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Authors: Michael Eric Dyson
First, for such a synthesis to have occurred, a clear definition of the potential connection of black nationalism and socialism was needed. The second need was for a discussion of the ideological similarities and differences between the varieties
of black nationalism and socialism to be joined. And the third need was for an explicit expression of the political, economic, and social interests that an allied black nationalism and socialism would mutually emphasize and embrace; the exploration of intellectual and political problems both would address; and an identification of the common enemies both would oppose. But given the existential and material matters that claimed his rapidly evaporating energy near the end of his life, Malcolm hardly had the wherewithal to perform such tasks.
Breitman also maintains that Malcolm’s final period marked his maturation as “a revolutionary—increasingly anti-capitalist and pro-socialist as well as antiimperialist,” labels that Breitman acknowledges Malcolm himself never adopted.
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Breitman reads Malcolm’s two trips to Africa as a time of expansive political reeducation, when Malcolm gained insight into the progressive possibilities of socialist revolutionary practice. After his return to the United States from his second trip, Malcolm felt, Breitman says, the need to express publicly his “own anti-capitalist and pro-socialist convictions,” which had “become quite strong by this time.”
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He cites interviews and speeches Malcolm made during this period to substantiate his claim, including Malcolm’s speaking at the Audubon Ballroom on December 20, 1964, of how almost “every one of the countries that has gotten independence has devised some kind of socialist system, and this is no accident.”
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Such a strategy, one that seeks to predict probable ideological and intellectual outcomes, may shed less light on Malcolm than is initially apparent. Breitman’s contention that Malcolm was becoming a socialist; Cleage’s that he was confused; T’shaka’s that he maintained a vigorous revolutionary black nationalist stance; and Goldman’s that he was improvising can all be proclaimed and documented with varying degrees of evidence and credibility.
This is not to suggest that one view is as good as the next or that they are somehow interchangeable, because we are uncertain about Malcolm’s final direction. It simply suggests that the nature of Malcolm’s thought during his last year was ambiguous and that making definite judgments about his direction is impossible. In this light, trajectories say more about the ideological commitments and intellectual viewpoints of interpreters than the objective evidence evoked to substantiate claims about Malcolm’s final views. The truth is that we have only a bare-bones outline of Malcolm’s emerging worldview. In “The Harlem ‘Hate-Gang’ Scare,” contained in
Malcolm X Speaks
(and delivered during what Breitman says was Malcolm’s final period), Malcolm says that during his travels he
noticed that most of the countries that had recently emerged into independence have turned away from the so-called capitalistic system in the direction of socialism. So out of curiosity, I can’t resist the temptation to do a little investigating wherever that particular philosophy happens to be in existence or an attempt is being made to bring it into existence.
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But at the end of his speech, in reply to a question about the kind of political and economic system that Malcolm wanted, he said, “I don’t know. But I’m flexible. . . . As was stated earlier, all of the countries that are emerging today from under the shackles of colonialism are turning toward socialism.”
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This tentativeness is characteristic of Malcolm’s speeches throughout the three collections that contain fragments of his evolving worldview, especially
Malcolm X
Speaks
and
By Any Means Necessary
. Even the speeches delivered during his final period showcase a common feature: Malcolm displays sympathy for and interest in socialist philosophy without committing himself to its practice as a means of achieving liberation for African-Americans.
Malcolm confessed in the “Young Socialist” interview, “I still would be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of the black people in this country.”
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Of course, as Breitman implies, Malcolm’s self-description is not the only basis for drawing conclusions about his philosophy. But even empirical investigation fails to yield conclusive evidence of his social philosophy because it was in such radical transformation and flux.
Malcolm was indeed improvising from the chords of an expanded black nationalist rhetoric and an embryonic socialist criticism of capitalist civilization. Although Breitman has been maligned as a latecomer seeking to foist his ideological beliefs onto Malcolm’s last days, there is precedence for Trotskyist attempts to address the problem of racism and black nationalism in the United States.
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And the venerable black historian C. L. R. James became a Marxist, in part, by reading Trotsky’s
History of the Russian Revolution
.
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Although Malcolm consistently denounced capitalism, he did not live long enough to embrace socialism.
The weakness of such an interpretive trajectory, then, is that it tends to demand a certainty about Malcolm that is clearly unachievable. An ideological trajectory of Malcolm’s later moments is forced to bring coherence to fragments of political speech more than systematic social thought, to exaggerate moments of highly suggestive ideological gestures rather than substantive political activity, and to focus on slices of organizational breakthrough instead of the complex integrative activity envisioned for the OAAU. In the end, it is apparent that Malcolm was rapidly revising his worldview as he experienced a personal, religious, and ideological conversion that was still transpiring when he met his brutal death.
But the thrust behind such speculation is often a focus on how Malcolm attempted to shape the cultural forces of his time through the agency of moral rhetoric, social criticism, and prophetic declaration. Just as important, but often neglected in such analyses, is an account of how Malcolm was shaped by his times, of how he was the peculiar and particular creation of black cultural forces and American social practices. Armed with such an understanding, the focus on Malcolm’s last year would be shifted away from simply determining what he said and did to determining how we should use his example to respond to our current cultural and national crises.
The literature on Malcolm X is certain to swell with the renewed cultural interest in his life. And although the particular incarnations of the approaches I have detailed may fade from intellectual view or cultural vogue, the ideological commitments, methodological procedures, historical perspectives, cultural assumptions, religious beliefs, and philosophical presuppositions they employ will most assuredly be expressed in one form or another in future treatments of his life and thought.
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The canonization of Malcolm will undoubtedly continue. Romantic and celebratory treatments of his social action and revolutionary rhetoric will issue forth from black intellectuals, activists, and cultural artists. This is especially true in the independent black press, where Malcolm’s memory has been heroically kept alive in books, pamphlets, and magazines, even as his presence receded from wide visibility and celebration before his recent revival. The independent black press preserves and circulates cultural beliefs, intellectual arguments, and racial wisdom among black folk away from the omniscient eye and acceptance of mainstream publishing.
Shahrazad Ali’s controversial book,
The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the
Blackwoman
, for instance, sold hundreds of thousands of copies without receiving much attention from mainstream newspapers, magazines, or journals. The mainstream press often overlooked Malcolm’s contributions, but black publications like
The Amsterdam New
s,
The Afro-American
,
Bilalian News
, and
Black News
scrupulously recorded his public career. The black independent press, in alliance with various black nationalist groups throughout the country that have maintained Malcolm’s heroic stature from the time of his assassination, is a crucial force in Malcolm’s ongoing celebration. Such treatments of his legacy will most likely be employed by these groups to actively resist Malcolm’s symbolic manipulation by what they understand to be the forces of cultural racism, state domination, commodification, and especially religious brainwashing that Malcolm detested and opposed.
The enormous influence of the culture of hip-hop on black youth, coupled with the resurgence of black cultural nationalism among powerful subcultures within the African-American community, suggests that Malcolm’s heroic example will continue to be emulated and proclaimed. The stakes of hero worship are raised when considering the resurgent racism of American society and the increased personal and social desperation among the constituency for whom Malcolm eloquently argued, the black ghetto poor. Heightened racial antipathy in cultural institutions such as universities and businesses, and escalated attacks on black cultural figures, ideas, and movements, precipitate the celebration of figures who embody the strongest gestures of resistance to white racism.
Moreover, the destructive effects of gentrification, economic crisis, and social dislocation; the expansion of corporate privilege; and the development of underground political economies—along with the violence and criminality they breed—means that Malcolm is even more a precious symbol of the self-discipline,
self-esteem, and moral leadership necessary to combat the spiritual and economic corruption of poor black communities. With their efforts to situate him among the truly great in African-American history, hero worshipers’ discussion of Malcolm will be of important but limited value in critically investigating his revolutionary speech, thought, and action.
Malcolm’s weaknesses and strengths must be rigorously examined if we are to have a richly hued picture of one of the most intriguing figures of twentiethcentury public life in the United States. Malcolm’s past is not yet settled, savaged as it has been in the embrace of unprincipled denigrators while being equally smothered in the well-meaning grip of romantic and uncritical loyalists. He deserves what every towering and seminal figure in history should receive: comprehensive and critical examination of what he said and did so that his life and thought will be useful to future generations of peoples in struggle around the globe.
Martin Luther King, Jr., is, perhaps, the greatest influence on my life outside of the
mentorship of my beloved pastor, the late, great rhetorical genius, theological giant, and
political mystic, the Rev. Dr. Frederick George Sampson II. I was nine years old when
King was murdered in Memphis, and though I had never heard of him, his death
affected me profoundly. I scrounged around for every personal recollection about him I
could find, sent off for recordings of his most famous speeches, and read every article and
book about him that the library contained. This chapter from
Reflecting Black
is
among my first published attempts to wrestle with the intellectual and moral legacy, as
well as the clear but complex social heroism, of a man I consider the greatest American in
our nation’s history.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NATIONAL HOLIDAY to honor the life and achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a reason for critical celebration. Only the second American and the first African-American to be feted with this singular honor, the celebration of King’s birthday is an occasion of national, religious, and racial significance. It acknowledges that King was the supreme embodiment of American citizenship and political engagement, the highest manifestation of the American religious genius, and the richest expression of the multifaceted character of the black experience in America.
On the other hand, the King birthday celebration also presents the danger of losing the challenging and uncomfortable dimensions of King’s thought and life by romanticizing his career. The nature and scope of King’s accomplishments, which center in nothing short of a specific revolution in how black people live and are perceived in American culture, inevitably invite historic embellishment and social myth. But neither a puerile romanticization of King as Safe Negro nor a caricatured mythologization of King as Great American Hero will do. King’s life was too complex, his achievements too profound, and his thinking too provocative to warrant such naive responses. We must transcend such unrealistic assessments of King and concentrate on the substantive contributions of his life and thought.
An especially helpful and illuminating way to view King’s life and justly assess his accomplishments is through a reflection upon the ethics and politics of hero celebration. This context permits us to examine the beneficial and harmful uses to which the King holiday may be put in creating or preserving images of King that avoid disturbing history or dodge painful truth. This context also provides a healthy framework in addressing recent revelations about King’s character, including charges of plagiarism and womanizing. In this chapter, I will examine some characteristics of heroism, exploring the ways it makes sense to call King a hero, treat two central tensions that arise in asserting that King’s heroism is ambiguous, and briefly suggest that King’s birthday is indeed worth celebrating.
In my brief examination of some characteristics of heroism, I do not intend to provide a theory of heroism or trace its varied genealogy. Rather, I will discuss heroism within the limits of existing understandings of the concept and then seek to apply them to King in analyzing the effects of hero worship on the ideals for which he gave his life.
In his work on George Washington, cultural critic and historian Gary Wills reminds us that hero worship “is a hard assignment for many people today—one they think they cannot fulfill, or should not. Hero worship is elitist. It reduces the science of history to mere biography, if not to anecdote. It suggests that individual talent is a more important force than large economic processes. . . . The attitude of many in our time is captured by Bertolt Brecht’s
Galileo,
who says: ‘Unhappy the land that needs a hero.’”
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While Wills’s larger point about the suspicion of many Americans toward hero worship may be valid, explaining the diminished field of activity over which heroism is spread, it is equally true that American hero worship is presently focused in two social spheres: competitive sports and the military.
Contemporary forms of American heroism are often displayed within the context of sports competition, where individual or team exploits are lauded for embodying particular virtues, skills, and mastery. For example, basketball heroes are often said to embody the virtues of rigorous habits of practice, expert skills of physical dexterity, and mastery of the overall complexity of their craft necessary to perform excellently and unselfishly in a team sport.
Military heroes, as well, figure prominently in the comparatively constricted sphere of heroism celebrated today. America’s recent war in the Gulf shows how eager Americans are for clear embodiments of American values of national patriotism, personal valor, and sacrifice for the common good. That Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell are instant heroes testifies to the peculiar hunger of many Americans for reassurance about the integrity and rightness of this country’s values and ways of life.
Perhaps this last point clearly demonstrates a telling feature of heroism: it is intimately related to ideals felt to be worthy of support because they say something important about national self-identity. Part of the difficulty in deciding upon a genuine and truly national hero is connected to the increasing diversity of American culture. Because of the bewildering pluralization of perspectives about what it means to be an American, growing dispute about what goods are worthy of pursuit, strong disagreement about how to measure various forms of moral and social excellence, and the unraveling of a unified concept of the public good, the virtuous as well as the heroic is subject to radical revision and heated debate. Occasionally, however, a person or movement so decisively captures the nation’s imagination that a variety of Americans come to believe that their truest selves and deepest beliefs are embodied in the vision and life of that figure or movement. Such was the case for many Americans in relation to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement.
The civil rights movement provided a social context, cultural framework, and racial worldview for blacks and other similarly excluded Americans to argue for inclusion within the larger circle of privilege, rights, and status from which they had been socially and legally barred. Civil rights leaders and activists built upon the symbol systems of black religion, the resonant traditions of radical protest within black culture, and a progressive understanding of liberal democracy in articulating demands for equality, justice, and freedom. Because of this potent mix of elements, the civil rights movement had the advantage of appealing to specific values nourished within a black cultural cosmos, while linking them to the iconic structures, symbolic worldviews, and heroic values that undergirded much of American society. As symbolic representative of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., embodied the virtues of black religious culture and black traditions of protest, as well as the best impulses of Western liberal democracy.
On the other hand, King wove into his rhetorical and strategic tapestry threads of prophetic religious utterance and radical social criticism that sorely tested the limits of liberal tolerance of forces of fundamental social challenge and transformation. The fact that some state and national politicians who represent the forces of stasis and regression that King opposed are now in part responsible for presiding over the public rituals to commemorate his memory only attests to the ambiguous character of the heroism King embodies.
King figures prominently in a distinct line of social prophets whose ideals can sometimes only be truly honored by their remaining, in significant measure, outside of the totemic processes of official acceptance, which cloak their status as prophetic characters whose memory judges American moral practice. The ambiguity that surrounds King’s memory is healthy because it creates suggestive tensions within the developing edifice of King worship and draws attention to those troubling aspects of King’s thought that have the potential to shatter the rigid constructions of official truth.
In reflecting on the ambiguity of King’s heroism, it will be helpful to discuss some characteristics of heroism and explore how King can be usefully understood as an American hero. A heroic figure undeniably possesses the ability to substantially alter and influence the course of events because of her mix of personal traits, skills, talents, and visions. This definition, of course, rests on the distinction that
Sidney Hook made between two types of persons who qualify as potential heroes. After defining the hero in history as “the individual to whom we can justifiably attribute preponderant influence in determining an issue or even whose consequences would have been profoundly different if he had not acted as he did,” Hook describes the difference in “eventful” persons and “event-making” persons.
2
The
eventful
man in history is any man whose actions influenced subsequent developments along a quite different course than would have been followed if these actions had not been taken. The
event-making
man is an eventful man whose actions are the consequences of outstanding capacities of intelligence, will, and character rather than of accidents of position. This distinction tries to do justice to the general belief that a hero is great not merely in virtue of what he does but in virtue of what he is.
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By Hook’s measure, King certainly qualifies as a genuine hero, as someone whose combination of talents, intelligence, and vision considerably altered the course of events. This does not mean that King was the only person in the civil rights movement who possessed high degrees of intelligence, discipline, and skill. Numerous participants in the civil rights movement exhibited extraordinary leadership ability and qualities, ranging from the ingenious strategic skills of Bayard Rustin, the penetrating philosophic skills of Bob Moses, the uncanny organizational skills and folk wisdom of Fannie Lou Hamer, and the creative nonviolent theory of James Lawson.
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While others possessed sharper skills than King in particular areas, King possessed a unique ability to inspire masses and maintain the loyalty of an impressive host of talented men and women. Perhaps this was best expressed by Benjamin Mays when he wrote:
It may be that only one man in ten million could have led the Montgomery boycott without that city exploding into one of the worst race riots in history. . . . If the Montgomery Improvement Association had chosen a person other than King to communicate the Negroes’ grievances to the city fathers, Dr. King might have gone through life as a successful Baptist preacher and no more. His rare ability to lead and inspire the classes as well as the masses, in a crusade for social justice, might never have been called forth.
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Furthermore, it may be argued that the force of King’s personality, intelligence, and gifts helped create the conditions for social change in regard to race relations. King thus exhibited what Hook meant in a further clarification of the eventful versus the event-making person.
The event-making man, on the other hand, finds a fork in the historical road, but he also helps, so to speak, to create it. He increases the odds of success for the alternative he chooses by virtue of the extraordinary qualities he brings to
bear to realize it. At the very least, he must . . . display exceptional qualities of leadership. It is the hero as event-making man who leaves the positive imprint of his personality upon history—an imprint that is still observable after he has disappeared from the scene.
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As Lerone Bennett observed, King’s ability to create the conditions that led to social transformation was clearly demonstrated in Birmingham, Alabama, where it is widely believed that the civil rights movement gained its greatest symbolic victory because of a highly publicized clash with Sheriff Bull Connors’s violent tactics to repel the civil rights demonstrators.
No leader, of course, can create an event the time is not prepared for. But the genius of the great leader lies precisely in his apprehension of what the times require and in carrying through in the teeth of great opposition an act that changes the times. In Birmingham, King approached that kind of greatness, creating the occasion of the “Negro Revolution” by an act almost everyone said was ill-timed and ill-chosen. Birmingham . . . was cbosen, not stumbled upon. It was created by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and how much he would probably have to pay to get it.
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King was certainly a figure who often precipitated change through conscious, decisive action.
The hero, particularly the one who advances an agenda of trenchant social criticism and sweeping ethical reform, also possesses the ability to create a situation in which it is untenable to remain unchanged or unchallenged by the hero’s vision of how things should be. The hero, in short compass, forces us to make moral choices. As James Hanigan says:
One thing that makes the hero’s course a precarious one is that the very nature of the hero’s role in history requires the more ordinary among us to make choices. It is not simply a matter for us of liking or disliking, of admiring or ignoring the hero. Rather, we are forced to choose for or against the hero, for or against the vision, or dream, or message, or course of action the hero proposes to us. One hallmark of the hero’s authenticity as a hero is precisely that he or she forces us to choose; we cannot remain indifferent to this presence among us, even if we would. For not to be with the hero is automatically to be against him or her.
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