Malcolm X

Written by Barbara Bullen

“No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million Black people
who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million
Black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but
disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you
as an American, or a patriot or a flag saluter, or a flag-waver-no not I.
I’m speaking as a victim of this American System.
And I see America through the eyes of the victim.
I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”

“And why was he our ‘Shining Black Prince’?
Selected Quotes from Malcolm X: Nation Time: Spring 1997
https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Malcolm_X/513.Malco
lm.X.Selected.Quotes.pdf

One of the most influential figures of the Civil Rights Movement was Malcolm X. Unlike Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s non-violent mission for equality and the end of discrimination not only for Blacks but for all races, Malcolm X commanded attention throughout the world.

“Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement. A spokesman for the Nation of Islam until 1964, he was a vocal advocate for black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the black community.

Malcolm spent his adolescence living in a series of foster homes or with relatives after his father’s death and his mother’s hospitalization. He engaged in several illicit activities, eventually being sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1946 for larceny and breaking and entering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X Malcolm’s childhood was fraught with misfortune yet he never stopped looking forward to another day in which to excel even to the extent of educating himself while in prison.

“…Malcolm X was one of the most articulate and powerful leaders of black America during the 1960s. A street hustler convicted of robbery in 1946, he spent seven years in prison, where he educated himself and became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam. In the days of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X emerged as the leading spokesman for black separatism, a philosophy that urged black Americans to cut political, social, and economic ties with the white community. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, the capital of the Muslim world, in 1964, he became an orthodox Muslim, adopted the Muslim name El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and distanced himself from the teachings of the black Muslims. He was assassinated in 1965.

In the following excerpt from his autobiography (1965), coauthored with Alex Haley and published the year of his death, Malcolm X describes his self-education… It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire some kind of a homemade education.

I became increasingly frustrated. at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there – I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional. How would I sound writing in slang, the way I would say it, something such as, “Look, daddy, let me pull your coat about a cat, Elijah Muhammad-“

Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies.

It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me feel envy of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversations he was in, and I had tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I
just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said. So I had come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going through only book-reading motions. Pretty
soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I had received the motivation that I did.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary – to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying. In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words – immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn’t remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that “aardvark” springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a longtailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.

I was so fascinated that I went on – I copied the dictionary’s next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet-and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors,… and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.”

http://www.lattc.edu/Lattc/media/lattc_media/PDFs/Learning-to-Read-by-MalcolmX-PDF.pdf

 

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
New York, June 1965
CHAPTER ONE NIGHTMARE

“When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was alone with her three small children, and that my father was away, preaching, in Milwaukee. The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town
because “the good Christian white people” were not going to stand for my father’s “spreading trouble” among the “good” Negroes of Omaha with the “back to Africa” preachings of Marcus Garvey.

My father, the Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister, a dedicated organizer for Marcus Aurelius Garvey’s U.N.I.A. (Universal Negro Improvement Association). With the help of such disciples as my father, Garvey, from his headquarters in New York City’s Harlem, was raising the banner of black-race purity and exhorting the Negro masses to return to their ancestral
African homeland-a cause which had made Garvey the most controversial black man on earth.

Still shouting threats, the Klansmen finally spurred their horses and galloped around the house, shattering every window pane with their gun butts. Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come.”

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/malcom-x.pdf
Advocacy and teachings while with Nation “From his adoption of the Nation of Islam in 1952 until he broke with it in 1964, Malcolm X promoted the Nation’s teachings. These included beliefs:

• that black people are the original people of the world[99]
• that white people are “devils”[2] and
• that the demise of the white race is imminent.[3]

Louis E. Lomax said that “those who don’t understand biblical prophecy wrongly label him as a racist and as a hate teacher, or as being anti-white or as teaching Black Supremacy”.[100] He was accused[ of being antisemitic. [101] In 1961, Malcolm X spoke at a NOI rally alongside George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party; Rockwell claimed that there was overlap between black nationalism and white supremacy.[102]

One of the goals of the civil rights movement was to end disenfranchisement of African Americans, but the Nation of Islam forbade its members from participating in voting and other aspects of the political process.[103] The NAACP and other civil rights organizations denounced him and the Nation of Islam as irresponsible extremists whose views did not represent the common interests of African Americans.[104][105]

Malcolm X was equally critical of the civil rights movement.[106] He called Martin Luther King Jr. a “chump”, and said other civil rights leaders were “stooges” of the white establishment.[107][G] He called the 1963 March on Washington “the farce on Washington”,[109] and said he did not know why so many black people were excited about a demonstration “run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn’t like us when he was alive”.[110]

While the civil rights movement fought against racial segregation, Malcolm X advocated the complete separation of African Americans from whites. He proposed that African Americans should
return to Africa and that, in the interim, a separate country for black people in America should be created.[111][112] He rejected the civil rights movement’s strategy of nonviolence, arguing that black people should defend and advance themselves “by any means necessary”.[113] His speeches had a powerful effect on his audiences, who were generally African Americans in northern and western cities. Many of them —tired of being told to wait for freedom, justice, equality and respect[114]—felt that he articulated their complaints better than did the civil rights movement.[115][116]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X

Malcolm X a great but controversial leader is remembered by memorials and tributes that include the first home he was brought up in which is now a historical monument. Malcolm X is also portrayed in the movies, TV and on stage.

Malcolm X was a great leader known for his beliefs that not everyone liked. But he proved to everyone that despite being incarcerated for seven years he put his time to good use through selfeducation turning out to be the most prolific, educated speaker that there was in the United States.

We welcome the holiday that celebrates Malcolm X for we live in a democracy where both sides must be heard; the good, the bad and the ugly that rears its head because of the suffering, racial
discrimination and fear and torture of Blacks.

Let us look forward to another day for great leaders to appear to lead us to justice for the benefit of all races in the United States