Malcolm X lives.
More than 25 years after his murder in a Manhattan ballroom, the charismatic African-American hero who once called himself ”the angriest black man in America,” remains a presence in the nation`s cultural and political life.
Tune in, for instance, on Sunday evenings to ”Roc,” the Fox network`s sitcom about a Baltimore garbageman and his family, and there`s Malcolm`s bright face, with its trademark horn-rimmed eyeglasses, staring back at you from photos on the walls of the set.
Flip open an issue of Emerge, a black newsmagazine and, again, there`s his visage, with eyes that look through you, this time on three subscription cards. In bold, black print are the words ”INSIGHTFUL. INTELLIGENT. INSPIRING.” Presumably, the words are meant to apply to Malcolm as well as the magazine.
Then there are the ubiquitous ”X” hats. They were popularized by marketer and film director Spike Lee, who is now at work on a film version of Malcolm`s life reportedly budgeted at $25 million and starring Academy Award winner Denzel Washington. It`s scheduled for a Christmas 1992 release.
The white-on-black hats form only part of a growing Malcolm wardrobe that includes shirts, jackets, medallions and other fashion accessories bearing either his likeness or simply the algebraic symbol that he, like other Black Muslims, took as their enigmatic surnames, the emblem of the black African past lost to slavery.
It`s clear that Malcolm X`s memory continues to grip the minds of a good many African-Americans as well as whites. Last year, for instance, more than 2,000 people showed up at a New York hotel to attend a conference about him. Many weren`t even born when he was assassinated at age 39 by a Black Muslim hit squad on Feb. 21, 1965, the result of an open feud between Malcolm and the religious sect he had broken with, the Nation of Islam.
The question is, why does his influence endure?
”Why are we still looking at Malcolm X? Malcolm X signified revolution,” said Chris Parker, the political rap star known as KRS-1 and leader of the influential group Boogie Down Productions (BDP) of New York.
”Obviously, we are still in that revolutionary state of mind, still looking for revolutionary leaders,” he said from a Miami hotel during a late- night break in a college lecture tour covering 44 states. ”Looking at Malcolm X only implies we have not been fulfilled with someone like Malcolm X. All of our black leaders are trying to be down with (associated with) our murderers,” he says of the nation`s white powers-that-be in caustic, righteous tones Malcolm might have once used.
It was the rappers who breathed new life into Malcolm`s memory during the late 1980s, making many in their young audiences aware for the first time of the former pimp, addict and hustler who reformed and educated himself in prison to became one of the most articulate voices of black outrage in the 1960s.
”BDP was the first rap group to introduce Malcolm X into the music,”
said Parker. ”This is not an egotistical thing, please. We`re talking in terms of history. We came up with `By All Means Necessary,` ” a takeoff on a Malcolmism that justice for American blacks would come `by any means necessary.`
”I`ve always respected Malcolm for what he does and says,” said Parker, speaking of Malcolm in the present tense. ”He`s one of the most logical people who ever walked the face of the Earth.”
Fiery and funny
That Malcolm should remain popular so long after his death no doubt has something to do with his magnetic personality. It reverberates across the decades in his taped speeches, filmed interviews and ”The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” the famous work written in collaboration with Alex Haley.
Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Neb., he grew to a lanky 6 feet 4 inches, with a boyish grin and riveting light-brown eyes. Though contemporary journalists wore out the word ”fiery” in describing him, he was often charming, witty and funny. He had presence and was at ease with both common folk and dignitaries. He loved a debate, no doubt the outgrowth of his youthful desire to be a lawyer.
It`s been said the only man more sought after as a speaker at predominantly white college campuses in the early 1960s was President John Kennedy. Malcolm was constantly on the airwaves, able to draw a crowd of reporters in a moment. Those who knew him say he had a brand of genius.
Malcolm X in death is a surrogate father figure for many young black men, just as he was in life, another element of his continued popularity. ”He taught me how to be a man. How to stand up, not be afraid, how to be courageous,” said Imam (teacher in Arabic) Abdul Karim Hasan, a Muslim cleric in Los Angeles. He knew Malcolm for several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ”He taught me that in order to be successful in this world, you have to be bold.”
”He represents a serious example of black manhood and adulthood,” said Bakari Kitwana, manager of the African American Book Center on 75th Street and Cottage Grove. ”People respect that.”
During his 12 years as spokesman for Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam`s founder, and then after the schism, Malcolm called for an Old Testament approach in racial affairs, an eye for an eye.
That approach was, in fact, based on the generally accepted principle that one has the right to defend oneself when attacked. Nothing was wrong with black violence in response to white, he argued, during the indendiary confrontations of the civil rights movement in the early `60s.
`Get your best stuff`
”Malcolm believed if it`s going to be bloody, so be it,” said Ossie Davis, the actor and friend who called Malcolm ”our shining black prince,”
in the eulogy he delivered over the fallen leader`s body in a Harlem church.
”He said (to white America), `You get your best stuff. I`ve got mine. Let`s go back into the alley and duke it out till we settle this thing,`
” explained Davis.
This earned Malcolm a reputation as a preacher of violence, though he was always careful to speak in terms of self-defense and retaliation.
His message, of course, ran counter to the Christian pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, which called for creative non- violence, Gandhian passive resistance. To paraphrase a biographer, the difference between King and Malcolm was that King spoke to the black man`s better angels while Malcolm spoke to the black man`s gut.
Malcolm also preached black pride, black self-reliance and pan-Africanism as tonics for what he saw as hundreds of years of brainwashing suffered by American blacks and black Africans, victims of slavery and colonialism. Towards the end, he also began to take an international perspective, seeing the troubles of colored peoples across the globe as connected. These are still positions any true Malcolmite would hold today.
Failure of integration
In his final months, his harsh critique of American society had evolved from the pernicious Black Muslim creed that all whites were ”devils” into a truer understanding that while many individual whites weren`t necessarily racist, the social system inherently was, encouraging those in the majority to act racist.
He foresaw the limitations of civil rights, of the King dream of a colorblind society, to change this. The relatively powerless were begging the relatively powerful to concede a fair share of power in the form of land, money and jobs. Whites, believing there was just too much to lose, would resist. Blacks still face such resistance. Witness recent reports of the greater difficulty blacks have getting mortgages, the attacks against affirmative action and the popularity of Louisiana gubernatorial candidate David Duke.
”That`s why I think some of the things Brother Malcolm was espousing, people are going to now,” says A. Peter Bailey, a free-lance writer who lives in Richmond, Va. He was the editor of the Blacklash, the official paper of the Organization of African American Unity, one of two groups Malcolm founded after leaving the Black Muslims. He was at the Audubon Ballroom the day Malcolm was shot.
”They see the failure of the integrationist, `We shall overcome,` `black and white together` (approach). It has failed to a great degree. So people are looking for something else, and that something else is the type of group unity, consciousness and empowerment that Brother Malcolm was talking about way back then.”
Maturing political vision
Muriel Feelings of Philadelphia, who also knew Malcolm and was in charge of cultural affairs for the Organization of African American Unity, suggests that his apparent rock-ribbed personal integrity remains attractive to people who have been disappointed by disclosure of shortcomings in the personal lives of leaders such as King. For a man who had been amoral in his younger days, Malcolm as a political leader was a virtual prude. In fact, he gave the philandering of Elijah Muhammad as a reason for his break with the Black Muslims.
”Notice how all these people who malign him . . . never say anything about his moral principles,” said Feelings. ”He was extremely principled. He was always counseling the brothers about fidelity in marriage.” He was married and had six daughters. Haley has said of him, ”I don`t know if I ever knew a man who was more tender to his wife and children.”
Malcolm was also seen as having political integrity because he never blunted his message for white audiences.
But Stanley Crouch, an often contrarian New York essayist who recently won a $30,000 Whiting award for his book ”Notes of a Hanging Judge,” says Malcolm`s integrity was ”based on never having to do anything. In other words, he`s kind of like a Jesse Jackson.
”He has the purity that any martyr who never had to deal with the complexities of real political sophistication can maintain. He never had to run a city. He never had to deal with the sanitation department. He never had to deal with different communities that had different and competing issues. Everything was very emblematic: us and them.”
Crouch lays a lot of the current youthful fascination with Malcolm at the feet of what he calls the ”political rock `n` roll factor.”
”A lot of people have this idea that the whole thing with the white rock `n` roll kids phenomenon is you buy a record so you can turn it up to 10 and drive your parents crazy. My feeling is Malcolm X is the political version for black kids of rock `n` roll.
”If you play, say, `Message to the Grass Roots` or `The Ballot or the Bullet` (Malcolm X speeches available on tape) and somebody says, `What are you doing listening to him?` you say, `Aw, you all don`t understand.` He`s kind of a high roll to the glittering form of alienation that American youth love.”
”Some people say: `What did he do? He didn`t do anything.` ” said Bailey. ”He did. He left a lot of minds changed, like mine. And that`s why his (message) has been sustained. Because he dealt with minds.”
Sitcom simplification
There is a feeling of faddishness to much of the current regard for Malcolm X, especially with Hollywood now claiming him. One recent night he appeared on not only ”Roc,” where he`s mainly a prop, but ”True Colors,”
another Fox sitcom, about an interracial family, a white and black ”Brady Bunch.” In the episode he was a main, if silent, character.
Fourteen-year old Lester, who`s black, goes through a racial identity crisis after reading the autobiography. He lashes out at his father, dubbing him an Uncle Tom, and at his white stepmother, stepsister and stepgrandmother, calling them devils, then retreats to the attic (which he names Little Africa), missing his own birthday party. Soon after he`s reconciled with his family, leaving his portrait of Malcolm in the attic. The end.
”My only regret of any kind is we didn`t really close the Malcolm X side of the story in the way we should have, which is difficult to do in 22 minutes,” said Michael Weithorn, the show`s creator and executive producer, who says some viewers complained that Malcolm`s philosophy was given short shrift.
”Malcolm`s image is quite serviceable and profitable for many people,”
says Paul Lee, director of Best Efforts Inc., a professional research service in Highland Park, Mich. Lee, 31, has studied and collected Malcolmana since he was 13. ”Unfortunately,” he said, ”Malcolm the man, the human being, has been lost in much of the euphoria over Malcolm the icon, the myth.”
