by MAHIR ALI
Not long after Malcolm X was assassinated 60 years ago this week, the radical satirical singer-songwriter Phil Ochs summed up the indifferent response among self-proclaimed American liberals: “I cried when they shot Medgar Evers/ Tears ran down my spine/ I cried when they shot Mr Kennedy/ As though I’d lost a father of mine/ But Malcolm X got what was coming/ He got what he asked for this time/ So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.”
His reputation as an articulate purveyor of racial hatred was widespread when three gunmen associated with the Nation of Islam (NoI) pumped 21 bullets into the charismatic preacher almost as soon as he rose up to speak on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York, on Feb 21, 1965, while his pregnant wife and four young daughters watched in horror from the front row.
In too many ways, it was the culmination of the chronicle of a death foretold. In the preceding months, Malcolm had publicly acknowledged that he was a marked man. The previous year, he had disassociated himself from the NoI, after serving for several years as its most effective spokesman. His motives for doing so had steadily multiplied.
The earliest revolved around the hypocrisy of the cult leader Elijah Muhammad. The NoI favoured black separation in the US, and in doing so attracted the affection of the vilest white racists, including the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. Malcolm’s family home had been raided by the KKK while he was still in his mother’s womb, and he blamed the organisation for his father’s death six years later.
Malcolm’s parents were devotees of Marcus Garvey’s Africa-focused United Negro Improvement Association, which shared some roots with the NoI’s precursors. He was involved, uncomfortably, in the NoI’s first meeting with the KKK in Atlanta, but locked out of further contacts.
Malcolm X was outlived by his monumental legacy.
Malcolm was even more appalled by his leader’s transgressions at a personal level, after Elijah’s son Wallace confirmed that his dad had fathered eight children with six of his young secretaries, evidently against their will. Malcolm himself had a murky background as a hustler, drug dealer and pimp that led him to prison at 20. He discovered the library as a means of self-education, and then two of his brothers introduced him to Elijah’s teachings. Like many other African Americans, he was attracted by the notion that blacks were superior to the whites who oppressed them, and deserved a separate territory where they could live without discrimination.
Dawn for more