The Achievement of Malcolm X (MR)

[struggle4progress]

<snip> Malcolm was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925. While pregnant with him, his mother was attacked by Ku Klux Klansmen trying to force his family out of town because his father had spoken to a meeting of local blacks in support of Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” movement. Malcolm’s family moved to Lansing, Michigan where one of his earliest memories was seeing his home burnt down in 1929 by members of the Black Legion, a white fascist organization; later his father’s body was found hacked to death. <snip>

In his review of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) in The New York Review of Books, the radical journalist I. F. Stone, attempting to understand both the cognitive and unconscious aspects of Malcolm’s experience and the life changing character of his religious conversion, cites the pragmatist philosopher William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Uncomfortable with such sudden, even radicalizing, changes in outlook and personality, James saw them as character flaws, describing them as a “liability” and noting “sudden and complete change as one of most curious peculiarities.” But James also understood them as emancipating qualities; he quotes Martin Luther, “God is the God...of those who are brought to nothing...and his nature is...to save the very desperate and the damned” . Stone was fascinated by Malcolm’s religious conversion because it prefigured his later political conversion. <snip>

Finally, Malcolm described the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy as “chickens coming home to roost.” What he meant was that Kennedy’s killing was of a piece with societal violence spawned by institutionalized racism, but he was widely excoriated for his remark and was muzzled by Elijah Mohammed. This was followed by Malcolm’s break with the Nation of Islam and his establishment of an independent mosque in New York and a political group, the Organization of African American Unity. <snip>

... “They want you to be nonviolent here, but they want you to be very violent in South Vietnam.” <snip>

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0205simon.htm