Why they killed Malcolm X
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
SPIKE LEE'S movie about Malcolm X has created a surge of interest in black America's most important post-war leader. Malcolm's assassination on 21 February 1965 was no surprise; in his last few months he lived in constant fear of assassination.
After a first murder attempt, which obviously relied on meticulous surveillance and planning, Malcolm suspected that state agencies were involved.
Despite the hostility of the Black Muslims to Malcolm after he left them, most likely the US state apparatus killed him. Because they were scared; scared of a charismatic leader evolving in an increasingly revolutionary, anti-capitalist direction.
The story of Malcolm's political evolution in his last fateful year is recounted by George Breitman in 'The Last Year of Malcolm X'. Breitman was a leader of the US Socialist Workers Party, then linked with the trotskyist Fourth International, at whose meetings Malcolm spoke several times. This account is based on Brietman's excellent book*.
By 1963 Malcolm X had been a member of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) for 11 years. The Muslims, starting out as a small sect, grew rapidly as the civil rights struggle pushed forward the issue of racism.
The Muslims were black separatists, advocating breaking off contact with white society, and organising the black community on the basis of their own puritanical morality.
Because of his remarkable oratorical skills Malcolm became Muslim leader Elijah Mohammed's most famous lieutenant. Malcolm also pushed the hardest radical message of black defiance and resistance, which created tensions with the Muslim hierarchy.
The split with Elijah Mohammed was provoked by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Muslim leaders were instructed to keep silent on the issue, an injunction Malcolm broke in a famous statement about 'chickens coming home to roost'.
The implications of his statement were clear; the assassination of the leader of the white power structure was an issue which shouldn't concern black Americans.
Elijah Mohammed was outraged and ordered Malcolm not to speak for 90 days. Ninety days silence to atone for his bucking of Muslim discipline.
It was during this period that Malcolm decided that the message of the Muslims, that of black separatism, in reality meant passivity towards the struggle against racism and black oppression. Malcolm split from the Muslims and founded his own 'Muslim Mosque Inc.'
After the split and a visit to Mecca, where Malcolm became a follower of orthodox Islam, he said:
'No religion will ever make me forget the conditions of our people in this country. No religion will ever make me forget the continued fighting with dogs against our people in this country. No religion will ever make me forget the police clubs that come up 'side on our heads...
'Any time I have a religion that won't let me fight for my people, I say to hell with that religion. That's why I'm a Muslim.'
In fact Malcolm X did not come out of the Black Muslims with a worked out alternative; he was rethinking his positions on the run. What he did know was that the Muslims were utterly passive in face of the anti-racist struggle. They faced a challenge to their popularity in the ghettoes from the growing civil rights movement, and organisations like the Freedom Now Party.
During the first few months of Malcolm's 'independent' period, the 50 weeks between his split with the Muslims and his assassination, he moved gradually from the black separatism of the Muslims to black nationalism.
At first his nationalism was stated in continued religious terms, signified by the name of his new organisation, the Muslim Mosque Inc.
The black separatism of the Nation of Islam meant advocating a complete break with white society; black nationalism meant building unity among black people for a struggle with the white power structure. This in fact was the underlying difference which Malcolm wrestled with during the 90 days of silence imposed by Elijah Mohammed.
But there was a contradiction between the objective of black unity in the struggle for nationhood, and the expression of that struggle in a religious organisation – the Muslim Mosque. The recognition of that contradiction led to Malcolm's formation of the Organisation of Afro-American Unity in December 1964.
Throughout the last 50 weeks of his life Malcolm's thought was evolving. For example, in April 1964 his comments on a white pacifist minister killed by a bulldozer during an anti-racist demonstration were entirely negative. The white man's sacrifice, he said, was 'too late', given the centuries of white oppression.
But by December of that year, he had no hesitation praising the two white students and one black man (Goodman, Schwerner and Chainey) killed by racist police during black voter registration in Mississippi (the murders are dramatised in the film Mississippi Burning.
He dropped his opposition to 'mixed marriages' – the Nation of Islam, of course, would never have approved inter-marriage between black and white.
During his last year Malcolm made two trips to Africa, which helped crystallise his views on major questions of strategy for black liberation.
Politics in Africa at that time was awash with left-inclined nationalist forces. Malcolm met many famous nationalist leaders, like Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah. These people had a positive attitude to socialism, as they understood it, and admired the Soviet Union.
In particular he was influenced by meeting a leader of the Algerian FLN, the organisation which had just evicted French imperialism, who pressed on Malcolm the idea that white people could fight the racist system and be revolutionaries too.
The African trips helped cause a change in Malcolm's position on the three key issues; alliances with whites, separatism and the struggle against capitalism.
Much of the debate with moderate black leaders in the US went along the lines of 'integration' versus separatism. While breaking with separatism, Malcolm always fought the idea of 'integration'.
Integration, he said, was when the system gave a few token blacks jobs or school places; a sop to liberal consciences.
In fact his idea of black unity in struggle, against both tokenistic 'integration' or separatism, was the forerunner of the idea of Black Power, taken up by leaders like Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers.
On strategy Malcolm gradually evolved the idea that blacks could fight alongside whites. But they could not wait for white workers or progressives before building their own unity, developing self-defence and launching their own struggle.
On this Malcolm had evolved the basic ideas of black self-organisation as a strategy for black liberation. He was a not a theoretician, but an activist, and above all an orator, a tribune for the grievances and determination of black America. But the basic ideas of self-organisation as a liberation strategy was fully developed in his speeches.
In the last few months of his life Malcolm developed an explicit anti-capitalism, and a growing understanding of socialism.
Questioned about whether capitalism could abolish racism, he replied 'Can a chicken produce a duck egg? It can't. It's just impossible.'
His statements on socialism were very guarded; he was feeling his way. He made favourable comments on socialism, saying it was 'no accident' that socialism was so popular among black revolutionaries in Africa. If you love black nationalism, he said, then you'll love revolution.
He spoke several times at meetings organised by the US Socialist Workers Party (nothing to do with the British SWP). He granted interviews to their paper the Militant; and ordered copies of their International Socialist Review for some of his key supporters. Among his detractors there were dark rumours about his 'flirtation' with Trotskyism.
Malcolm's organisation of Afro-American Unity was never more than a few hundred strong. During his last months he was wrestling with the idea of what kind of organisation to build.
His main idea was that the OAAU would be a vehicle for unity among the different black organisations, not a rival to the established civil rights groups. But he never really had time to think the problem through.
By the end of his life, Malcolm had completed two stages of his political development; the first from separatism to black nationalism, and then towards being a revolutionary anti-capitalist, identifying especially with anti-imperialist struggles in the third world.
But he was not a socialist or a Marxist; and speculation about whether he would have become one or the other is pointless.
While his OAAU never amounted to much, he had given a political profile and definition to black nationalism, embodied in an implicit strategy of black self-organisation and black liberation.
He thus was the key figure in freeing the black movement in America from the purely civil rights and 'integrationist' strategy of moderate leaders like Martin Luther King. He opened the door for Black Power to become a major force.
These political gains became for years the mainstream of black US politics; the idea that blacks should defend themselves and not be pacifists, that they had to organise themselves for struggle without waiting for white liberals, that blacks were fighting a whole power structure and system, not just individual backwardness and prejudice among whites.
In future issues we will look at the development of the black movement after Malcolm's death. In the reactionary political atmosphere of the 1980s black politics has moved to the right, with middle class blacks being admitted to former white preserves (none more symbolic than General Colin Powell supervising the slaughter in Iraq), and black mayors in major cities channelling black aspirations within the system.
But Malcolm's ideas stood against all that, and are a permanent reservoir and example of another route – that of black liberation, with its inherently anti-capitalist dynamic.
A brilliant organiser and orator armed with a Black Power strategy, openly revolutionary and anti-capitalist – this was a challenge which US capitalism answered in its all-too-familiar fashion.
\ George Breitman's book is published by Pathfinder Press. As the US SWP moved increasingly towards Castroism in the early 1980s, George Breitman remained faithful to Trotskyism and was one of many of the older cadres expelled, becoming a leader of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency.*