Malcolm X was murdered on this day in 1965 when I was five.
I remember hearing only that he was murdered “by his own people,” so I grew up thinking this was the reason it had less impact than the murder of MLK, Jr. a few years later. When I read his autobiography, I concluded simply that his murder was the result of a turf war. But I was never really clear about the whole situation until last month when I listened to the audiobook of 2020 National Book Award Winner The Dead Are Arising The Life of Malcolm X by Pulitzer Prize winner Les Payne, researched and completed after his death by his daughter, Tamara Payne.
https://www.nationalbook.org/books/the-dead-are-arising-the-life-of-malcolm-x/
Throughout my life, I have read dozens of the books that show up on what are now called Black Lives Matter reading lists. And this is the first to fully illuminate some of the questions I did not even realize I have had for over fifty years. Many of its details had been covered elsewhere, but I am grateful to the book for its thorough history of the Black American struggle in general and especially the Nation of Islam which I had never researched despite having had an up close and personal experience!
In 1994, Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam (NOI) was on a speaking tour and coming to Palm Beach County, Florida where I lived. Despite being massively pregnant with my third child, I wanted to go. Farrakhan himself had complained that his media coverage resembled Name That Tune where “they only give one note,” and I wanted to hear the entire song. Back then, I wondered if he was an up and coming force and I wanted to hear his whole spiel and not just selected sound bites.
My then-husband was furious. He imagined his pregnant wife being the only petite white woman in a sea of angry Black men. The compromise was that I attended with three men one of whom was a professional private investigator and body guard who provided us with emergency training and flack jackets. (I do wish I had a picture!) What we didn’t know until we got there was that every attendee was put through metal detectors and bag searches. As it turned out, the audience was a more mixed gender group than the 3 to 1 ratio I arrived among. It was a Saturday night and much of the audience were Black couples on dates. It was a mostly happy, charming and exquisitely dressed crowd. We were greeted with simple curiosity not hostility.
Shortly after this outing, in response to a member of the local Jewish community who was considering creating an event to “Dialogue with Louis Farrakhan,” I wrote the following, all of which I feel holds true today.
“In my strong, well-researched opinion, Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam do more good than harm when left to themselves without national media coverage of the nonsense he spews. He has built a substantial coalition of support among the African American community based on his anti-drug, anti-crime and pro-family platforms. For lack of a better spokesman, many Black men have joined his ranks for the betterment of their communities. Since the demise of the Arsenio Hall Show, he has no great media platform, so I say leave him where he is doing some good.
He is not a man with whom you can create a constructive dialogue. He is an orator. He can be insidious because he deftly mixes the truths that his audience supports with the distortions created by his paranoid misinterpretations of history. I have seen in person how he manipulates an audience by cleverly mixing his convoluted logic with legitimate truths, laugh lines and biblical and Koranic references. That evening, I heard the expected hostile rhetoric aimed at whites, the media, Jews and Warner Brothers Studios (makers of the movie Malcolm X.) But I was most chilled by the parts of his presentation I had never heard before and wondered if anti-semitism gets all the media play because of the abundance of Jews in the press corp? The most uproarious laughter of the evening was prompted by his riff explaining that ‘the bible tells us to subdue and master the earth and since the American Indians just ran around chasing buffalo, by the law of use they forfeited their right to the land and the white man took it away.’ Please don’t offer him a platform to play his tune!”
Farrakhan was not given that local platform and soon faded from the national spotlight, although he never fully disappeared.
The difference between 1994 and now, as constantly proven by the last president, is that once given a pulpit, even a proven compulsive liar is even harder to de-fang. There are just too many media outlets to truly silence anyone these days. In the middle of the pandemic, last summer, Farrakhan gave a speech that had well over a million views on YouTube.
Prior to listening to the new audiobook, the best recent sense I had of why NOI and Farrakhan remain popular was this response to controversy over his connections with people in the Women’s March movement. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/nation-of-islam/555332/ The explanation for their ongoing cache in the Black community comes down to NOI members filling a void on the ground in communities downtrodden by systemic racism and overpolicing while Farrakhan uses the media to stir the pot.
The life and murder of Malcolm X and the best and worst of the NOI and Farrakhan provide the same cautionary tales. Malcolm X split from and was murdered by the NOI for trying to forge a middle path. The intersections of racial issues and all aspects of American identity and politics, now as then, share the problematic through line of the divide and conquer themes of religion, money, power and ownership.
It’s both comforting and devastating to finally understand something that has niggled at me for 56 years.
Rest In Power Malcolm, et al!
