I want to talk about El Hajj Malik el Shabazz.  Friday was his birthday.  He would have been 81 years old, had he not died 41 years ago.  I wrote some of what follows as a passing comment on My Left Wing on Friday.  Someone said that it should really be made a diary.  The result herein is an apt example of "be careful of what you ask for, because you may get it", given its length.  But my apologies, as usual, for that fact.  Chalk it up to this being only the 2nd diary I've written in a month.  On the other hand, this is bad even for me - I've had to cut out in the interests of mercy on the reader, much of what I have written.  So think of this, I guess, as the first part of a series.  A series that, hopefully, will further a conversation about race, mainstream politics, and the role of African-Americans in each from a different perspective than has been discussed in most leftist political blogs before.

Anyhow, let's start with what may some day be called "Part I."

The man who died El Hajj Malik al Shabazz on February 21, 1965, who was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, and who was best known to the world as Malcolm X, was a man greatly misunderstood both during his lifetime and beyond.

This is my favorite picture of him, and Dr. King - and probably the most representative of how I feel about all the things each man fought for and what their efforts meant to each other, and to Black people:

Most people in the mainstream don't know (or don't want to know because it's inconvenient for their post-hoc reconstruction of Dr. King's views) that at the end of their respective lives, Dr. King and Malcolm X were politically moving towards each other, in terms of viewpoints about the struggle and methods.  Over the years I have had many moments of fantasy about what could have been, for African-Americans, if Malcolm had continued to live even until Dr. King was killed 3 years later.  Most Americans have this fantasy that it was Dr. King who was successful all by his lonesome, his Christian non-violence movement morally swaying Americans to his view, and that other than "small details", America itself has truly changed.  And, but for folks -- mostly of color -- who just won't "move on", has solved its race problem.

Whereas if you actually study the history and compare on the ground to what exists today, it becomes obvious that but for Malcolm X, and the subsequent ascension of the Black Nationalist movement including its champions the Black Panthers in the urban areas, Dr. King's success --transitory as it appears to be, in hindsight -- was directly correlated with majoritarian America seeing full frontal what the alternative could be and *would be.*

What could have been, had they both lived.  I suspect that a lot of things we still talk about and struggle about today would have been resolved long ago.  I know that when I first heard The Ballot or The Bullet as a college student in 1978, I cried, knowing he was dead and that the brutal, practical advice to African-Americans about how to succeed long term and *permanently* in our struggle for our due in this country was rapidly being shunted away as "violence" and "hatred" for self-serving political reasons, and no more.

Malcolm X was assassinated in February, 1965, at the early ascendancy of his movement -- the Organization for Afro-American Unity, whose charter had been presented for the first time only 1 week before his death  -- so it is difficult to make an assessment of whether he was or was not "successful in practice".  Yet the charter is an informative document because it does establish a set of goals against which we can measure other movements that continued after his death.  It advocated a practical prescription for the collective development of African Americans in America.  This is because of Malcolm X's perspective on what the problem was:

Whether you are -- Whether you are a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Nationalist, we all have the same problem. They don’t hang you because you’re a Baptist; they hang you 'cause you’re black. They don’t attack me because I’m a Muslim; they attack me 'cause I’m black. They attack all of us for the same reason; all of us catch hell from the same enemy. We’re all in the same bag, in the same boat. We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation -- all of them from the same enemy. The government has failed us; you can’t deny that. Anytime you are living in the twentieth century and you are still walkin' around here singing “We Shall Overcome,” the government has failed you.

This is part of what’s wrong with you -- you do too much singing. Today it’s time to stop singing and start swinging. You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him to become the heavy-weight champion of the world -- swinging helped him become the heavy-weight champion.

This government has failed us; the government itself has failed us. And the white liberals who have been posing as our friends have failed us.

(BTW, throughout this I have made changes from the text shown at the American Rhetoric site, because they are necessary to restore the words that Malcolm X actually spoke. I am always amused at the numerous "errors" in transcriptions at the American Rhetoric site in fiery Black speeches, including Malcolm's.)

Today, Malcolm X's face hangs in my living room, making me one of the few Black folks of a certain age that don't have the Holy Trinity (John Kennedy -- with Jackie or without; Robert Kennedy and Dr. King) as their visual savior hanging next to the default image (the propaganda image) of Jesus Christ himself.  There is a reason for my choice of visual savior.

And no, it's not because I'm "violent".  I no longer become as enraged as I used to when I hear folks spout the usual "violent" tripe.  But I still get disgusted.  Anyone who actually listened to his speeches, studied the development of his political philosophy over time, and took to heart his words, particularly post-Mecca , would know with certainty that a desire for violence against anyone simply did not exist in Malcolm X.  It was neither his motivation nor his method.  Although he rightfully pointed out the hypocrisy of this particular charge against him, given the history of revolutionary violence in America:

When this country here was first being founded, there were 13 colonies.  The whites were colonized.  They were fed up with this taxation without representation.  So some of them stood up and said "Liberty or Death!". . .The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books.  He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot.  And George Washington? Wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat!  Or George Washington.  "Liberty or Death!" was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English.  They didn't care about the odds.  Why, they faced the wrath of the entire British empire...Yet these 13 little scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation.  Tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded.  Told that big British Empire:  "Liberty or Death!" And here you have 22 million Afro-Americans, Black people today, catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw.

Today, the number of Americans of African descent living in America is no longer 22,000,000, but around 37,000,000, taking into account the structural undercounting of the census (which reports 35 million.)  Since we know with certainty that there has been no racial Revolutionary War equivalent post-1964, it's easy to ask:  has there been an elimination of the conditions that Malcolm X referred to as "hell" -- political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation? Malcolm X believed they were sufficient to justify the comparison between the feelings of the Founding Fathers when they went to war to create America and "This new Black man.....this new generation" in 1964 faced with what Malcolm X described as "hell?"  Has this been fixed?

We can all agree that today if hell continues to exist, it has quite a few differences from the hell than existed 42 years ago when Malcolm X gave The Ballot or the Bullet?" speech.  A different version of hell than that existing 43 years ago when Dr. King told 250,000 people on the Washington Mall that he had a future dream (he first told them that America had given Blacks a check marked "insufficient funds" they'd come to collect, but most today block out that less utopian, yet primary, part of Dr. King's message at the March on Washington; that phenomena is something that if this really becomes a series will be Part II or Part III of the discussion.) We can all agree on some clear differences.  The water hoses are gone; the dogs largely so (but not quite.) Bull Connor's dead, and George Wallace, and even the hated J. Edgar Hoover, the scourge of  the Black liberation movement if ever there was one.  At the most practical, day to day level of life, one can indeed now eat at an integrated restaurant, drink water from a single water fountain, watch a movie from somewhere other than the balcony, and pee in an integrated toilet.  Certainly there is much less physical violence perpetrated by supremacist whites.  One can even now vote (at least in theory; see 2000 and 2004) and not worry much about hanging from a tree burnt up and castrated the next morning.  And certainly, today an overtly white supremacist candidate can no longer be elected to any national office.  These are all differences - good one.

But if one is honest one cannot end the inquiry there.  One has to ask instead: Are the types of problems listed above the only, or even primary, "hell" that Malcolm X was referring to? No.  Remember, he said that the problem was summarized as three distinct ills:  political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation.  At the time he lived, that also included the larger problems for day-to-day Black life that by 1965 had millions of African-Americans functionally or literally illiterate and unable to access a decent education all the way through 12th grade; unable to work because of skills or training or racial discrimination, or working only under unfair conditions; unable to eat healthfully, eat at more than a subsistence level or occasionally eat at all; forced to live in slum housing largely concentrated in run down ghettos, to pay premium prices for the privilege and live in crowded conditions, all as the alternative to no housing at all; subject to constant police surveillance and, at times, harassment and brutality; and without decent medical care, responsible for the premature death and shortened at-birth life expectancy of African-Americans.  Both Dr. King and Malcolm X at various points in their lives believed that all of these things needed to be addressed before their work was done.

Unfortunately, they haven't been.

I believe that the current situation 41 years after Malcolm X's death and 38 years after Dr. King's death speaks for itself.  Just some snippets of what Black hell in America looks like right now, in case you didn't know:

· an estimated 40% Black male unemployment rate - which continues to be made even worse by the same racial discrimination in the workplace/rejection in favor of whites and non-Blacks just as existed pre-Civil Rights movement (and with the same  rhetoric), no matter what race of employer, something that should truly depress any serious scholar of African-Americans as living evidence of the truth first written by Carter G. Woodson in 1933.

· African-American maternal mortality rates equal to some of the poorest 3rd world countries.

· Infant mortality rates that are just as bad.

· Life expectancy at birth that continues to lag behind that of whites despite vast improvements in medical science

· The destruction of our communities caused by the importation of crack cocaine into our neighborhoods, by someone else, to fund someone else's so-called political revolution

· Systematic incarceration of Blacks including through use of disproportionate and biased sentencing guidelines that let whites selling the same drug off the hook by comparison
I could go on, and on.

Increasingly, particularly since the recession began but no less than 15 years ago, you can find quiet discussions in the Black community about the clock being rolled back on our progress.  On the only things that really mattered:  what quality of life would be experienced by the average Black man or woman in America.? No matter how many of us have reached a "middle class" economic or educational security, this question increasingly haunts more and more of us.  It's rather hard to ignore, at this point.  And when you don't ignore it, an obvious question is clear:  weren't a lot of these (other than the crack, anyhow) the same problems that existed back in 1964? Aren't they today just as bad, if not far worse for millions of people, if current statistics about Black America are to be believed?

Asking such questions leaves us with an unpleasant, but necessary truth:  it is decidedly premature to say that collectively Black people have stopped catching all the hell that Malcolm X talked about.  They haven't.  Quite the opposite:  some things, including some brand new vehicles of political oppression, economic exploitation and social degradation unique to our times have made things horrifically worse.  Conditions 41 years after Malcolm X's death are now in fact so hellish in some Black communities in America that Dante's Inferno is a far more apt descriptor of them.  This is the case even as it is true that most folks are not consciously ascribing to racist views anymore.  We have the theoretical cure part down pat - as a country, we can readily recite the "dream" of Dr. King and how much we believe in it.  But what about the practical solutions that are necessary to make the entire dream reality?

Well, maybe things are not so good.  But we don't talk about it.  Indeed, today, on the left you find a deafening silence in the face of undeniable fact, whenever the issues of "what to do" and "when are you going to do it?" are raised.  You also occasionally get some stuff that doesn't sound all that much different from 1964, even though the speaker usually will go to the mat if you even hint that this type of stuff might reflect the "R word"  (a reaction someone aptly pointed out is the closest white equivalent to the reaction of a Black person to being called a nigger by a white person.)

It's sort of sad, then, that it was easy for Malcolm X to look posit at least one practical solutions 42 years ago, in light of what he believed would be the case about America, based on what he already knew about America and its relationship to the descendents of its slave class:

And once we see that all these other sources to which we’ve turned have failed, we stop turning to them, and turn to ourselves.

We need a self-help program. A self-help philosophy.  A do-it-yourself philosophy.  A do-it-right-now philosophy.  A it’s-already-too-late philosophy. This is what you and I need to get with, and the only time -- the only way we are going to solve our problem is with a self-help program. Before we can get a self-help program started we have to have a self-help philosophy.

Black nationalism is a self-help philosophy.

What's so good about it? You can stay right in the church where you are and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. You can stay in any kind of civic organization that you belong to and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. You can be an atheist and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. This is a philosophy that eliminates the necessity for division and argument. 'Cause if you are black you should be thinking black, and if you are black and you are not thinking black at this late date, well I’m sorry for you.

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your -- your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you got a sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern.  And as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action. They’ll have you sitting in everywhere.

It’s not so good to refer to what you’re going to do as a sit-in. That right there castrates you. Right there it brings you down. What -- What goes with it? What -- Think of the image of someone sitting. An old woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well you and I have been sitting long enough, and it’s time today for us to start doing some standing.  And some fighting to back that up.

History reflects, however, that Malcolm X's solution of nationalistic self-reliance was never really tried -- and that he did not live a year after uttering these words.  Why? Because the powers that be made clear that Black nationalism was categorically unacceptable.  But rather than an honest rational case for why it was not a perfectly fine solution, the response of the majority of white America was to deem Malcolm X -- the man who died El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz -- a hater.  A hater because he excluded whites from the implementation of his proposed solutions for Black political oppression, economic exploitation and social degradation.  And because he refused to adopt a priori, as a Muslim, Dr. King's mandate of Christ-like non-violent moral suasion and integration with whites as the primary vehicle to achieve Black equality in America, a condition of Black acceptance in America became rejection of the philosophy of Malcolm X.  Since he did not ascribe to the only white-approved method of solving the problem, he was cut out of the larger dialogue entirely.  And Dr. King instead, and his rhetoric, was the only method that was encouraged and supported both economically and culturally by the majority (superficially at least; see the Maybe Series, Part II) for both his lifetime and Malcolm X's.

40 years later one can make a pretty persuasive argument based on the evidence that what Black progress really got for the Faustian bargain that rejected Malcolm X's prescription because it would "harm the Negro cause", and focused all its efforts on moral suasion and integration based on showing whites that Blacks were actual human beings was nothing more than America wanted us to have in the first place.  At least, nothing more if you measure what has been received in terms of a reduction of political oppression, economic exploitation and social degradation as measured by the day to day lives of most African-Americans not of the privileged middle or upper class.  The bullet-points I made above could have stretched to the hundreds. It doesn't take much research to confirm that - research that I hope that anyone truly of good will will make the time to undertake.

But today's outcomes should have surprised nobody, really.  Because if there was anything about Malcolm X, it was that he was prescient far beyond his formal education or personal experiences.  He warned folks - but particularly African-American folks -- of the serious risks of following down the "officially sanctioned" path of integration as the plan to escape from "hell":

We have observed that the usage of the term "integration" was designated and promoted by those persons who expect to continue a (nicer) type of ethnic discrimination and who intend to maintain social and economic control of all human contacts by means of imagery, classifications, quotas, and manipulations based on color, national origin, or "racial" background and characteristics.

Careful evaluation of recent experiences shows that "integration" actually describes the process by which a white society is (remains) set in a position to use, whenever it chooses to use and however it chooses to use, the best talents of nonwhite people. This power-web continues to build a society wherein the best contributions of Afro-Americans, in fact of all nonwhite people, would continue to be absorbed without note or exploited to benefit a fortunate few while the masses of both white and nonwhite people would remain unequal and unbenefited.

Perhaps this level of human and cultural insight is why Malcolm X, and others like him, were marked for death fairly early on in the backlash and they felt that Dr. King - despite the March on Washington, despite his ongoing movement -- could wait to die another 3 years.  Malcolm X was so brutally honest and non-compromising about his opinions and his principles no matter who he was talking to, Black or white, that I could imagine it must have been rather threatening.  But it was always the case that Malcolm X's chosen strategy to tell the unvarnished truth.  And that was not a reassuring truth, where America was concerned:

America is just as much a colonial power as  England ever was.  America is just as much a colonial power as France ever was. In fact, America is more so a colonial power than they.  Because she’s a hypocritical colonial power behind it.

Malcolm X realized that embracing a deliberate, bold, in-your-face and most importantly *self-directed* strategy of identifying and unifying African-Americans as a colonized people within the borders of the United States had any hope of actually achieving *permanent* change in the Black collective (as opposed to change for Black individuals.)  He realized that Blacks could no longer afford to play politics or patience in the same manner as had been practiced in the 70 or so years since the ascension of Jim Crow, with dashed hopes, generation after generation, that things would improve naturally over time.  He knew that collectively, it was dangerous and not productive to think about our cause only within the parameters we were given leave to consider by someone else.

I have to stop and wonder - how many folks who will read this diary really *know* anything about Malcolm X? Besides the pat assessment:  "not the right answer", "violent", "hatred"? Have you ever asked yourself why that was your answer, and then *confirmed* that your stated reasons had any factual legitimacy? Most folks sadly do not.

For example, most today point to Dr. King's stirring March on Washington speech (we call it the "I Have a Dream" speech, but considering that the dream part was a codicil prompted only after the speech was over by Marian Anderson, that's clearly not what the speech was called when it was actually given) that turned the tide, starting with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  But you decide - can we say that with certainty?  The Civil Rights Act passed nearly a year after Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech on August 28, 1963, the one that everyone on the left points to today as an example of his effectiveness in swaying hearts and minds.  Yet the bill spent nearly a year in dormancy after being introduced in 1963, stalled by fierce opposition.  It appeared certain to be going nowhere, yet again, after nearly a month of filibuster, the same as the bills that had been brought up in preceding years (but which had more teeth).  Folks were just about ready to give up, yet again.  And again, folks were told to be patient.

But then Malcolm X gave the speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet" I have been quoting above.  It has a significant discussion in it about the Civil Rights Act and the filibuster which by then had been going on for almost a month.  During a time when Dr. King's work and movement was focused almost entirely on either getting ready for or trying to control -- depending on whose perspective you take about the feelings between the elders of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the youth leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- the SNCC brainchild Freedom Summer, trying to draw national attention to the problems in Mississippi and increase voter registration.  In other words, the civil rights bill was not Dr. King's focus in his few public appearances in 1964, after he'd already been named Time's Man of the Year.  No matter - despite Dr. King's comparable silence, in April 1964 the United States Senate was treated to a well-publicized Black analysis of its conduct in connection with the Civil Rights bill being filibustered with a vengeance:

I was in Washington a couple of weeks ago, while the Senators were filibustering, and I noticed in the back of the Senate a huge map.  And on this map, it showed the distribution of Negroes in America.  And surprisingly, the same senators that were involved in the filibuster were from the states with the most Negroes.  Why were they filibustering the civil rights legislation? Because the civil rights legislation is supposed to guarantee voting rights to Negroes in those states.  And those senators know that if the Negroes of those states can vote, those senators are down the drain. The representatives of those states go down the drain.

[I]n the Constitution of this country it has a stipulation wherein wherever the rights...the voting rights of people in a certain district are violated, then the representative who is from that particular district, according to the Constitution, is supposed to be expelled from the Congress.  Now if this particular aspect of the Constitution were enforced, you wouldn't have a cracker in Washington, D.C.

But what would happen? When you expel the Dixiecrat, you're expelling the Democrat.  When you destroy the power of the Dixiecrat, you're destroying the power of the Democratic Party.  So how in the world can the Democratic Party in the South actually side with you, in sincerity?  When all of its power is based in the South? These Northern Democrats are in cahoots with the Southern Democrats.

They're playing a giant con game.  A political con game.  You know how it goes.  One of them comes to you, and makes believe he's for you.  And he's in cahoots with the other one that is not for you.  Why? Because neither one of them is for you. But they gotta make you go with one or the other. . .Lyndon B. Johnson's best friend [Richard Russell] is the one who is the head. . . who is heading the forces who are filibustering civil rights legislation.  You tell me - how in the hell is he going to be Johnson's best friend? How can Johnson be his friend, and *your* friend too? . . .

So, it's the ballot, or the bullet.  Today our people can see that we are faced with a government conspiracy.  This government has failed us.  The Senators who are filibustering concerning your and my rights? That's the government.  stop saying that it's a Southern filibuster.  It's not a segregationist filibuster.  *It's is a government filibuster.*  Any kind of activity that takes place on the floor of the House or the Senate, that's the government.  Any kind of dilly-dallying - that's the government.  Any kind of pussy-footing - that's the government.  Any type of act that's designed to delay or deprive and you and me right now  of getting full rights, that's the *government* that's responsible. And anytime you find a government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress.  Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court, and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it is guilty of today. . .So those of us whose political and economic and social philosophy is Black nationalism have become involved in the civil rights struggle.  And we intend to expand it from the level of civil righhts to the level of human rights.  As long as you fight it on the level of civil rights, you're under Uncle Sam's jurisidiction.  You're going to his court expecting him to correct the problem.  But he created the problem.  He's the criminal.  You don't take your case to the criminal - you take your criminal to court.

Within a week of this speech, Lyndon B. Johnson and Everett Dirksen -- the Republican without whose herculean and noble efforts the bill simply would not have passed -- pulled together a working group to begin, in earnest, work on a compromise bill that could actualy get passed in the Senate.  The filibuster ultimately ended on June 10, 1964 and the Act was signed on July 2, 1964.  Shortly thereafter, Johnson made his famous quote about having lost the South for a generation.

Yet it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was invited to the signing ceremony for the Civil Rights Act.  Not the man whose fiery articulation to Blacks, in the midst of the filibuster, about what was really going on behind the filibuster, who was responsible, and what should happen if the bill was NOT passed -- that is most temporally connected to the passage, after years of failure, of a barely adequate, vague and definitely modest civil rights bill to guarantee some modicum of citizenship rights to Black folks.  Except for one small thing:  Malcolm X had already correctly identified the real problem as one not involving deprivation of just civil rights (the rights given by a society), but a deprivation of Black human rights. 

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