Part I
Malcolm and the American State
For maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and to prevent wasted effort, long-range goals are being set.
1. Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real “Mau” in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.
2. Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammad is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. . . .
—FBI memorandum, March 4, 1968.
Malcolm X’s political and historical significance increased after his assassination. His public statements as a minister and political leader reached mainly a black urban audience while millions of every race read his posthumously published autobiography and speeches. He gained prominence as a caustic critic of civil rights leaders, but by the end of his life his evolving ideas had converged with the militant racial consciousness stimulated by the civil rights protest movement. During his public career, he was affiliated with one of the smaller African-American religious groups and never participated in the major national meetings of black leaders; yet he is remembered as one of the most influential political leaders of modern times. To some admirers he became an icon—a heroic, almost mythological, figure whose arousing orations have become indisputable political wisdom. To detractors he remains a dangerous symbol of black separatism and anti-white demagoguery. One of the most widely discussed and controversial African-American leaders of this century, Malcolm remains insufficiently understood, the subject of remarkably little serious biographical and historical research.
This edition of Malcolm X’s FBI surveillance file seeks to retify a particularly serious deficiency in previous writings on Malcolm—that is, the failure to study him within the context of American racial politics during the 1950s and 1960s. The surveillance reports document Malcolm’s life from his final years in prison during the early 1950s through the time of his assassination in February 1965. They trace Malcolm’s movement from the narrowly religious perspective of the Nation of Islam toward a broader Pan-Africanist worldview. The file illuminates his religious and political world suggesting the extent to which his ideas and activities were perceived as threatening to the American state. When examined in the context of the FBI’s overall surveillance of black militancy, Malcolm’s FBI file clarifies his role in modern African-American politics.
Although some writings about Malcolm X have referred to the FBI file, most biographical accounts have not placed him within the framework of national or international politics. Instead, Malcolm has usually been portrayed as an exceptional individual whose unique experiences inspired his distinctive ideas, as a person affecting African-American politics rather than being affected by the constantly changing political environment.1 Even Malcolm’s relationships and activities within the Nation of Islam remained shrouded in rumor and mystery, despite the crucial role that organization played in Malcolm’s ideological development.
Moreover, research regarding Malcolm remains largely uninformed by the outpouring of scholarly studies of his main ideological competitor, Martin Luther King, Jr. Although King, like Malcolm, was a remarkable orator, recent writings on him have placed King within the wider framework of African-American political and religious history.2 Similarly broadly focused studies are needed in order to understand Malcolm’s evolving role in a multifaceted African-American freedom struggle that shaped his ideas even as he influenced its direction. Malcolm and King were articulate advocates of distinctive philosophies and political strategies, but neither leader’s historical significance can be equated solely with the emotive power of his words. Both Malcolm and King sought to provide guidance for a mass struggle that generated its own ideas and leaders. Rather than simply followers of Malcolm or King, the activists, organizers, and community leaders who constituted the grass roots of the freedom struggle magnified both leaders’ political impact.
Instead of extensive research based on sources produced at the time, popular and scholarly understanding of Malcolm X derives largely from published texts of his speeches and from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a vivid and enlightening, yet undocumented, narrative prepared by Alex Haley. Haley shaped his subject’s recollections into a moving account of Malcolm’s transformation from abused child to ward to criminal to religious proselytizer to radical Pan-Africanist. The autobiography is an American literary classic that has enriched the lives of many readers. It elicits empathy, revealing the world through its narrator’s eyes, but it is less successful as social and political history. Malcolm’s political ideas become conclusions drawn solely from his personal experiences. His changing attitudes toward whites becomes the central focus of the narrative, while his political influences, contacts, and activities are reduced to subthemes. All serious study of Malcolm X must begin with the Autobiography;unfortunately, many works on him do not extend beyond the biographical and historical information provided by Malcolm himself.3
1. Social Origins of Malcolm’s Nationalism
Like most autobiographies, Malcolm’s account of his life was intended to explain how he came to enlightenment and fulfillment, but his narrative is incomplete and misleading. Malcolm’s early experiences limited his subsequent political choices but do not explain them. Malcolm’s conversion to Elijah Muhammad’s doctrines was a rejection rather than a culmination of his previous life. He repudiated the Christian teachings of his childhood and affiliated with a religious organization he had never previously encountered. He insisted that the major national civil rights groups and their middle-class leaders did not represent needs of the black masses, but, before joining the Nation of Islam, he had never been affiliated with any African-American advancement organization. Despite his fervent advocacy of racial unity and institutional development, he was, ironically, an outsider with respect to the most important African-American institutions. His life was spent mainly as an angry, though insightful, critic, hurling challenges from the margins of black institutional life. With some justification, he saw himself as a leader uniquely capable of arousing discontented African Americans that leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., could not reach. During most of his life, however, his status as an outsider prevented him from having the type of impact on the direction of African-American politics that he would achieve as a marbyr.
Malcolm’s black nationalism derived, ironically, from his exclusion from the African-American social and cultural mainstream. Although his parents, Louise and Earl Little, were organizers for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), his childhood experiences did not connect him to the enduring institutions of black life. Rather than memories of a nurturing African-American household, Malcolm’s autobiography emphasized the white forces that destroyed his family. He remembered racist whites forcing his family to move from Omaha, Nebraska, where he was born in 1925, to Milwaukee, then to Lansing, Michigan, and finally to a home outside East Lansing. Malcolm gives few indications that he was involved as a child in African-American social life. Malcolm remembered his father as an embittered itinerant preacher who, despite his Garveyite sympathies, displayed and infused Malcolm with ambivalent racial attitudes. “I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was,” Malcolm surmised, “he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man’s brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child.” Watching his father deliver sermons, Malcolm was “confused and amazed” by his emotional preaching and acquired “very little respect for most people who represented religion.” Taken to UNIA meetings by his father, Malcolm was unmoved by the message of racial pride. “My image of Africa, at that time, was of naked savages, cannibals, monkeys and tigers and steaming jungles.” Malcolm felt that his mother treated him more harshly than his siblings because his light complexion stirred memories of her own mixed-race ancestry. Neither of Malcolm’s parents were able to shelter him or provide him with dependable resources to deal with the racism of the surrounding world. When Earl Little was killed in 1931, six-year-old Malcolm believed rumors that “the white Black Legion had finally gotten him.”4 Afterwards, Malcolm’s family life rapidly deteriorated. His mother resented her dependence on welfare assistance. As she progressively lost her sanity, Malcolm became more and more incorrigible. At the age of thirteen, Malcolm was removed from his family entirely and sent to reform school.
In contrast to Malcolm’s experience of a disintegrating family life and social marginalization, Martin Luther King, Jr., his principle ideological adversary, spent his childhood within a stable, nurturing African-American family and community.5 “My parents have always lived together very intimately, and I can hardly remember a time that they ever argued,” King once recalled. Growing up in the house his grandfather, A. D. Williams, had purchased two decades before King’s birth in 1929, the family’s roots in the Atlanta black community extended to the 1890s, when Williams had become pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church. After Williams’s death in 1931, Martin Luther King, Sr. became Ebenezer’s Pastor. The church became King, Jr.’s “second home”; Sunday School was where he met his best friends and developed “the capacity for getting along with people.” Although he, like Malcolm, came to dislike the emotionalism of black religious practice, he developed a lifelong attachment to the black Baptist church and an enduring admiration for his father’s “noble example.”6 King and his family developed strong ties to Atlanta’s black institutions, including businesses, civil rights organizations, and colleges such as Morehouse and Spelman. While Malcolm’s family experienced economic hardship during the Depression years, King “never experienced the feeling of not having the basic necessities of life.” Both Malcolm and King acquired antielitist attitudes during their childhoods, but the former resented middle-class blacks while the latter acquired a sense of noblesse oblige. As a teenager, Malcolm ended his schooling after the eighth grade when he was discouraged from aspiring to be a professional. King completed doctoral studies and saw education as a route to personal success and a career of service to the black community.
Both Malcolm and King recalled having anti-white attitudes during their formative years, but white people occupied a much more central place for Malcolm as a young man than for King, who had little contact with whites as a youth. Malcolm’s evolving attitudes toward whites were complex and volatile, serving as the underlying theme of his autobiography. As a child, his mother took him to meetings of white Seventh Day Adventists, whom Malcolm recalled as “the friendliest white people I had ever seen.”7His account of his youth includes both descriptions of encounters with white racism and indications of his own ambivalent feelings toward whites. Often the only black in his class, he refrained from participating in school social life. He admitted nevertheless that he secretly “went for some of the white girls, and some of them went for me, too.” Elected president of his eighth grade school class, he concedes that he was proud: “In fact, by then, I didn’t really have much feeling about being a Negro, because I was trying so hard, in every way I could, to be white.”8 After moving to Boston in 1941, Malcolm soon straightened his hair in order to look more “white,” and brushed off a black, middle-class woman named Laura in order to pursue his white lover. King, for his part, reacted to a childhood rejection by a white friend by determining to “hate every white person” and thereafter had little social contact with whites until his college years.9 Spending his formative years as part of an African-American elite, he resented white racial prejudice but was rarely personally affected by it. His racial identity most often brought him rewards rather than punishments.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Malcolm’s conversion to the Islamic teachings of Elijah Muhammad involved a rejection of his past that would have been inconceivable for King. While in prison for robbery, Malcolm repudiated his earlier life and symbolized his rebirth in the Nation of Islam by abandoning his surname. He joined an organization that had not been part of his environment as a youth and acquired a new past through the racial mythology of the Nation. Malcolm’s acceptance of the idea that he was a member of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in North America made his previous life—and indeed all the postenslavement experiences of African-Americans—only a negative reference point for his new identity. For Malcolm, black adherence to Christianity simply reflected the fact that African-Americans had been brainwashed and separated from their true history. During his adult life, Malcolm would increase his knowledge of the African-American historical literature, but he also popularized the historical myths of Elijah Muhammad, which replaced the complexities of African-American history with tales of the “Asian Black Nation” and “the tribe of Shabazz.”10 Unlike the main African-American Christian churches, the Nation of Islam did not have deep historical roots in the African-American experience, and its development was largely isolated from that of other black religious institutions. Malcolm learned from Elijah Muhammad that African-American history was not a long struggle toward freedom but simply the final stage of the decline of the “Black Man,” who had once ruled the earth. The Nation’s version of the past was not based on historical research, but it appealed to blacks such as Malcolm who did not identify with the black Christian churches that were more rooted in African-American history.
In contrast to Malcolm’s negation of his past, King placed great importance on his family’s deep roots in the Baptist church and the Atlanta black community. King’s great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had been Baptist ministers. He saw African-American history and the history of his own family as a successful climb from enslavement to freedom and from poverty to affluence. King’s adult life as a religious leader was built upon the foundation of his childhood experiences and his ties to the African-American Baptist church and to black leadership networks. While Malcolm became a critical outsider urging blacks to reject mainstream institutions, King became a critical insider seeking to transform those institutions.
Malcolm’s and King’s strengths and limitations as leaders were related to their ability to mobilize African-American institutions on behalf of the racial goals they sought. Malcolm’s political evolution demonstrates the extent to which black nationalism had become marginalized since its nineteenth-century heyday. While nineteenth-century nationalists Martin Delany and Alexander Crummell were products of mainstream black institutions, Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad were outsiders—the former an alien who came to the United States only as an adult, the latter a Muslim in a Christian-dominated culture. Garvey was able to gain a massive following and build an institutional base in the United States despite the opposition of mainstream leaders, but he could never supplant them or their institutions. Elijah Muhammad similarly attacked the “so-called Negro” leaders and attracted a sizable following; yet he could never effectively challenge the dominance of the national civil rights groups.
Only toward the end of his life did Malcolm begin to move beyond his role as a representative of Elijah Muhammad. As he became restive under Muhammad’s cautious leadership, he strengthened his ties with black activists who were affiliated with the major black churches and civil rights groups. He continued to criticize the national civil rights leaders, but he recognized that the civil rights movement contained militant factions with which he could work. Malcolm continued to call himself a black nationalist, but the term was no longer sufficient to describe his ideology. Advocacy of the goal of establishing a black-controlled nation no longer detracted from the achievement of goals that were more attainable in the short term. After his break with the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm denned black nationalism as black control of the political and economic life of black communities, as racial pride and self-reliance. Malcolm also insisted that he was “giving a new interpretation to the civil-rights struggle, an interpretation that will enable [black nationalists] to come into it, take part in it.”11
Malcolm’s new interpretation was consistent with the evolving ideas of many of the militant activists who had participated in the civil rights struggle, because it suggested a strategy that was in accord with their own experiences. Just as nationalism was an insufficient term to describe ideas that are only tenuously connected with the long-term goal of establishing a black nation, so too was integrationism inadequate to describe the increasingly far-reaching objectives of the activists who spearheaded the civil rights protests of the 1960s. By the time of Malcolm’s break with Elijah Muhammad, many of these activists saw themselves as participants in a freedom struggle seeking rights that extended beyond civil rights legislation or even the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution. Such activists also recognized that future black progress would require the transformation of the African-American institutions that had made possible previous gains. Rather than simply a movement toward the assimilation of white cultural values, the struggle was becoming by 1964 a movement toward the political, economic, and cultural transformation of white and black America.
Many black leaders of the mid-1960s continued to insist that black nationalism and integrationism represented mutual exclusive, antagonistic ideologies, but Malcolm and King were among those who began to recognize the limitations of their perspectives. Malcolm, even more than King, was willing to modify his views in order to bridge the nationalist-integrationist ideological conflict. As he did so, his black nationalism became less strident but also more potent. The FBI closely observed the shift in his ideological orientation and increasingly saw him an important element in an upsurge of racial militancy.
2. Malcolm and the FBI
Malcolm X’s affiliation with Elijah Muhammad attracted the attention of the FBI, but during the 1950s and early 1960s, the federal government did not view the Nation of Islam or black nationalists in general as major threats to national security. Instead, during the Cold War era, leftist internal subversion was the nation’s major concern. Malcolm’s advocacy of racial separatism and his anti-white public statements alarmed many white Americans who became aware of them, but, until the late 1950s, most government officials who knew of him considered him a minor cult figure. Even during the early 1960s, Malcolm’s black nationalist rhetoric did not cause much concern among whites, because it was not seen as an major element within African-American politics. As late as 1966, a Newsweek opinion survey indicated that most blacks supported the civil rights organizations and their leaders, and only five percent of the respondents indicated approval of black nationalism. A similarly small proportion of blacks expressed positive opinions about the “Black Muslims” and Elijah Muhammad. The large proportion of “not sure” responses regarding the Nation of Islam reflected wide-spread uncertainty among blacks regarding its policies.12 After a decade of civil rights protests, black militancy was still commonly defined as approval for confrontational tactics rather than separatists strategies. In 1967, when the FBI officially extended its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) beyond leftist organizations to include “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups,” the Nation of Islam was targeted but so too were King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.13 The FBI’s increasing concern about black nationalist agitation was clearly a result of the increasing militancy, during the first half of the 1960s, of blacks who were not black nationalists. Malcolm’s significance as a subversive threat reflected his gradual movement from the margins of African-American politics toward active support for militant grass roots activism.
Nevertheless, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI had exhibited intense hostility to all forms of African-American militancy, including the politically inert black nationalism of the 1950s. Indeed, David Garrow, in his study of the FBI’s vendetta against King, has argued that the Bureau’s essential “social role has been not to attack critics, Communists, blacks, or leftists per se, but to repress all perceived threats to the dominant, status-quo-oriented political culture.”14 Hoover’s intense racism, however, insured that he would use his power with special vigor against black militancy. Hoover’s career in the Justice Department began during the era of “New Negro” militancy after World War I, and, as an official of the General Intelligence Division and the Bureau of Investigation, he soon became involved in counterintelligence efforts aimed at Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph.15 As head of the FBI, he intensified the Bureau’s program of domestic surveillance during the 1930s and 1940s. During this period, the United States government became far more concerned about communist subversion than about waning black nationalist activism and the FBI’s continuing interest in the minuscule Nation of Islam was largely a result of the group’s opposition to military service. This surveillance did not result from a belief among most government officials that the Nation was subversive but from the determination of Hoover to maintain surveillance of a large number of suspect groups, even without explicit authority from his nominal superiors in the Justice Department.
During the early years of Malcolm’s ministry the federal government’s policies toward the Nation of Islam were inconsistent. While Hoover and other Bureau officials saw the group as one of many which advocated black militancy, other officials of the Justice Department were not convinced that the Muslims posed a serious threat. The 1975 Church Committee hearings on intelligence activities revealed extended discussions between the FBI and Justice Department officials regarding the Nation of Islam. According to testimony before the committee, the Bureau suggested in 1952 that the Muslims be added to the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. The Department of Justice concluded the following year that the Nation of Islam would not be prosecuted under the anticommunist Smith Act but decided that “the group would under certain circumstances represent a serious threat to our national security.” In 1954, government officials decided against prosecuting the Nation for conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act. Afterwards, the Justice Department approved continuing wiretap surveillance of Elijah Muhammad while also responding inconclusively to the FBI’s requests for advice on whether Muslim activists should remain on the Security Index. In 1959, Hoover’s nominal superiors refused to support his request to prosecute the NOI or place it on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. The following year, the Justice Department advised Hoover that Black Muslims could not be automatically barred from government employment but gave the FBI authority to continue its investigation of the Nation of Islam. During the 1960s, Justice Department officials continued to questioned whether Elijah Muhammad’s prophesies actually constituted national security threats even while refraining from ordering the FBI to discontinue its investigation. Without explicit instructions from Justice Department officials, the FBI continued to compile information on the Muslims until after the death of Elijah Muhammad.16
During his public life Malcolm gradually shifted his nationalist perspective from Elijah Muhammad’s politically inert racial separatism towards a Pan-African perspective that brought him closer to the increasingly militant African-American political mainstream. While a loyal spokesperson for Elijah Muhammad, he had advocated a form of nationalism that aroused the emotions of blacks and the fears of whites. The FBI reports of his early speeches mentioned his apocalyptic predictions of race wars and divine retribution, but Justice Department officials were more perplexed than worried by Malcolm’s vague metaphors and religious prophecies that communicated anti-white sentiments without explicitly calling for racial confrontations. An FBI report of Malcolm’s speeches at New York’s Temple No. 7 offers an example of the kind of apocalyptic prophecies that excited black audiences while not provoking white authorities:
LITTLE told this group that there was a space ship 40 miles up which was built by the wise men of the East and in this space ship there are a number of smaller space ships and each one is loaded with bombs. LITTLE stated that when ELIJAH [MUHAMMAD] of Chicago, Illinois, gives the word these ships will descend on the United States, bomb it and destroy all the “white devils.” According to LITTLE these bombs will destroy all the “devils” in the United States and that all the Muslims in good standing will be spared.17
When FBI agents interviewed Malcolm a few months after this speech, they described him as “uncooperative” but nevertheless willing to reassure them that “Muslims are peaceful and they do not have guns and ammunition and they do not even carry knives.” Malcolm insisted that he had “never been a member of the Communist Party” and that the NOI did not “teach hatred.” When questioned about the War of Armageddon, Malcolm reportedly “remarked that the Bible states this will be when God destroys the devil.”18
Malcolm sought to separate himself from leftist subversion and civil rights agitation, which were more immediate government concerns than was black nationalism. Malcolm’s initial hostility toward the expanding civil rights protest movement at times extended beyond verbal attacks to include opportunistic overtures to the white opponents of civil rights. As had Marcus Garvey during the 1920s, Malcolm represented the Nation of Islam in a meeting with the Ku Klux Klan representatives, seeking to arrange an accommodation based on mutual support for racial segregation. According to the FBI’s report of the meeting, which occurred in Georgia on January 28, 1961, Malcolm solicited the Klan’s help with Muslim plans to separate from the United States. After his break with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm expressed his shame over participating in the meeting, revealing that it resulted in a tacit agreement between the NOI and the Klan. “From that day onward the Klan never interfered with the Black Muslim movement in the South.”19
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm X’s speeches often suggested that the federal government was worried about the threat posed by the Nation of Islam, but such comments overstated the government’s concern. When compared to the extensive FBI investigation of King, the file on Malcolm contains few indications that the FBI ever devoted much effort to combating his influence until after his break with Elijah Muhammad. Even then, the FBI did not understand the nature of the threat posed by either Malcolm X or Elijah Muhammad, nor did it develop a coherent program to combat black nationalist agitation until after Malcolm’s death. Instead, during the first half of the 1960s, the FBI was primarily concerned with the possibility that communists, rather than black nationalists, might gain control over the African-American freedom movement.
While investigating Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, the FBI rarely made them the targets of its aggressive and often illegal counterintelligence activities. When Hoover officially established the COINTELPRO in 1956, its initial goal was to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party, USA, which had long been the target of aggressive FBI tactics, including extensive recruitment of informers and efforts to exacerbate factionalism. COINTELPRO was later expanded to include such targets as the Socialist Workers Party, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and even the Ku Klux Klan. Although isolated COINTELPRO activities were undoubtedly directed against Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, only in 1967, two years after Malcolm’s death, did Hoover include the Nation of Islam as a COINTELPRO target. Elijah Muhammad was mentioned among “extremists” who warranted special attention. An August 25 memorandum to field offices announced:
The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters. . . .20
3. Politicization of Nationalism
As Malcolm became increasingly successful as a minister of the Nation of Islam, he also began to recognize the political limitations of his religious message. During the first decade of his ministry, his political perspective had been shaped by the apolitical, religious orientation of the Nation of Islam. He was always careful to acknowledge that he was speaking on behalf of Elijah Muhammad and sought to distance himself from black radicalism. This was not only a reflection of his subordinate status in the Nation but also of his belief that religious conversion to Muhammad’s form of Islam offered a better route to racial advancement than the strategies of social reform within the American political system. Malcolm’s account of his formative experiences mentioned few contacts with political ideas, whether conventional or radical. He had only a passing awareness of the extensive leftist activities that took place while he was in New York during the 1940s. Although Malcolm’s autobiography mentions in passing rent-raising parties where activists sold the Communist newspaper Daily Worker, and proclaimed the Communist Party as “the only political party that ever ran a black man for the Vice Presidency of the United States,” Malcolm describes himself as unaffected by left activism: “to my sterile mind in those early days, it didn’t mean much.”21 Even Malcolm’s 1950 statement that he had “always been a Communist” should be seen primarily as an outgrowth of Malcolm’s effort during World War II to convince selective service officials that he was unfit for the military. The 1952 visit Malcolm reportedly received in prison from a member of the Crispus Attucks Club of the American Youth for Democracy may suggest a latent openness to radicalism, but he was undoubtedly sincere, if not totally accurate, when he told FBI interviewers in 1955 that he had “never been a member of the Communist Party or the American Youth for Democracy” and claimed not “to have known anyone who was associated with it.”22
Malcolm’s primary function as a Muslim minister was not to advocate a political program but to present Elijah Muhammad’s religious ideas and recruit new members for the Nation. As a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammad, he saw civil rights leaders primarily as unworthy competitors to the person he proclaimed “the greatest Living Emancipator and Truth Bearer that the world has ever known.”23 Nevertheless, even as he verbally attacked white “devils” and “brainwashed” integrationist leaders, his effort to expand his audience eventually brought him into direct contact with civil rights activists. Despite his insistence that the Nation of Islam truly represented the black masses, the upsurge of Southern civil rights protests forced Malcolm to reassess his relationship to the Southern black struggle. For the most part, the most visible manifestations of mass militancy among blacks during the early 1960s were guided by representatives of the civil rights organizations that had been the targets of Malcolm’s verbal barbs against integrationism. Malcolm’s nationalism did not supplant the civil rights activism of the early 1960s. Instead, his mature thought represented a convergence of his earlier ideas and those that emerged from sustained black protest movements. The “Black Power” rhetoric of the period after Malcolm’s death owed much to his influence, but the new African-American racial consciousness also resulted from internal changes in the civil rights protest movement—particularly the increasing involvement of poor and working-class blacks and the growing emphasis on economic and political empowerment. As the Southern civil rights movement became a broadly focused, national freedom struggle, a new militant racial consciousness became evident among grass roots activists, even among those who had little awareness of Malcolm X. Organizers and activists who were involved in the grass roots mobilizations of 1963 and 1964 increasingly saw the ideas of Malcolm X as consistent with the conclusions drawn from their own movement experiences.
Malcolm X, for his part, not only attracted increasing support from grass roots activists but also moved toward their confrontational tactics and away from Elijah Muhammad’s tactical accommodationism in anticipation of Allah’s eventual retribution. Although he was the Nation of Islam’s most effective proselytizer during the decade before his death, Malcolm increasingly recognized the insufficiency of the Nation’s religious and racial separatism as a means of achieving African-American advancement. He saw that his own early criticisms of the civil rights protest movement had overstated the Nation of Islam’s credentials as a force for social change and understated the potential of grassroots activists in the civil rights movement to become such a force. Malcolm abandoned his position as a dissenter affiliated with a small religious group in order to forge closer relations with black activists who had successfully mobilized mass protest movements. While remaining critical of cautious mainstream civil rights leaders, he acknowledged the success of some of these leaders in pushing the civil rights movement toward greater militancy.
During the late 1950s, in the aftermath of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad reacted ambivalently to the emergence of King as a nationally known civil rights leader. According to a 1958 FBI report, Malcolm, apparently seeking to distance his organization from civil rights activism while securing the release of two jailed Muslims in Alabama, referred to King as a “traitor” “who is being used by the White man.”24 As Lewis V. Baldwin has demonstrated, these verbal attacks against King did not prevent Malcolm from seeking a dialogue with King and other civil rights leaders.25 In 1960, for example, Malcolm wrote to King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and other leaders to invite each as “spokesman and fellow-leader of our people” to attend and, if they wished, to speak at an “Education Rally” in New York. Malcolm explained that by participating, civil rights leaders could hear Elijah Muhammad and then “make a more intelligent appraisal of his teachings, his methods and his programs.”26 Malcolm recognized that King had little to gain from attending the Muslim-sponsored rally, but the appeal for dialogue was a consistent theme in Malcolm’s speeches, even as he became more and more caustic in his attacks on civil rights leaders.
While King continued to ignore numerous invitations from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm was occasionally successful in his efforts to interact with civil rights leaders directly. During late 1961 and early 1962, for example, he participated in a series of debates with Bayard Rustin at Howard University and the University of Chicago on the topic “Integration or Separation.” He also took part in similar debates with Edward Warren, president of the Los Angeles NAACP.27 Malcolm occasionally offered his support to non-Muslim protest activities. During 1962, he addressed Harlem rallies on behalf of unionized hospital workers. On one occasion, he joined black labor leader A, Philip Randolph on the podium and applauded the struggle of black and Spanish-speaking workers as part of a larger “fight for human rights and human dignity.”28 Later in the year, he joined a Harlem rally to protest police brutality, pointing out the inconsistency of blacks being asked to fight against the nation’s enemies abroad while turning the other cheek at home.29Malcolm also apparently was invited to speak in Birmingham in the midst of the spring 1963 demonstrations. On another occasion, he attended a rally to protest the 1963 murder of four black girls in a Birmingham church bombing. Although rally organizer Jackie Robinson tried to keep him from speaking, audience members called for Malcolm and created a ruckus until he came to the platform and quieted them.30
Writing in August 1963 to King and other civil rights leaders, Malcolm adopted a conciliatory tone, noting that the nation’s “racial crisis” demanded immediate steps “by those who have genuine concern before the racial powder keg explodes.” Malcolm argued that if Kennedy and Khrushchev could negotiate agreements, “it is a disgrace for Negro leaders not to be able to submerge our ‘minor’ differences in order to seek a common solution to a common problem posed by a Common Enemy.” He assured the civil rights leaders that, if they attended a Muslim-sponsored rally in Harlem, he would “guarantee order and courtesy for all speakers.”31
As Malcolm’s outreach activities brought him into contact with grass roots activities throughout the nation, his dissatisfaction with Elijah Muhammad’s policies increased. In his autobiography, he noted his conviction “that our Nation of Islam could be an even greater force in the American black man’s overall struggle—if we engaged in more action.” He explained that he privately believed that the Nation should alter its “general non-engagement policy” and that “militantly disciplined Muslims” should participate in mass protests.
It could be heard increasingly in the Negro communities: “Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything, unless somebody bothers Muslims.” I moved around among outsiders more than most other Muslim officials. I felt the very real potentiality that, considering the mercurial moods of the black masses, this labeling of Muslims as “talk only” could see us, powerful as we were, one day suddenly separated from the Negroes’ front-line struggle.32
Malcolm recounted that his effort to politicize his Muslim ministry was already in progress during 1963. His disillusionment with Elijah Muhammad after learning of his infidelities had made him less comfortable stressing the moral teachings of the Nation. “If anyone had noticed,” he asserted, “I spoke less and less of religion” and instead “taught social doctrine . . . current events, and politics. I stayed wholly off the subject of morality.”33 Furthermore, he became increasingly restive at having to restrict his public statements because of the resentments of other Muslim officials. He recalled resenting having to refuse interviews during 1963 and having to restrain his comments on contemporary issues of concern to blacks.
When a high-power-rifle slug tore through the back of NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers in Mississippi, I wanted to say the blunt truths that need to be said. When a bomb was exploded in a Negro Christian church in Birmingham, Alabama, snuffing out the lives of those four beautiful little black girls, I made comments—but not what should have been said about the climate of hate that the American white man was generating and nourishing.34
While suppressing such sentiments, Malcolm maintained his public stance of hostility toward national civil rights leaders. During the summer of 1963, after the major civil rights groups announced plans for a Washington March for Jobs and Freedom, Malcolm followed Elijah Muhammad’s instructions not to cooperate with the civil rights groups sponsoring the event. An FBI report noted that he warned NOI members that the march was likely to end in a bloodbath and that they would be expelled if they participated.35Malcolm’s personal feelings about the march were probably more restrained. Because the Nation of Islam was coincidentally holding its annual convention during the week of the march, Malcolm was able to observe the demonstration, which attracted over 200,000 participants. Talking with reporters at the Statler Hilton, which serve as headquarters for march organizers, he remarked, “I am not condemning or criticizing the March, but it won’t solve the problems of black people.” In theAutobiography he acknowledged widespread black support for the march, explaining that he opposed national civil rights leaders. He spoke more positively of grass roots advocates of militant action who “envisioned thousands of black brothers converging together upon Washington—to lie down in the streets, on airport runways, on government lawns—demanding of the Congress and the White House some concrete civil rights action.”36 Speaking in November at a Northern Negro Leadership Conference in Detroit, Malcolm accused the leadership of subverting the initial grass roots enthusiasm for the march. “They joined it, became a part of it, took it over,” he charged. “And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising.”37
Although Malcolm’s sharp criticisms of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders drew the most attention from his audience, the “Message to the Grass Roots” marked a major turning point in his political orientation. The address was delivered at a conference called by the Reverend Albert B. Cleage as part of an effort to create a “Freedom Now” political party. Simply by attending the gathering, Malcolm implied that he was willing to ally himself with non-Muslim militants. “What you and I need to do is learn to forget our differences,” he advised. “You don’t catch hell because you’re a Baptist, and you don’t catch hell because you’re a Methodist.” Malcolm criticized the nonviolent tactics of the “Negro revolution,” insisting that the “black revolution” would involve bloodshed; but he also indicated a degree of respect for the militancy that had been displayed by local movements, such as those in Cambridge, Maryland, and Danville, Virginia. “The Negroes were out there in the streets,” Malcolm proclaimed.
They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington. . . . That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I’m telling you what they said. . . . That was the black revolution.38
Malcolm’s implicit support for civil rights militancy could not become explicit as long as he remained in the Nation of Islam. He realized that Elijah Muhammad had little sympathy for any form of militancy that assumed that racial advancement could come through reform of the American political system. Once he decided to break with Elijah Muhammad, however, Malcolm’s support for grass roots militancy opened the way for a concerted effort to inject himself into the African-American freedom struggle. On March 8, 1964, when he officially announced his departure from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm stated that he was “prepared to cooperate in local civil rights actions in the South and elsewhere. . . .” He insisted that he was not abandoning his black nationalist objectives but merely acknowledging that racial reforms were worthy immediate goals. “Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.”
Although NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins responded coolly to Malcolm’s overtures, other civil rights leaders reacted more favorably. Cecil Moore of the NAACP commented, “There’s always room for more in the civil rights struggle. So, we welcome Malcolm X into the field.”39 King remained ambivalent about establishing ties with one of the harshest critics of his nonviolent strategy. On March 26, 1964, the two men met briefly when King was at the U. S. Capital to testify on the pending civil rights legislation. Malcolm, clearly pleased by his success in finally having a direct encounter with King, grinned broadly as he shook hands with the smiling King, as the two posed for a photographer. A few months later, a King associate, probably acting with King’s approval, sought Malcolm’s help in obtaining a United Nations declaration on behalf of African-American rights. A proposed meeting of the two leaders never took place.40 Despite Malcolm’s break with Elijah Muhammad, the gulf that had developed between him and King could not be readily bridged. When King recalled the Washington encounter, he acknowledged that Malcolm was “very articulate” but remained disturbed by Malcolm’s “demagogic oratory,” particularly his call for armed self-defense by blacks. King warned, “And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice.”41
In his autobiography, Malcolm describes his trip to Mecca, in the spring of 1964, as a crucial turning point in the development of his worldview. His dramatic account of the resulting “radical alteration” of his racial outlook probably belies the more gradual maturation of his political outlook. Indeed, the suddenness of the transformation in Malcolm’s perspective while abroad suggest that his experiences in Arab and African nations strengthened inclinations that had been suppressed during his years in the Nation of Islam. This explains Malcolm’s sudden responsiveness to positive interracial contacts that previously would not have countered his ingrained skepticism. While in Lagos, Nigeria, he enthusiastically reported the warm reception he had received while abroad. He made public his new views regarding whites by referring to Islamic teachings that his previous international travels and extensive readings would certainly have brought to his attention. He claimed that a book he had read on the way to Jedda had made him “more open-minded.” He had become convinced that the Koran was against violations of the human rights of individuals of all religions. “Islam is a religion which concerns itself with the human rights of all mankind, despite race, color, or creed. It recognizes all (everyone) as part of one Human Family.”42
After returning to the United States, Malcolm (now calling himself El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Al-Sabban), established the Organization of Afro-American Unity to unite African Americans “around a non-religious and non-sectarian constructive program for Human Rights.” Writing to invite Roy Wilkins to an OAAU meeting in June 1964, Malcolm described the new organization as an effort to “transcend all superficial, man made divisions between the Afro-American people of this country who are working for Human Rights” and assured Wilkins that the OAAU “would in no way compete with already existing successful organizations.”43 Although Malcolm’s earlier criticisms made it difficult for him to improve relations with King, he increasingly recognized that the civil rights movement contained varied ideological tendencies. Still hostile to activism that he defined as integrationist and pacifistic, Malcolm began to express more positive attitudes toward the grass roots leaders and organizers of a mass movement that was becoming increasingly concerned with goals beyond civil rights.
During the last year of his life, Malcolm’s political trajectory merged with that of many young activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the most militant of the black protest groups active in the South. SNCC workers’ intense full-time involvement in Southern black struggles placed them in the vanguard of the ideological transformation that would soon fracture the national civil rights coalition. Stokely Carmichael, for example, was initially skeptical about Malcolm’s views when he first encountered him at Howard University, but by 1964 he was among the SNCC workers questioning the idealistic inter-racialism that had once been dominant in the group.44
A turning point in Malcolm’s relations with SNCC came unexpectedly during his second 1964 tour of Africa. SNCC chairman John Lewis and staff member Donald Harris crossed paths with Malcolm in Kenya on October 18. The two had been in Ghana soon after Malcolm had departed and were told of the “fantastic impressions” Malcolm had made during his visit. “Because of this, very often peoples’ first attitude or impression of us was one of skepticism and distrust,” Lewis and Harris reported. “Among the first days we were in Accra someone said, “ ‘Look, you guys might be really doing something—I don’t know, but if you are to the right of Malcolm, you might as well start packing right now ‘cause no one’ll listen to you.’ ” Africans in Ghana and other places they visited, the SNCC workers discovered, wanted to know what was SNCC’s relationship with the Organization of Afro-American Unity. “In every country he was known and served as the main criteria for categorizing other Afro-Americans and their political views.” Lewis and Harris were pleasantly surprised, therefore, when Malcolm arrived at their Nairobi hotel, and they used the chance encounter to begin extended discussions.
We spent the rest of that day and evening as well as a good part of the following day talking with Malcolm about the nature of each of our trips. At that point [Malcolm] had been to eleven countries, talking with eleven heads of state and had addressed the parliaments in the majority of these countries. Although he was very tired he planned to visit five more countries. He felt that the presence of SNCC in Africa was very important and that this was a significant and crucial aspect of the “human rights struggle” that the American civil rights groups had too long neglected. He pointed out (and our experience bears him correct) that the African leaders and people are strongly behind the Freedom Movement in this country; that they are willing to do all they can to support, encourage and sustain the Movement, but they will not tolerate factionalism and support particular groups or organizations within the Movement as a whole. It was with this in mind that he formed his Organization of Afro-American Unity.
Discussion also centered around Malcolm’s proposed plan to bring the case of the Afro-American before the General Assembly of the United Nations and hold the United States in violation of the Human Rights Charter. The question was at that time (and ultimately was evident) that support from the civil rights voices in this country was not forthcoming and the American black community was too plinted [sic] to attempt such a move without looking like [complete] asses and embarrassing [our] most valuable allies. We departed with Malcolm giving us some contacts and the hope that there would be greater communication between the [OAAU] and SNCC.45
On November 24, 1964, Malcolm returned to the United States with renewed determination to establish continuing contacts with activists in SNCC and other groups. At a November 29 OAAU rally at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm agreed with local activist Jesse Gray’s suggestion that mercenaries should be sent to Mississippi rather than to the Congo. He continued to emphasize the need to link the African-American freedom struggle with freedom struggles throughout the world. “You waste your time when you talk to this man, just you and him.”46 On December 20, Fannie Lou Hamer, a SNCC worker and former congressional candidate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) shared a Harlem platform with Malcolm, who suggested that his role in the black struggle was to strengthen the hand of nonviolent groups by demonstrating to whites that more violent alternatives existed. “We need a Mau Mau,” he announced. “If they don’t want to deal with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, then we’ll give them something else to deal with. If they don’t want to deal with the Student Nonviolent Committee, then we have to give them an alternative.”47 After hearing Hamer speak, Malcolm immediately invited her and the SNCC Freedom Singers to be honored guests at an OAAU meeting, where he clarified his position regarding civil rights. Despite having once doubted whether African Americans were United States citizens, he argued that blacks should register to vote as independents. After Hamer spoke, Malcolm told his followers, “I want Mrs. Hamer to know that anything we can do to help them in Mississippi, we’re at their disposal.” At the end of December, Malcolm met with a SNCC-sponsored group of youngsters from McComb, Mississippi, and told them, “we here in the Organization of Afro-American Unity are with the struggle in Mississippi one thousand per cent. We’re with the efforts to register our people in Mississippi to vote one thousand per cent. But we do not go along with anybody telling us to help nonviolently.”48
Early in 1965, Malcolm met with a group of civil rights leaders in a gathering organized by Juanita Poitier, the wife of actor Sidney Poitier. Labor leader A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young of the Urban League, Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women, and actor Ossie Davis were among those who attended. Davis recalled that the group “spent that day discussing Malcolm’s philosophy, the mistakes he made, what he wanted to do now, and how he could get on board the people’s struggle that was taking place.”49
Malcolm’s most direct involvement in the Southern black struggle occurred a few weeks before his death. On Wednesday evening, February 3, 1965, he addressed several thousand Tuskegee Institute students, and the following Thursday morning, he spoke to student activists at Brown’s Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama. SCLC staff member Andrew Young recalled that, in order to lessen its impact on the audience, Malcolm’s talk was “sandwiched between” those of two other SCLC staffers, James Bevel and Fred Shuttlesworth. Coretta Scott King, who arrived at the Chapel shortly after Malcolm’s speech, recalled that Young sought her help in steering the students back toward nonviolence. She later wrote that Malcolm reassured her that, by coming to Selma, he intended to assist her husband’s work, commenting, “If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”50 An FBI report of the speech noted that Malcolm called upon President Johnson to “order a full scale investigation of the Ku Klux Klan” but that he did not threaten action by his followers. The FBI report commented:
[Malcolm] further stated that no one at the church, or any Negro in Selma involved in the demonstrations, had done nothing they would not have done if he had never appeared in Selma. He apparently made this statement due to press statements that his presence in Selma had embarrassed other civil rights leaders.51
Malcolm was unsuccessful in his attempt to meet with King while in Selma, but such a meeting with King undoubtedly would have occurred if Malcolm had lived.
Shortly after leaving Selma, Malcolm embarked on his final foreign visit. On February 8, he addressed the First Congress of the Council of African Organizations. When he flew to Paris to deliver another talk, French authorities barred his entry, calling him an “undesirable” likely to “trouble the public order.” Forced to return to London after a few hours of questioning in the Orly Airport transit lounge, Malcolm reacted to the French action in a conversation with Afro-Cuban nationalist Carlos Moore. “I was surprised . . . since I thought if there was any country in Europe that was liberal in its approach to things, France was it, so I was shocked when I got there and couldn’t land.” He blamed the American government, suggesting that France had “become a satellite of Washington, D. C.”52
Soon after his return to the United States, Malcolm’s house was firebombed. He attributed the act to his enemies in the Nation of Islam. While the identity of the arsonist was never determined, Malcolm’s public criticisms of Elijah Muhammad had unquestionably made him a target for Muslim zealots. During December, Fruit of Islam Captain Raymond Sharrieff had sent an open telegram to Malcolm officially warning him that “the Nation of Islam shall no longer tolerate your scandalizing the name of our leader and teacher, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, regardless of where such scandalizing has been.”53 Minister Louis X (later Louis Farrakkan), once Malcolm’s protégé, also attacked his former friend in strong terms. “IS Malcolm bold enough to return and face the music ... ? Would he like to face Mr. Muhammad?” Louis X wrote in Muhammad Speaks. Describing Malcolm as “the target of the dissatisfaction of both his own followers (which are very few) and the followers of Muhammad,” Louis X condemned Malcolm for his efforts to establish ties with civil rights groups:
He had blasted the white man and the NAACP for 9 or 10 years. He had preached the truth, as revealed to Muhammad by Allah: that the white race was a race of devils. . . . Malcolm now pleads to the white man that he had learned they were not devils, by seeing so-called white Muslims in Mecca. . . .
Malcolm was doomed, according to the article. “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk about his benefactor (Elijah Muhammad). . . . Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death, and would have met with death if it had not been for Muhammad’s confidence in Allah for victory over the enemies.”54
Malcolm’s assassination on February 21, 1965, ended his efforts to establish an alliance between his nationalist followers and the militant offspring of the civil rights movement. Deprived of Malcolm’s leadership, African-American politics remained divided into hostile, warring camps. After Malcolm’s death, the divisions were evident even among militant blacks who saw themselves as his ideological descendants. On one side were nationalists who resolutely refused to participate in efforts to achieve black advancement through struggle within the American political system. On the other were radical activists who sought to mobilize African-Americans for confrontational politics while placing little emphasis on the cultural and psychological transformation that would foster effective black political action.
4. Malcolm’s Ambiguous Political Legacy
Assassinated while still at an early stage of his development as an independent political leader, Malcolm X became, after his death, a historical influence on the black struggles. Deprived of the opportunity to continue refining his ideas, he left a body of thought, mostly in the form of speeches, to be developed and reinterpreted by others. His death came on the eve of a turbulent era of African-American politics that made his words prophetic. During 1966 and 1967, the debate over the Black Power slogan brought many of his still controversial ideas into the black political mainstream. Nevertheless, Malcolm’s ideological descendants disputed the nature of his political legacy and selectively borrowed from it. “Cultural nationalists” saw the “Old Malcolm”— before his break with the Nation of Islam—as their spiritual mentor, while “revolutionary nationalists” were inspired by the “New Malcolm” of 1964 and 1965. Malcolm, himself, was unable to offer guidance to the black activists who transformed his ideas into Black Power politics. The contradictory tendencies in Malcolm’s life paralleled the bitter and sometimes deadly intrablack conflicts of the late 1960s. Indeed, Malcolm became one of the first victims of those internecine battles.
The FBI’s interest in Malcolm did not end with his death. Instead, the Bureau’s efforts to combat the new forms of racial militancy became more ruthless in the post-Malcolm era. Aware of the threat that Malcolm might have posed if he had succeeded in unifying the black militant community, the FBI attempted to exacerbate conflicts among the various factions that identified themselves with Malcolm’s ideas. The FBI’s COINTELPRO against so-called “black nationalist-hate groups,” which had begun in August 1967, sought to forestall a black nationalist coalition that would lead to “a true black revolution.” In the view of FBI leaders, the danger posed by Malcolm X was not simply that he was a black nationalist but that he had been a potential “‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” Malcolm clearly would have been targeted for COINTELPRO’s “dirty tricks” if he had not been assassinated. The FBI’s treatment of black nationalists became more hostile as they followed Malcolm’s lead in abandoning separatist strategies that did not involve confrontations with white authorities.55
By the end of the 1960s, the federal government had developed a policy toward black militancy that clearly distinguished between groups and leaders that were considered potential threats and those that were not. The criterion for inclusion on the list of COINTELPRO targets was not advocacy of racial separatism; black political groups and leaders were treated as worthy of aggressive counterintelligence projects according to the extent to which they sought to undermine capitalism and to mobilize mass confrontations with government authorities. Thus, despite his integrationist sentiments, King remained a major target of the FBI until his death. Conversely, the FBI did not target the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which, despite the black separatist leadership of Roy Innis, established ties with the Nixon administration.
By associating himself with the upsurge in nonnationalist activism of the 1963–1965 period, Malcolm helped to transform African-American nationalism into something it had not been since the Garvey era—that is, a movement that was taken seriously as a threat by the United States government. Although the FBI had long been interested in the Nation of Islam, only after Malcolm’s break with the group did the FBI shift the focus of its covert programs from anticommunism to efforts to undermine black nationalist militancy. The reasons for this shift included both the rise of urban racial violence and the increasing involvement of nationalists in mass activism. By 1967, the Bureau had recruited an army of more than three thousand informants in black communities with BLACKPRO and other informant programs. When the counterintelligence program was revised, during August 1967, to target so-called “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups,” the Nation of Islam was included among the groups to receive the FBI’s “intensified attention.” Yet, according to Kenneth O’Reilly’s comprehensive study of the FBI’s efforts against black militancy, during the 1967–1968 period most local offices no longer considered the Nation of Islam a major threat.56
Indeed, in March 1968, when FBI field offices were directed to identify targets for new COINTELPRO efforts, the emphasis was on potential rather than existing threats posed by black nationalist leaders and organizations. A memorandum written to W. C. Sullivan stressed the need to “prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups.” SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael was identified as a militant with “the necessary charisma” to become the “messiah” who might have unified the “militant black nationalist movement.” Ultimately, the California-based Black Panther Party became the primary target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO projects. The Panthers, with their emphasis on armed self-defense and militant (though not anti-white) rhetoric, were clearly the political offspring of Malcolm’s last years.
Had Malcolm lived, he might have moderated the destructive ideological conflicts that made black militants so vulnerable to the FBI’s “dirty tricks.” During the last year of his life, he abandoned a form of black nationalism that limited itself to criticisms of integrationist leaders while failing to offer serious alternatives to civil rights activism. Rather than standing apart from racial reform movements, he associated himself with the most militant elements in those movements. He began to emphasize those aspects of the black nationalist tradition that were consistent with the objectives of those seeking racial reforms within the American political system. Instead of viewing the development of black-controlled institutions as inconsistent with the insistence on equitable government policies with regard to blacks, he saw each as contributing to the other. Although Malcolm’s own emphasis on the need for blacks to defend themselves paved the way for the rhetorical excesses of later Black Power militants, his increasing respect for the activists who used nonviolent tactics aggressively might have encouraged other black nationalists to appreciate the need for a broad range of tactics in a sustained mass struggle. As a respected black nationalist, he may have been able to prevent the intellectual—and sometimes physical warfare —that broke out between “cultural nationalists” and “revolutionary nationalists” and that divided SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panthers. Rather than encouraging verbal warfare between nationalists and integrationists, by the time of his death Malcolm was already urging black nationalists to see themselves as building upon the civil rights organizing of the early sixties.
Although Malcolm undoubtedly would have exerted a major influence in the transformation of African-American politics during the last half of the 1960s, we can only speculate about the direction black politics might have taken if both Malcolm and King had had the opportunity to discuss and refine their political views. King criticized the Black Power slogan as counterproductive, but he refused to condemn Stokely Carmichael and other former civil rights workers who became Black Power proponents. Deeply rooted in African-American religion and closely connected with African-American institutions, King came to recognize the importance of explicit appeals to racial pride, even as he continued to condemn anti-white rhetoric and to reject separatist ideologies. In his last book,Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, King defended Black Power “in its broad and positive meaning” as “a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals.” He acknowledged the value of the slogan as “a psychological call to manhood.” He condemned the “tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and strip him of his personhood.” King argued, “To offset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved the body can never be free.”57 Coretta Scott King has insisted that “Martin firmly agreed with certain aspects of the program that Malcolm X advocated,” particularly the need for racial pride and black access to power. She surmised that “at some point the two would have come closer together and would have been a very strong force in the total struggle for liberation and self-determination of black people in our society.”58
African-American politics of the period after King’s death would have been strengthened by the ideological convergence hinted in Malcolm’s last speeches and King’s last writings. As the most respected and well-known advocate of black nationalism, Malcolm might have been a strong voice against forms of black nationalism that lead to cultural atavism, cultism, opportunism, or other forms of regressive politics. Similarly, King would certainly have spoken against civil rights leadership that refrained from using aggressive, nonviolent tactics against racial oppression. Both would have pushed the African-American freedom struggle toward greater attention to the problems of the black poor. Both would have stressed the international dimensions of the struggle for social justice. They would have remained controversial leaders and the targets of the repressive agencies of the American state, but their courage and experience as leaders would have made them valuable sources of advice for the black activists who followed them.
Malcolm X’s life provides many useful insights for today. The most useful of these is that all ideologies, even black nationalism, can retard as well as foster black unity and mass militancy. During his life, he had the courage to affiliate with a small group outside the African-American mainstream; he also had the courage to break his ties with that group when he determined that more effective political institutions were needed. He argued against allowing the political skepticism of black nationalists to turn into political apathy or pessimism. The present era of African-American politics requires the wisdom of the nationalist tradition as a necessary corrective to civil rights reform efforts that are overly cautious or fail to appreciate African-American cultural distinctiveness. The development of African-American institutions under black leadership is a necessary component of any effort to achieve significant reforms in the United States, but such institutions are strengthened when African Americans are accorded fair treatment as United States citizens.
For too long, African-American politics has been divided by a false dichotomy. Nationalism and integrationism are inadequate terms to describe the vast range of political insights that have been outgrowths of past struggles. Debates over the use of violence are unproductive without a recognition that all effective political movements combine elements of persuasion and coercion. Malcolm X’s intellectual legacy can be fully appreciated only when it is seen as part of the larger legacy of the African-American freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.
1. Although a definitive biographical of Malcolm has not yet been written, useful biographical information can be found in C. Eric Lincoln, Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); Louis Lomax, When the Word Is Given (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1963); Peter Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X (Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1979); George Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (New York: Merit, 1967). Eugene Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) and Bruce Perry, Malcolm X: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (New York: Station Hill, 1991) provided interesting, though controversial, psychological insights.
2. See, for example, David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1966); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); and Clayborne Carson, “Reconstructing the King Legacy: Scholars and National Myths,” in Peter J. Albert and Ronald Hoffman, eds.. We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).
3. Perry’s recent controversial study is exceptional in this regard, but the reliability of this work cannot be determined until its sources —particularly transcripts of interviews with Malcolm’s associates —are made available to other researchers.
4. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X(New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), pp. 4, 5, 7, 10.
5. Although my conclusions depart from his, the following discussion has been influenced by James H. Cone’s insightful comparative study Martin & Malcolm & America (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1991).
6. Quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr., “Autobiography of Religious Development,” unpublished papers written at Crozer Theological Seminar, November 1950.
7. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiography, p. 17.
8. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiography, p. 31. Malcolm asserts that he was elected president of his seventh-grade class, but Perry convincing argues that he must have been in the eighth grade at the time. See Malcolm, p. 37.
9. King, “Autobiography.”
10. C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 75. The Nation of Islam’s mythology of racial origins generally saw black identity within the context of a broader African-Asian identity. Malcolm’s initial image of the Messiah W. D. Fard was not of a black man but of a “light-brown-skinned” person with “an Asiatic cast of countenance.” See Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiography, p. 186. Malcolm often expressed an identification with Asian nations, particularly nations such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam that were engaged in wars against the United States.
11. See, for example, Malcolm’s discussion of black nationalism in “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in George Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Merit, 1965), pp. 23–44.
12. See William Brink and Louis Harris, Black and White: A Study of U. S. Racial Attitudes Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), pp. 248, 254, 260.
13. See Director, FBI, to SAC, Albany, March 4, 1968, reprinted in Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 108–111.
14. David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From ‘Sob’ to Memphis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), pp. 208–209.
15. See, for example, Hoover to Frank Burke, August 12, 1919, in Robert A. Hill, ed., Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California, 1983), pp. 479–480.
16. See United States Senate, Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, vol. 6, Federal Bureau of Investigation, testimony of Frederick A. O. Schwarz, Jr., November 18, 1975, p. 37–39. In 1960, Walter Yeagley, of the Justice Departments Internal Security Division told Hoover that the Nation of Islam should not be designated as a subversive group because its rhetoric was “more calculated and designed to arouse hatred and antipathy against the white race as a race, rather than against the Government. There is evidence of language which speaks of the destruction of America, but is couched more in terms of prophecy and prediction, often referring to the ‘War of Armageddon,” than in terms of incitement to action.” See Exhibit 27 in Hearings, vol. 6, p. 428. See also David J. Garrow, FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 154.
17. FBI, New York, 105–8999, January 28, 1955.
18. FBI, New York, 105–8999, January 28, 1955.
19. Bruce Perry, ed., Malcolm X: The Last Speeches (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), p. 123.
20. Director, FBI, to SAC, Albany, August 25, 1967. According to David J. Garrow, the FBI “played assorted COINTEL tricks on the [Nation of Islam] as early as the late 1950s.” See FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 154.
21. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiogruphy, p. 76.
22. FBI, January 28, 1955.
23. FBI, 04/30/58, Part II, section 3.
24. See FBI, April 30, 1958, in part II, section 2.
25. Lewis V. Baldwin, “A Reassessment of the Relationship between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Western Journal of Black Studies 13 (1989); p. 104.
26. Malcolm X to King, July 21, 1960.
27. See FBI reports; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 103; Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom, p. 249.
28. Muhammad Speaks, July 31, 1962, and January 31, 1963.
29. Muhammad Speaks, September 15, 1962.
30. Perry, Malcolm, p. 210; Hampton and Fayer, Voice of Freedom, p. 256.
31. Letter sent to King, Roy Wilkins, Gardner C. Taylor, Adam Clayton Powell, James Farmer, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Ralph Bunche, Joseph H. Jackson, and James Forman, August 1, 1963, in Malcolm X 1960–1965 folder, NAACP Papers, Group III, Box A227, Library of Congress.
32. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiography, p. 289.
33. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiography, pp. 294. According to Bruce Perry, Malcolm, as early as 1959, “unsuccessfully tried to secure Elijah Muhammad’s permission to boycott Harlem stores that refused to hire or promote black employees. The same year, the Messenger made Malcolm apologize for organizing a protest demonstration in nearby Newark. Malcolm kept pressing Mr. Muhammad for permission to engage in demonstrations. The Messenger instructed him not to raise the subject again.” See Malcolm, p. 211.
34. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiography, pp. 293.
35. FBI, November 15, 1963.
36. Quoted in Thomas Gentile, March on Washington: August 28, 1963 (Washington: New Day Publications, 1983), p. 162; Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X, p. 278.
37. Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots,” in George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Merit Publishers, 1965), p. 16.
38. Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks, p. 14.
39. Quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer, March 14, 1964.
40. FBI 105-8999-1-25a, June 27, 1964 (telephone log); see discussion in James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, p. 207.
41. King quoted in Playboy interview, reprinted in James Melvin Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 364–365.
42. Press release in Malcolm X Folder in NAACP Papers, Group III, Box A227, Library of Congress.
43. Malcolm X to Roy Wilkins, June 24, 1964. In a May 15, 1964, letter to Wilkins, James Shabazz, secretary of Muslim Mosque, Inc., assured Wilkins that Malcolm would not “attack any person or organization that is engaged in the struggle” and asked “forgiveness for the unkind things that he has said in the past.” See Malcolm X Folder in NAACP Papers, Group III, Box A227, Library of Congress.
44. See Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, pp. 100, 144, and passim.
45. John Lewis and Donald Harris, “The Trip,” report submitted December 14, 1964, cited in Carson, In Struggle, p. 135.
46. Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks, p. 97.
47. Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks, p. 115.
48. Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks, p. 152.
49. Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, p. 260.
50. Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 256. Coretta King also remarked that by the time of Malcolm’s assassination her husband came to believe that “Malcolm X was a brilliant young man who had been misdirected. They had talked together on occasion and had discussed their philosophies in a friendly way” (p. 258). See also account in lames H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, p. 209.
51. FBI Mobile, 44–557, February 4, 1965. See also Carson, In Struggle, p. 135.
52. “Malcolm X Barred by French Security,” New York Times, February 10, 1965; Malcolm quoted in taped conversation with Carlos Moore, February 9, 1965, reprinted in John Henrik Clark, Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1990), p. 205.
53. “Nation of Islam Warns Malcolm X,” The Crusader, quoted in FBI, November 25, 1964.
54. Minister Louis X, “Boston Minister Tells of Malcolm—Muhammad’s Biggest Hypocrite,” Muhammad Speaks, December 4, 1964.
55. Director, FBI, to SAC, Albany, March 4, 1968.
56. See memorandum from FBI Director to SAC, Albany, August 25, 1967, reprinted in Churchill and Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers, pp. 92–93; Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York; Free Press, 1989), p. 277–278.
57. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 43.
58. Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, pp. 256–257; and Coretta Scott King, quoted in Hampton and Fayer, Voice of Freedom, p. 264.