Malcolm X (Malcolm Little; El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) (1925-1965). Biography and Creativity

The fourth child of Earl and Louise Norton Little and the seventh child of his father, the civil rights activist Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925. Malcolm Little’s father, Earl, was an outspoken opponent of white oppression, a Baptist preacher who supported the controversial Marcus Garvey (a pan-Africanist who advocated the mass exodus of blacks to Africa), and a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Earl, nearly illiterate, was raised in Georgia during an era when lynching was still common (for more information on the horrific history of lynching in America, visit Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America: http://withoutsanctuary. org/main.html). As a black community leader, Earl Little was dogged by racism throughout his life, something that deeply impressed Malcolm. Eventually, Earl moved the family first to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then Lansing, Michigan, all the while preaching Garvey’s message of African unity and liberation. Malcolm felt especially close to his father, attending Garveyite meetings with him at a young age.

Shortly after they moved into a predominantly white community near Lansing, the Littles were evicted because their lease prohibited nonwhites from occupying the land. They were offered no compensation and held financially responsible for court costs and litigation fees (Perry 9). Before they were able to move out, the farmhouse was burned to the ground. Earl told local authorities that white assailants had started the blaze but was eventually accused of arson by police investigators (Perry 10). When Louise and Earl relocated to another all-white neighborhood near Lansing, they were swindled by the seller, who owed taxes on half of the land (Perry 11).

Forced from one home to another, dogged by discrimination, the Littles had great difficulty making ends meet. Even though The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Malcolm X with a great deal of assistance from Alex Haley, and subsequent Malcolm X biographies often disagree about the details of Malcolm X’s early life and whether his family was threatened by the notorious white supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), there is no doubt he and his family experienced the trauma of racially motivated injustice.

Tragically, Earl was killed under the wheels of a trolley when Malcolm was just six years old. Louise, unconvinced by the account of her husband’s “accidental” death, believed white men had murdered him (Perry 12). Much later in his Autobiography, Malcolm alleged that his father was assassinated by the Black Legion, a white supremacist group that was active in Michigan and Ohio for most of the 1930s. In any case, this staggering loss greatly affected Malcolm, both emotionally and economically.

Though Earl had two life insurance policies, one of the companies labeled his death a suicide, leaving the Little family destitute. As he reports in the Autobiography, Malcolm began to act out his inner turmoil, misbehaving and shoplifting items from a local grocery store. As he grew older, he learned about the life insurance injustice and about the way the white community had viewed his father. Unfortunately, Malcolm soon found himself alone in the world when his mother, after battling depression and suffering a mental breakdown, was committed to a state mental hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Malcolm was subsequently sent to live in a series of foster homes before going to Boston in 1941 to live with his older half sister.

As a teenager, Malcolm worked a variety of jobs including shoe shining, dishwashing, and working as a steward for the New Haven Railroad, a job that eventually led him to New York. It was during this time that he became involved in petty criminal activities. This quickly escalated to full-time “hustling” as he made money through prostitution, larceny, drug trafficking, and burglary. Malcolm avoided being drafted into the U.S. Army for service during World War II by convincing military psychiatrists that he was mentally unfit for active duty, acting like a black militant who wanted to kill southern whites.

While he did escape battle, he did not escape the law; in 1946, after returning to Boston, Malcolm Little was arrested and convicted of a variety of crimes, including breaking and entering with his friend Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis and two white women. While Malcolm and Shorty received 10-year sentences, the two women were each sentenced to one year of probation.

Here Malcolm saw firsthand how unjust the American legal system could be. He was sent to Charlestown Prison—a rat-infested, overcrowded facility with no running water—and then transferred to an experimental prison in nearby Norfolk, Massachusetts. Charlestown was anything but inspiring, whereas Norfolk offered unlimited access to a good library. Malcolm chose to use this time of incarceration to better himself: During the six years he served in prisons, Malcolm broke his addiction to cocaine, initiated his own reading program, and, most important, converted to the teachings of the Nation of Islam (NOI), a religious organization led by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that advocated racial separatism.

In 1952 Malcolm became a member and subsequent minister of the NOI and was given an X as a replacement for his surname, Little. The X was meant to symbolize the unknown African name of his enslaved ancestors. Malcolm’s name changed throughout his life. As Charles Hoyt notes in his essay “The Five Faces of Malcolm X,” these names correlate to the political and spiritual conversions he experienced. As the Autobiography documents, Malcolm’s dramatic transformations came about after powerful epiphanies. For example, when Malcolm was introduced to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, he recounts the awakening he felt upon their first face-to-face meeting in revelatory terms:

I stared at the great man who had taken the time to write to me when I was a convict whom he knew nothing about. He was the man whom I had been told had spent years of his life in suffering and sacrifice to lead us, the black people, because he loved us so much. And then, hearing his voice, I sat leaning forward, riveted upon his words. . . . Concluding, pausing for breath, he called my name. It was like an electric shock. (Autobiography 200-201)

These transformations played a major, formative role throughout Malcolm’s life. By 1954 Malcolm X, now a minister, had started NOI temples in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. In addition to founding temples across urban America, Malcolm founded a nationally distributed newspaper, Muhammad Speaks; led an effort to organize local businesses that catered to ghetto communities; and established schools for men, women, and children. In recognition of these achievements, Elijah Muhammad elected Malcolm X as the national spokesman for the NOI. For nearly 10 years he was one of the Nation of Islam’s strongest and most effective voices.

However, by the early 1960s a rift had formed between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. As the biographer Bruce Perry argues, Malcolm had been questioning the Nation’s ideology and methods for some time (206). In 1959, Malcolm made his first trip overseas, visiting Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Ghana as Elijah Muhammad’s ambassador. When he returned from his trip, Malcolm privately expressed reservations about Muhammad’s characterization of all white-skinned people as “devils” incapable of treating African Americans as human beings (Perry 206).

Another point of contention was Elijah Muhammad’s prohibition of political involvement by NOI members. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders led large protests against racial bigotry that garnered international attention, Malcolm’s requests to stage similar events were repeatedly vetoed by his mentor. Eventually, Malcolm’s confrontation of racial injustice, which to the NOI entailed making a political statement, provoked the NOI leadership to charge he was abusing his position as national spokesman and advancing his own agenda.

According to the Autobiography, Malcolm felt betrayed when he discovered that many of the leaders of the NOI were personally profiting from their positions in the organization. He was particularly troubled by Elijah Muhammad’s illicit sexual liaisons with female followers. After the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X was suspended from the NOI for delivering a fiery speech that not only condemned the recently deceased leader for his lack of action on civil rights but characterized his assassination as an instance of “chickens coming home to roost.” In March 1964 Malcolm responded by announcing his break with the NOI. For the next year his efforts would be geared toward organizing a black nationalist political party. He sought to use national and international means to achieve this end.

In April and May 1964 Malcolm X traveled throughout the Middle East and Africa. Many of the countries he visited received him as an honored guest of state. While in Saudi Arabia as a guest of Prince Faisal, Malcolm completed the pilgrimage to Mecca, or hajj, an expectation of all Muslims that at least once in their lifetime they pray before the Kaaba in the holy city of Mecca. Malcolm X experienced a personal transformation as he completed the hajj. Though many of the statements Malcolm had made since his last visit overseas betrayed a new and more inclusive political consciousness, his fulfillment of the hajj marked a distinct change in Malcolm. As he explains in the Autobiography:

You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth. (337)

For the first time in his life, Malcolm X saw people of all races unified as one during the hajj. He also studied orthodox Islam and discovered dramatic differences between its teachings and those of the NOI. He subsequently adopted a new name to signify his new understanding. Although he continued to answer to the name Malcolm X, he was also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. This transformation was also marked by changes in his physical appearance: Just as he had stopped conking his hair and wearing faddish clothes when he converted to the NOI, upon his return from Mecca, Malcolm X sported a beard. In the United States, this superficial change was seen as a sign of his further radicalized notion of black nationalism. Describing this transformative experience, Malcolm said:

My thinking had been opened up wide in Mecca. I wrote long letters to my friends, in which I tried to convey to them my new insights into the American black man’s struggle and his problems as well as the depths of my search for truth and justice. “I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda,” I had written to these friends. “I am for truth, no matter who tells it. I am for justice, no matter who it is for or against.

I am a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” . . . They called me “the angriest Negro in America.” I wouldn’t deny that charge; I spoke exactly as I felt. I believe in anger. I believe it is a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself. I am for violence if non-violence means that we continue postponing or even delaying a solution to the American black man’s problem. (Autobiography 373)

It is significant that Malcolm also expanded his international base of support by visiting newly independent nations. These nations, recently independent from European colonial powers, welcomed Malcolm X as a leader in the same type of fight that had resulted in their liberation. Malcolm X visited Egypt, Lebanon, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal, Morocco, and Algeria in 1964. He returned to Africa in July, touring 11 nations as he sought international support for a petition drive asking the United Nations to investigate the United States for human rights violations against the African-American and Native American populations.

During late 1964 and early 1965, Malcolm spent time in London, giving speeches, lectures, and interviews. He also participated in a debate over the use of extremism as a political tool hosted by Oxford University. Interestingly, students in Paris were denied a similarly planned event when the government refused to allow him to enter the country. These events attest to the controversial and polarizing reaction the civil rights leader provoked: The French government refused him entry, while students at Oxford University applauded his oratory.

Such reactions were to be expected: Malcolm X advocated the use of violence. In the United States, he famously used the phrase “by any means necessary” to describe what African Americans must do to achieve freedom and equality. In Great Britain, this was an equally radical proposition, though many thought that Malcolm brilliantly defended it before a packed audience during the Oxford debates. A compelling part of his justification for such a radical stance was that a similar rationale had been used by the founding fathers of the United States as they rejected the European belief in the divine right of kings to rule and ignited the American Revolution.

In February 1965 Malcolm returned to the United States to continue to organize his political party, the Organization for Afro American Unity (OAAU). Despite repeated death threats, he arranged a public meeting of the OAAU in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. On February 21, just as he was beginning his speech, he was shot several times by at least three men in the audience identified as members of the NOI. Malcolm X was pronounced dead on arrival at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital across the street from the Audubon Ballroom. He was survived by his wife, Betty, and four daughters, Attallah, Qubilah, Ilyasah, and Gamilah, and his twin daughters Malaak and Malikah, who were born eight months after their father’s death.

Though the NOI had a clear motive for killing Malcolm and reportedly attempted to do so several times, there has been much speculation regarding who exactly was behind his assassination. This speculation has been fueled by the fact that Malcolm was subjected to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance from 1953 onward (the results of which can be found on the FBI’s Web site at http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/malcolmx. htm). With help from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (which monitored his movements overseas), as well as the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services, FBI investigators amassed more than 4,000 pages of information on Malcolm (Perry 324). Many claim that his entry into France was thwarted by government intervention. J. Edgar Hoover, the now-infamous head and founder of the FBI, reportedly tried to aggravate the existing conflict between Malcolm and the NOI and may have indirectly caused his death (Goldman 429-430). Malcolm’s stated intention of taking the plight of

African Americans before the United Nations, a spectacle that would have seriously damaged the international stature of the U.S. government, has also been cited as a possible motive for his assassination (Jenkins and Tryman 42). However, speculation about government complicity in the assassination plot has been overshadowed by the fact that Elijah Muhammad and other NOI members did not deny that they were responsible for ordering Malcolm’s death (Perry 373-374). When Malcolm returned from Mecca, he confessed: “In the past I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again.” Such statements show a dynamic human being wrestling with the world, a man willing to change and admit error. This portrait, although not the one captured by common representations of him in the media, reveals a rare, complex human being, one deeply affected by personal loss and attuned to social injustice.