeks and months of trial and error, discovery, disappointment. Additionally, Goldman sifts through the conflicting evidence of Malcolm’s assassination.37 Goldman maintains that only one of Malcolm’s three convicted and imprisoned assassins is justly jailed, and that two other murderers remain free.38 Goldman says about Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which he founded in his last year, that its “greatest single asset was its star: its fatal flaw was that it was constructed specifically as a star vehicle for a man who didn’t have the time to invest in making it go.”39
When it was written in 1973, and revised in 1979, Goldman’s was the only fulllength biography of Malcolm besides Lomax’s To Kill a Black Man. The virtue of Goldman’s book is that it taps into the sense of immediacy that drives Lomax’s book, while also featuring independent investigation of Malcolm’s life through more than a hundred interviews with Malcolm himself. Goldman’s treatment of Malcolm also raises a question that I will more completely address later: Can a white intellectual understand and explain black experience? Goldman’s book helps expose the cultural roots and religious expression of Elijah Muhammad’s social theodicy, an argument Malcolm took up and defended with exemplary passion and fidelity. He describes Malcolm’s public moral mission to proclaim judgment on white America with the same kind of insight and clarity that characterized many of Malcolm’s public declarations.
Explaining Malcolm as a public moralist moves admirably beyond heroic reconstruction to critical appreciation. The significance of such an approach is its insistence on viewing Malcolm as a critical figure in the development of black nationalist repudiations of white cultural traditions, economic practices, and religious institutions. And yet, unlike hero worshipers who present treatments of Malcolm’s meaning, the authors who examine the moral dimensions of Malcolm’s public ministry are unafraid to be critical of his ideological blindnesses, his strategic weakness, his organizational limitations, and his sometimes bristling moral contradictions.
But if they display an avidity, and aptitude, for portraying Malcolm’s moral dimensions and the forces that made his vision necessary, Malcolm’s public-moralist interpreters have not as convincingly depicted the forces that make public morality possible. The public-moralist approach is almost by definition limited to explaining Malcolm in terms of the broad shifts and realignment of contours created within the logic of American morality itself, rarely asking whether public-moralist proclamation and action are the best means of effecting social revolution. This approach largely ignores the hints of rebellion against capitalist domination contained in Malcolm’s later speeches, blurring as well a focus on King’s mature beliefs that American society was “sick” and in need of a “reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”40
This approach also fails to place Malcolm in the intricate nexus of social and political forces that shaped his career as a religious militant and a revolutionary black nationalist. It does not adequately convey the mammoth scope of economic and cultural forces that converged during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, not only shaping the expression of racial domination, but influencing as well patterns of class antagonism and gender oppression. As Clayborne Carson argues in his splendid introduction to the FBI files on Malcolm X, most writings have failed to “study him within the context of American racial politics during the 1950s and 1960s.”41 According to Carson, the files track Malcolm’s growth from the “narrowly religious perspective of the Nation of Islam toward a broader Pan-Africanist worldview,” shed light on his religious and political views and the degree to which they “threatened the American state,” and “clarif[y] his role in modern African-American politics.”42
Moreover, the story of Malcolm X and the black revolution he sought to effect is also the story of how such social aspirations were shaped by the advent of nuclear holocaust in the mid-1940s (altering American ideals of social stability and communal life expectation), the repression of dissident speech in the 1950s under the banner of McCarthyism, and the economic boom of the mid-1960s that contrasted starkly to shrinking resources for the black poor. A refined social history not only accents such features, but provides as well a complex portrait of Malcolm’s philosophical and political goals, and the myriad factors that drove or denied their achievement.
Malcolm’s most radical and original contribution rested in reconceiving the possibility of being a worthful black human being in what he deemed a wicked white world. He saw black racial debasement as the core of an alternative moral sphere that was justified for no other reason than its abuse and attack by white Americans. To understand and explain Malcolm, however, we must wedge beneath the influences that determined his career in learning how his public-moralist vocation was both necessary and possible.
If the task of biography is to help readers understand human action, the purpose of psychobiography is to probe the relationship between psychic motivation, personal behavior, and social activity in explaining human achievement and failure. The project to connect psychology and biography grows out of a well-established quest to merge various schools of psychological theory with other intellectual disciplines, resulting in ethnopsychiatry, psychohistory, social psychology, and psychoanalytic approaches to philosophy.43
Behind the turn toward psychology and social theory by biographers is a desire to take advantage of the insight yielded from attempts to correlate or synthesize the largely incompatible worlds of psychoanalysis and Marxism carved out by Freud and Marx and their unwieldy legion of advocates and interpreters. If one argues, however, as Richard Lichtman does, that “the structure of the two theories makes them ultimate rivals,” then, as he concedes, “priorities must be established.”44 In his analysis of the integration of psychoanalysis into Marxist theory, Lichtman argues that “working through the limitations of Freud’s view makes its very significant insights available for incorporation into an expanded Marxist theory.”45
Psychobiographers have acknowledged the intellectual difficulties to which Lichtman points while using Marxist or Freudian theory (and sometimes both) to locate and illumine gnarled areas of human experience. For instance, Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, one of psychobiography’s foundational works, weds critical analysis of its subject’s cultural and intellectual roots to imaginative reflections on the sources of Gandhi’s motivation, sacrifice, and spiritual achievement.46
As they bring together social and psychological theory in their research, psychobiographers often rupture the rules that separate academic disciplines. Then again, if the psychobiographer is ruled by rigid presuppositions and is insensitive to the subject of study, nothing can prevent the results from being fatally flat. Two recent psychobiographies of Malcolm X reveal that genre’s virtues and vices.
Eugene Victor Wolfenstein’s The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution is a work of considerable intellectual imagination and rigorous theoretical insight.47 It takes measure of the energies that created Malcolm and the demons that drove him. Wolfenstein assesses Malcolm’s accomplishments through a theoretical lens as noteworthy for its startling clarity about Malcolm the individual as for its wide-angled view of the field of forces with which Malcolm contended during his childhood and mature career.
Wolfenstein uses an elaborate conceptual machinery to examine how racism falsifies “the consciousness of the racially oppressed,” and how racially oppressed individuals struggle to “free themselves from both the falsification of their consciousness and the racist domination of their practical activity.”48 For Wolfenstein’s purpose, neither a psychoanalytic nor a Marxist theory alone could yield adequate insight because Freudianism “provides no foundation for the analysis of interests, be they individual or collective,” and Marxism “provides no foundation for the analysis of desires.” Therefore, a “unifying concept of human nature was required.”49
Wolfenstein’s psychobiography is especially helpful because it combines several compelling features: a historical analysis of the black (nationalist) revolutionary struggle, an insightful biographical analysis of Malcolm X’s life, and an imaginative social theory that explains how a figure like Malcolm X could emerge from the womb of black struggle against American apartheid. Wolfenstein accounts for how Malcolm’s childhood was affected by violent, conflicting domestic forces and describes how black culture’s quest for identity at the margins of American society—especially when viewed from the even more marginal perspective of the black poor—shaped Malcolm’s adolescence and young adulthood.
Wolfenstein also explores Malcolm’s career as a zealous young prophet and public mouthpiece for Elijah Muhammad, revealing the psychic and social needs that Malcolm’s commitments served. Wolfenstein’s imaginative remapping of Malcolm’s intellectual and emotional landscape marks a significant contribution as well to the history of African-American ideas, offering new ways of understanding one of the most complex figures in our nation’s history.
Undoubtedly, Wolfenstein’s book would have benefited from a discussion of how black religious groups provided social and moral cohesion in northern urban black communities, and from a description of their impact on Earl Little’s ministry. Although Wolfenstein perceptively probes the appeal of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association to blacks—and the social, psychological, and economic ground it partly shared with the Ku Klux Klan and white proletarian workers—his psychoanalytic Marxist interpretation of Earl Little and Malcolm would have been substantially enhanced by an engagement with black Protestant beliefs about the relationship between work, morality, and self-regard.50
Wolfenstein is often keenly insightful about black liberation movements and the forces that precipitated their eruption, but his dependence on biological definitions of race weakens his arguments.51 The value of more complex readings of race is that they not only show how the varied meanings of racism are created in society; but prove as well that the idea of race has a cultural history.52 More complex theories of race would permit Wolfenstein to illumine the changing intellectual and social terrain of struggle by groups that oppose the vicious meanings attributed to African-American identity by cultural racists.
In the end, Wolfenstein is too dependent on the revelations and reconstructions of self-identity that Malcolm (with Haley’s assistance) achieved in his autobiography. In answering his own rhetorical questions about whether Malcolm and Haley represented Malcolm accurately, Wolfenstein says that from a “purely empirical standpoint, I believe the answer to both questions is generally affirmative.”53 The problem, of course, is that Malcolm’s recollections are not without distortions. These distortions, when taken together with the book’s interpretive framework, not only reveal his attempts to record his life history, but reflect as well his need to control how his life was viewed during the ideological frenzy that marked his last year. By itself, self-description is an unreliable basis for reconstructing the meaning of Malcolm’s life and career. Still, Wolfenstein’s work is the most sophisticated treatment to date of Malcolm’s intellectual and psychological roots.
But Bruce Perry’s uneven psychobiographical study, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, which reaches exhaustively beyond Malcolm’s selfrepresentation in his autobiography, possesses little of the psychoanalytic rigor and insight of Wolfenstein’s work.54 Although Perry unearths new information about Malcolm, he does not skillfully clarify the impact that such information should have on our understanding of Malcolm. The volume renders Malcolm smaller than life.
In Perry’s estimation, Malcolm’s childhood holds the interpretive key to understanding his mature career as a black leader: Malcolm’s “war against the white power structure evolved from the same inner needs that had spawned earlier rebellions against his teachers, the law, established religion, and other symbols of authority.”55 Perry’s picture of Malcolm’s family is one of unremitting violence, criminality, and pathology. The mature Malcolm is equally tragic: a man of looming greatness whose self-destruction “contributed to his premature death.”56 It is precisely here that Perry’s psychobiography folds in on itself, its rough edges puncturing the center of its explanatory purpose. It is not that psychobiography cannot remark on the unraveling of domestic relations that weave together important threads of personal identity, threads that are also woven into adolescent and adult behavior. But Perry has a penchant for explaining complex psychic forces—and the social conditions that influence their makeup—in simplistic terms and tabloid-like arguments.
Still, Perry’s new information about Malcolm is occasionally revealing, though some of the claims he extracts from this information are more dubious than others. When, for instance, Perry addresses areas of Malcolm’s life that can be factually verified, he is on solid ground. By simply checking Malcolm’s school records Perry proves that, contrary to his autobiography, Malcolm was not expelled from West Junior High School but actually completed the seventh grade in 1939. And by interviewing several family members, Perry establishes that neither Malcolm’s half-sister Ella nor his father Earl were, as Malcolm contended, “jet black,” a claim Perry views as Malcolm’s way of equating “blackness and the strength his lightskinned mother had lacked.”57 Despite Malcolm X’s assertion of close friendships with Lionel Hampton, Sonny Greer, and Cootie Williams during his hustling days, Perry’s interviews show that the “closeness Malcolm described was as fictitious as the closeness he said he had shared with the members of his own family.”58
But when Perry addresses aspects of Malcolm’s experience that invite close argument and analytical interpretation, he is on shakier ground. At this juncture, Perry displays an insensitivity to African-American life and an ignorance about black intellectual traditions that weaken his book. For instance, Perry depicts Malcolm’s travels to Africa—partially in an attempt to expand his organization’s political and financial base, but also to express his increasingly international social vision—as intended solely to fund his fledgling organization. Perry also draws questionable parallels between the cloudy events surrounding a fire at Malcolm’s family farm during his early childhood in 1929 (which Perry concludes points to arson by Earl Little) and the fire at Malcolm’s New York house after his dispute with Nation of Islam officials over ownership rights.
A major example of the limitation of Perry’s psychobiographical approach is his treatment of Malcolm’s alleged homosexual activity, both as an experimenting adolescent and as a hustling, income-seeking young adult. Perry’s remarks are more striking for the narrow assumptions that underlie his interpretations than for their potential to dismantle the quintessential symbol of African-American manhood. If Malcolm did have homosexual relations, they might serve Perry as a powerful tool of interpretation to expose the tangled cultural roots of black machismo, and to help him explain the cruel varieties of homophobia that afflict black communities. A complex understanding of black sexual politics challenges a psychology of masculinity that views “male” as a homogeneous, natural, and universally understood identity. A complex understanding of masculinity maintains that male identity is also significantly affected by ethnic, racial, economic, and sexual differences.
But Perry’s framework of interpretation cannot assimilate the information his research has unearthed. Although the masculinist psychology that chokes much of black leadership culture needs to be forcefully criticized, Perry’s observations do not suffice. Because he displays neither sensitivity to nor knowledge about complex black cultural beliefs regarding gender and sexual difference, Perry’s portrait of Malcolm’s sex life forms a rhetorical low blow, simply reinforcing a line of attack against an already sexually demonized black leadership culture.
The power of psychobiography in discussing black leaders is its potential to shed light on its subjects in a manner that traditional biography fails to achieve. African-American cultural studies, which has traditionally made little use of psychoanalytic theory, has sacrificed the insights such an undertaking might offer while avoiding the pitfalls of psychological explanations of human motivation. After all, psychobiography is also prone to overreach its capacity to explain.
In some ways, the psychobiographer’s quest for (in this case) the “real Malcolm” presumes that human experience is objective and that truth is produced by explaining the relation between human action and psychic motivation. Such an approach may seduce psychobiographers into believing that they are gaining access to the static, internal psychic reality of a historical figure. Often such access is wrongly believed to be separate from the methods of investigation psychobiographers employ, and from the aims and presumptions, as well as the biases and intellectual limitations, that influence their work.
Because both Wolfenstein and Perry (like Goldman) are white, their psychobiographies in particular raise suspicion about the ability of white intellectuals to interpret black experience. Although such speculation is rarely systematically examined, it surfaces as both healthy skepticism and debilitating paranoia in the informal debates that abound in a variety of black intellectual circles. Such debates reflect two crucial tensions generated by psychobiographical explanations of black leaders by white authors: that such explanations reflect insensitivity to black culture, and that white proponents of psychobiographical analysis are incompetent to assess black life adequately. Several factors are at the base of such conclusions.
First is the racist history that has affected every tradition of American scholarship and that has obscured, erased, or distorted accounts of the culture and history of African Americans.59 Given this history (and the strong currents of antiintellectualism that flood most segments of American culture), suspicion of certain forms of critical intellectual activity survive in many segments of black culture. Also, black intellectuals have experienced enormous difficulty in securing adequate cultural and financial support to develop self-sustaining traditions of scholarly investigation and communities of intellectual inquiry.60
For example, from its birth in the womb of political protest during the late 1960s and early 1970s, black studies has been largely stigmatized and usually underfunded. Perhaps the principal reasons for this are the beliefs held by many whites (and some blacks) that, first, black scholars should master nonblack subjects, and second, that black studies is intellectually worthless. Ironically, once the more than 200 black studies programs in American colleges and universities became established, many white academics became convinced that blacks are capable of studying only “black” subjects.
At the same time, black studies experienced a new “invasion” by white intellectuals. This new invasion—mimicking earlier patterns of white scholarship on black life even as most black scholars were prevented from being published—provoked resentment from black scholars.”61 The resentment hinged on the difficulty black scholars experienced in securing appointments in most academic fields beyond black studies. Black scholars were also skeptical of the intellectual assumptions and political agendas of white scholars, especially because there was strong precedence for many white scholars to distort black culture in their work by either exoticizing or demonizing its expression. Black intellectual skeptics opposed to white interpretations of black culture and figures employ a variety of arguments in their defense.
Many black intellectuals contend that black experience is unique and can be understood, described, and explained only by blacks. Unquestionably, AfricanAmerican history produces cultural and personal experiences that are distinct, even singular. But the historical character of such experiences makes them theoretically accessible to any interpreter who has a broad knowledge of African-American intellectual traditions, a balanced and sensible approach to black culture, and the same skills of rational argumentation and scholarly inquiry required in other fields of study.
There is no special status of being that derives from black cultural or historical experience that grants black interpreters an automatically superior understanding of black cultural meanings. This same principle allows black scholars to interpret Shakespeare, study Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and master Marxist social theory. In sum, black cultural and historical experiences do not produce ideas and practices that are incapable of interpretation when the most critically judicious and culturally sensitive methods of intellectual inquiry are applied.
Many intellectuals also believe that black culture is unified and relatively homogeneous. But this contention is as misleading as the first, especially in light of black culture’s wonderful complexity and radical diversity. The complexity and diversity of black culture means that a bewildering variety of opinions, beliefs, ideologies, traditions, and practices coexist, even if in a provisional sort of way. Black conservatives, scuba divers, socialists, and rock musicians come easily to mind. All these tendencies and traditions constitute and help define black culture. Given these realities, it is pointless to dismiss studies of black cultural figures simply because their authors are white. One must judge any work on AfricanAmerican culture by standards of rigorous critical investigation while attending to both the presuppositions that ground scholarly perspectives and the biases that influence intellectual arguments.
Psychobiographies of Malcolm X’s life and career represent an important advance in Malcolm studies. The crucial issue is not color, but consciousness about African-American culture, sensitivity to trends and developments in black society, knowledge of the growing literature about various dimensions of black American life, and a theoretical sophistication that artfully blends a variety of disciplinary approaches in yielding insight about a complex historic figure like Malcolm X. When psychobiography is employed in this manner, it can go a long way toward breaking new ground in understanding and explaining the life of important black figures. When it is incompetently wielded, psychobiographical analysis ends up simply projecting the psychobiographer’s intellectual biases and limitations of perspective onto the historical screen of a black figure’s career.
To comprehend the full sweep of a figure’s life and thought, it is necessary to place that figure’s career in its cultural and historical context and view the trends and twists of thought that mark significant periods of change and development. Such an approach may be termed a trajectory analysis because it attempts to outline the evolution of belief and thought of historic figures by matching previously held ideas to newer ones, seeking to grasp whatever continuities and departures can be discerned from such an enterprise. Trajectory analysis, then, may be a helpful way of viewing a figure such as Martin Luther King Jr., whose career may be divided into the early optimism of civil rights ideology to the latter-day aggressive nonviolence he advocated on the eve of his assassination. It may also be enlightening when grappling with the serpentine mysteries of Malcolm’s final days.
Malcolm’s turbulent severance from Elijah Muhammad’s psychic and worldmaking womb initiated yet another stage of his personal and political evolution, marking a conversion experience. On one level, Malcolm freed himself from Elijah’s destructive ideological grip, shattering molds of belief and practice that were no longer useful or enabling. On another level, Malcolm’s maturation and conversion were the result of his internal ideals of moral expectation, social behavior, and authentic religious belief. His conversion, though suddenly manifest, was most likely a gradual process involving both conscious acts of dissociation from the Nation of Islam and the “subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by the experiences of life.”62
Many commentators have heavily debated the precise nature of Malcolm’s transformation. Indeed, his last fifty weeks on earth form a fertile intellectual field where the seeds of speculation readily blossom into conflicting interpretations of Malcolm’s meaning at the end of his life. Lomax says that Malcolm became a “lukewarm integrationist.”63 Goldman suggests that Malcolm was “improvising,” that he embraced and discarded ideological options as he went along.64 Cleage and T’shaka hold that he remained a revolutionary black nationalist. And Cone asserts that Malcolm became an internationalist with a humanist bent.
But the most prominent and vigorous interpreters of the meaning of Malcolm’s last year have been a group of intellectuals associated with the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist-Marxist group that took keen interest in Malcolm’s post-Mecca social criticism and sponsored some of his last speeches. For the most part, their views have been articulately promoted by George Breitman, author of The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary and editor of two volumes of Malcolm’s speeches, organizational statements, and interviews during his last years: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements and By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter, by Malcolm X. A third volume of Malcolm’s speeches, Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, was edited by Bruce Perry, who claimed “ideological difference with the publisher.65
Breitman’s The Last Year of Malcolm X is a passionately argued book that maintains Malcolm’s split with Elijah took Malcolm by surprise, making it necessary for him to gain time and experience to reconstruct his ideological beliefs and redefine his organizational orientation. Breitman divides Malcolm’s independent phase into two parts: the transition period, lasting the few months between his split in March 1964 and his return from Africa at the end of May 1964; and the final period, lasting from June 1964 until his death in February 1965. Breitman maintains that in the final period, Malcolm “was on the way to a synthesis of black nationalism and socialism that would be fitting for the American scene and acceptable to the masses in the black ghetto.”66
For Breitman’s argument to be persuasive, it had to address Malcolm’s continuing association with a black nationalism that effectively excluded white participation, or else show that he had developed a different understanding of black nationalism. Also, he had to prove that Malcolm’s anticapitalist statements and remarks about socialism represented a coherent and systematic exposition of his beliefs as a political strategist and social critic. Breitman contends that in the final period, Malcolm made distinctions between separatism (the belief that blacks should be socially, culturally, politically, and economically separate from white society) and nationalism (the belief that blacks should control their own culture).
Malcolm’s views of nationalism changed after his encounters with revolutionaries in Africa who were “white,” however, and in his “Young Socialist” interview in By Any Means Necessary, Malcolm confessed that he “had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising” of his definition of black nationalism.67 Breitman argues that though he “had virtually stopped calling himself and the OAAU black nationalist,” because others persisted in the practice, he accepted “its continued use in discussion and debate.”68 Malcolm said in the same interview, “I haven’t been using the expression for several months.”69
But how can Breitman then argue that Malcolm was attempting a synthesis of black nationalism and socialism if the basis for Malcolm’s continued use of the phrase “black nationalism” was apparently more convenience and habit than ideological conviction? What is apparent from my reading of Malcolm’s speeches is that his reconsideration of black nationalism occurred amid a radically shifting worldview that was being shaped by events unfolding on the international scene and by his broadened horizon of experience. His social and intellectual contact with activists and intellectuals from several African nations forced him to relinquish the narrow focus of his black nationalist practice and challenged him to consider restructuring his organizational base to reflect his broadened interests.
If, therefore, even Malcolm’s conceptions of black nationalist strategy were undergoing profound restructuring, it is possible to say only that his revised black nationalist ideology might have accommodated socialist strategy. It is equally plausible to suggest that his nationalist beliefs might have collapsed altogether under the weight of apparent ideological contradictions introduced by his growing appreciation of class and economic factors in forming the lives of the black masses.70 For the synthesis of black nationalism and socialism that Breitman asserts Malcolm was forging to have been plausible, several interrelated processes needed to be set in motion.
First, for such a synthesis to have occurred, a clear definition of the potential connection of black nationalism and socialism was needed. The second need was for a discussion of the ideological similarities and differences between the varieties of black nationalism and socialism to be joined. And the third need was for an explicit expression of the political, economic, and social interests that an allied black nationalism and socialism would mutually emphasize and embrace; the exploration of intellectual and political problems both would address; and an identification of the common enemies both would oppose. But given the existential and material matters that claimed his rapidly evaporating energy near the end of his life, Malcolm hardly had the wherewithal to perform such tasks.
Breitman also maintains that Malcolm’s final period marked his maturation as “a revolutionary—increasingly anti-capitalist and pro-socialist as well as antiimperialist,” labels that Breitman acknowledges Malcolm himself never adopted.71 Breitman reads Malcolm’s two trips to Africa as a time of expansive political reeducation, when Malcolm gained insight into the progressive possibilities of socialist revolutionary practice. After his return to the United States from his second trip, Malcolm felt, Breitman says, the need to express publicly his “own anti-capitalist and pro-socialist convictions,” which had “become quite strong by this time.”72 He cites interviews and speeches Malcolm made during this period to substantiate his claim, including Malcolm’s speaking at the Audubon Ballroom on December 20, 1964, of how almost “every one of the countries that has gotten independence has devised some kind of socialist system, and this is no accident.”73
Such a strategy, one that seeks to predict probable ideological and intellectual outcomes, may shed less light on Malcolm than is initially apparent. Breitman’s contention that Malcolm was becoming a socialist; Cleage’s that he was confused; T’shaka’s that he maintained a vigorous revolutionary black nationalist stance; and Goldman’s that he was improvising can all be proclaimed and documented with varying degrees of evidence and credibility.
This is not to suggest that one view is as good as the next or that they are somehow interchangeable, because we are uncertain about Malcolm’s final direction. It simply suggests that the nature of Malcolm’s thought during his last year was ambiguous and that making definite judgments about his direction is impossible. In this light, trajectories say more about the ideological commitments and intellectual viewpoints of interpreters than the objective evidence evoked to substantiate claims about Malcolm’s final views. The truth is that we have only a bare-bones outline of Malcolm’s emerging worldview. In “The Harlem ‘Hate-Gang’ Scare,” contained in Malcolm X Speaks (and delivered during what Breitman says was Malcolm’s final period), Malcolm says that during his travels he
noticed that most of the countries that had recently emerged into independence have turned away from the so-called capitalistic system in the direction of socialism. So out of curiosity, I can’t resist the temptation to do a little investigating wherever that particular philosophy happens to be in existence or an attempt is being made to bring it into existence.74
But at the end of his speech, in reply to a question about the kind of political and economic system that Malcolm wanted, he said, “I don’t know. But I’m flexible. . . . As was stated earlier, all of the countries that are emerging today from under the shackles of colonialism are turning toward socialism.”75
This tentativeness is characteristic of Malcolm’s speeches throughout the three collections that contain fragments of his evolving worldview, especially Malcolm X Speaks and By Any Means Necessary. Even the speeches delivered during his final period showcase a common feature: Malcolm displays sympathy for and interest in socialist philosophy without committing himself to its practice as a means of achieving liberation for African-Americans.
Malcolm confessed in the “Young Socialist” interview, “I still would be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of the black people in this country.”76 Of course, as Breitman implies, Malcolm’s self-description is not the only basis for drawing conclusions about his philosophy. But even empirical investigation fails to yield conclusive evidence of his social philosophy because it was in such radical transformation and flux.
Malcolm was indeed improvising from the chords of an expanded black nationalist rhetoric and an embryonic socialist criticism of capitalist civilization. Although Breitman has been maligned as a latecomer seeking to foist his ideological beliefs onto Malcolm’s last days, there is precedence for Trotskyist attempts to address the problem of racism and black nationalism in the United States.77 And the venerable black historian C. L. R. James became a Marxist, in part, by reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution.78 Although Malcolm consistently denounced capitalism, he did not live long enough to embrace socialism.
The weakness of such an interpretive trajectory, then, is that it tends to demand a certainty about Malcolm that is clearly unachievable. An ideological trajectory of Malcolm’s later moments is forced to bring coherence to fragments of political speech more than systematic social thought, to exaggerate moments of highly suggestive ideological gestures rather than substantive political activity, and to focus on slices of organizational breakthrough instead of the complex integrative activity envisioned for the OAAU. In the end, it is apparent that Malcolm was rapidly revising his worldview as he experienced a personal, religious, and ideological conversion that was still transpiring when he met his brutal death.
But the thrust behind such speculation is often a focus on how Malcolm attempted to shape the cultural forces of his time through the agency of moral rhetoric, social criticism, and prophetic declaration. Just as important, but often neglected in such analyses, is an account of how Malcolm was shaped by his times, of how he was the peculiar and particular creation of black cultural forces and American social practices. Armed with such an understanding, the focus on Malcolm’s last year would be shifted away from simply determining what he said and did to determining how we should use his example to respond to our current cultural and national crises.
The literature on Malcolm X is certain to swell with the renewed cultural interest in his life. And although the particular incarnations of the approaches I have detailed may fade from intellectual view or cultural vogue, the ideological commitments, methodological procedures, historical perspectives, cultural assumptions, religious beliefs, and philosophical presuppositions they employ will most assuredly be expressed in one form or another in future treatments of his life and thought.79
The canonization of Malcolm will undoubtedly continue. Romantic and celebratory treatments of his social action and revolutionary rhetoric will issue forth from black intellectuals, activists, and cultural artists. This is especially true in the independent black press, where Malcolm’s memory has been heroically kept alive in books, pamphlets, and magazines, even as his presence receded from wide visibility and celebration before his recent revival. The independent black press preserves and circulates cultural beliefs, intellectual arguments, and racial wisdom among black folk away from the omniscient eye and acceptance of mainstream publishing.
Shahrazad Ali’s controversial book, The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman, for instance, sold hundreds of thousands of copies without receiving much attention from mainstream newspapers, magazines, or journals. The mainstream press often overlooked Malcolm’s contributions, but black publications like The Amsterdam News, The Afro-American, Bilalian News, and Black News scrupulously recorded his public career. The black independent press, in alliance with various black nationalist groups throughout the country that have maintained Malcolm’s heroic stature from the time of his assassination, is a crucial force in Malcolm’s ongoing celebration. Such treatments of his legacy will most likely be employed by these groups to actively resist Malcolm’s symbolic manipulation by what they understand to be the forces of cultural racism, state domination, commodification, and especially religious brainwashing that Malcolm detested and opposed.
The enormous influence of the culture of hip-hop on black youth, coupled with the resurgence of black cultural nationalism among powerful subcultures within the African-American community, suggests that Malcolm’s heroic example will continue to be emulated and proclaimed. The stakes of hero worship are raised when considering the resurgent racism of American society and the increased personal and social desperation among the constituency for whom Malcolm eloquently argued, the black ghetto poor. Heightened racial antipathy in cultural institutions such as universities and businesses, and escalated attacks on black cultural figures, ideas, and movements, precipitate the celebration of figures who embody the strongest gestures of resistance to white racism.
Moreover, the destructive effects of gentrification, economic crisis, and social dislocation; the expansion of corporate privilege; and the development of underground political economies—along with the violence and criminality they breed—means that Malcolm is even more a precious symbol of the self-discipline, self-esteem, and moral leadership necessary to combat the spiritual and economic corruption of poor black communities. With their efforts to situate him among the truly great in African-American history, hero worshipers’ discussion of Malcolm will be of important but limited value in critically investigating his revolutionary speech, thought, and action.
Malcolm’s weaknesses and strengths must be rigorously examined if we are to have a richly hued picture of one of the most intriguing figures of twentiethcentury public life in the United States. Malcolm’s past is not yet settled, savaged as it has been in the embrace of unprincipled denigrators while being equally smothered in the well-meaning grip of romantic and uncritical loyalists. He deserves what every towering and seminal figure in history should receive: comprehensive and critical examination of what he said and did so that his life and thought will be useful to future generations of peoples in struggle around the globe.