Malcolm X still looms large

Fiery civil rights activist was slain 40 years ago this week

By Barbara Blake
STAFF WRITER
published: February 20, 2005 6:00 am

ASHEVILLE — Malcolm X.

The name alone evokes a visceral emotion.

In the 40 years since the fiery civil rights leader died in a rain of gunfire in a Harlem ballroom, Malcolm X has been reviled as a racist and worshipped as a proud voice for the oppressed.

At the height of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, few people had a casual opinion of the man who would transform himself time and again during the 39 years he lived. But four decades of retrospection shows a complex person whose passion for a just cause was sometimes overshadowed by the alarming tone of his rhetoric.

High school history books barely mention Malcolm X, particularly in comparison to the man to whom he is most compared — Martin Luther King Jr. To many, the two were distilled into simple labels: the Muslim firebrand castigating “white devils’’ versus the Christian peacemaker.

Dwight Mullen, a political science professor at UNC Asheville, said it would be unfair for history to perpetrate the perception that King was working to bring America together and Malcolm was a separatist who did not discourage violent activism.

“If you look at the last three years of King’s life, from 1965 to 1968, and the last two years of Malcolm’s life, from 1963 to 1965, there’s a remarkable similarity to the paths they took,” Mullen said. “Both of them realized that struggle was not just limited to the United States. Both realized that the fight they were fighting involved the plight of poor people internationally. Both of them talked about African liberation, both talked about liberation in Vietnam and about Latin America. And they both formed their own organizations, because the traditional organizations weren’t adequately addressing their concerns.’’

While King was rallying his followers in the rural South, Malcolm X was speaking to urban African-Americans in the Northern cities. And while Malcolm at one point did promote racial separatism and justice “by any means necessary,’’ at the end of his life, he was more closely aligned with leaders like King.

Mullen said he admired Malcolm X for his ability to reinvent himself as he continued his quest for knowledge and purpose, from virtual orphan to devoted student to dropout to lawbreaking thug to a clean-living religious icon who would eventually believe in the universal brotherhood of mankind.

“Just to walk that road is the kind of courage most people don’t have,’’ Mullen said. “Most people just stay on the path where they’re comfortable, but Malcolm didn’t do that.’’

Struggles and triumphs

It is Malcolm’s own struggles and triumphs as portrayed in “The Autobiography of Malcolm X’’ that many find as inspiring as the ideals he promoted later in his life.

“He’s one of those rare individuals whose influence has grown more since his death,’’ said Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford University and a renowned authority on the lives of Malcolm X, King and other civil rights leaders. “Far more people are familiar with his life and his ideals now than during most of his life, primarily because his autobiography wasn’t widely available until after his death. Far more people have read the autobiography than ever attended his speeches.’’

Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Neb., Malcolm X was the son of a Baptist minister who was murdered by white supremacists when Malcolm was 6 years old. His mother’s subsequent mental breakdown sent Malcolm and the other seven children to foster homes and orphanages.

Smart and focused, Malcolm graduated from junior high at the top of his class. But when a teacher in high school told him his dream of becoming a lawyer was “not realistic’’ for an African-American child, he lost interest in school and decided to drop out. By 1942, he was involved in narcotics, prostitution and gambling rings, and by 1946 was serving a seven-year prison sentence for burglary.

In prison, he was introduced to the National of Islam, a new and more radical branch of the Muslim religion. When paroled, Malcolm was a devoted follower of the Nation and changed his surname from Little, which he considered a “slave name,” to “X,’’ signifying his lost tribal name.

He would quickly become a national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, following its leader Elijah Muhammad. With his charismatic fire and eloquent speeches, Malcolm grew membership in the religion from 500 in 1952 to 30,000 in 1963. The following year, after discovering deception and unethical behavior on the part of Muhammad, Malcolm severed his relationship with the Nation of Islam and founded his own religious group, the Muslim Mosque, Inc.

That same year, Malcolm went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia and returned saying he had met, “blond-haired, blue-eyed men I could call my brothers.’’

Shifting his beliefs from achieving freedom “by any means necessary’’ to a more collaborative approach, Malcolm took yet another path toward his goal of achieving social and economic justice for all.

After renouncing Muhammad, Malcolm rarely traveled anywhere without bodyguards. On Feb. 14, 1965, the home where he, his wife Betty and their four daughters lived in New York was firebombed. One week later, on Feb. 21, during a speaking engagement at the Audubon Ballroom, three gunmen rushed Malcolm onstage, shooting him 15 times at close range as his wife — who was pregnant with twin girls — and his children watched in horror.

Fifteen hundred people attended his funeral in Harlem, where the eulogy was given by the late actor and activist Ossie Davis. After the ceremony, friends took the shovels away from the gravediggers and buried Malcolm themselves.

A lasting legacy

Forty years after his death, Malcolm X still holds sway over young people, many of whose own parents weren’t yet born when he died.

Asheville High School social studies teacher Jackie Burris is among the small group of educators who make a point of teaching students about Malcolm X, and she finds that most are riveted with his story and the idea of what might have happened had he lived.

“They tend to think he and Dr. King would’ve hooked up and been a powerful, powerful force in the civil rights movement and in getting things passed in Congress much quicker than they did,’’ she said. “Thinking about what these men together might have accomplished is really eye-opening for these kids.’’

Anastasia Smith, an Asheville High senior who took Burris’ multicultural studies course last semester, said she admired Malcolm’s willingness to change his views.

“Although he once hated white folks, he learned to grow toward them, and he was open-minded after going to Mecca,’’ she said. “He tried to show the world that white people aren’t bad just because of the past, and he was strong-minded. He was confident of what he believed in, and he wouldn’t let anything stop him.”

Teresa Fine, another of Burris’ students, said she was most impressed with Malcolm’s “power to overcome.’’

“He started out basically with nothing, and he was always coming into the worst kind of situations ever possible, but he always managed to overcome them,’’ she said. “He’d always come out of it, no matter what, because of his determination and his power to have a whole bunch of people behind him.’’

Both girls believe Malcolm’s autobiography should be required reading, and both lamented the relative absence of information about Malcolm X in standard textbooks.

“I took (Burris’ class, which is an elective), because it talks about more black people instead of just having to wait for Black History Month,’’ Smith said.

“If I hadn’t taken this class, I wouldn’t have known about him,’’ Fine said. “(History classes) are mostly about the positive people, like King. But we need to learn about all of black history.’’

Anushka Jagdeo, a senior at UNCA and co-president, with her twin sister, Genessa, of the Black Students Association, said she had barely heard of Malcolm X before she got to college and started learning about him from other students.

“In high school and middle school, I was like everybody else — pretty ignorant of the kinds of things he did,’’ she said.

Now, she says, she has great respect for Malcolm, as she does for King.

“It’s always been strange to say their names in one sentence, and I don’t know it’s fair to say that I admire them equally,’’ she said. “But I’ve always felt great respect for him, and I admire what he was striving for. For some reason, it just feels to me like he was moving in the direction where he could’ve actually been at King’s side or working with the types of people King worked with.’’

Mostly, she said, she respects him for “always keeping the pulse of the people — not just black people, but all people — in mind.”

Contact Blake at 232-6020 or bblake@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.