The activist killed at 39 years of age remains inspiration against black oppression all over the world. Among Trump’s efforts to whiten the history of the United States, Malcolm X’s words are more relevant than ever. “What do you think you would do after 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow and lynching? Do you think you would answer not violently?” These were some of the main questions that Malcolm X asked the American Society.
Although slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, the so -called laws of Jim Crow continue to consolidate daily discrimination against blacks until 1964. They were not authorized to vote or sit next to the whites on buses or restaurants. They lived in ghettos and had precarious jobs.
“Malcolm X faced exactly the problems that were sealing in the mind of the African American oppressed,” said Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, author of the Biography Malcolm X: The Black Revolutionary.
Your message to African Americans was clear: trusting yourself! Fight for their rights if necessary, even violently if necessary.
In the biography of Malcom X written by the American journalist and winner of the cleaning Payne Award (1941-2018), he remembered as a speech of the activist in 1963, he published him, as a “sword stroke”, conditioned feeling like as “black man” deeply rooted in his psyche.
This was exactly the declared goal of Malcolom X.
Childhood marked by racism
Born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, named Malcolm Little, the activist spent his childhood near Detroit in the midst of poverty and violence.
He was six years old when his father was found dead, murdered by white supremacists. Completely overwhelmed, with seven children and little money, Malcom’s mother faced mental health problems. Malcolm was then subjected to several families and adoptive institutions. Later, in his autobiography, he spoke of the “terror of very white social workers”.
Despite the difficult start of life, he was a good student, the only black man in his class. A particular experience had a profound impact on him: his favorite teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Malcolm replied that he would like to study law. But the teacher, addressing him with a racist insult, said this was not a realistic goal for a boy like him.
After this episode, his notes fell drastically. At 15, Malcolm X moved to Boston to live with his sister Ella Collins and subsequently in New York. It was supported by producing nozzles until it committed small crimes. In the early age of 20, he was arrested for several thefts.
“Here is a black man captured behind the bars, probably for years, placed there by the white man,” he wrote later in his autobiography. “Allow this black man nailed to start realizing, as I did, that from the first landing of this first slave ship, the millions of color men in America have been like sheep in a wolf lair. That’s why black prisoners become Muslims so quickly when Elijah Muhamad’s teachings enter.”
The mentor to which Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad refers, was a black separatist and leader of the Islamic nation, a political-religious organization of African American outside of Islamic orthodoxy.
Fight against “white demons”
The nation of Islam “says that all blacks are intrinsically children of God and good, and all whites are intrinsically evil and the children of the demon”, explains the biographer Waldschmidt-Nelson. “What has made it very attractive for Malcolm and many other prisoners, of course, is that someone would come to say: ‘You are not guilty of your misery; the blue demons that made them deflect.”
After entering the organization, he began to be called Malcolm X, because the surnames of the African American were historically attributed by their slave owners. Therefore, the members of the Nation of Islam rejected their names in slaves and simply called “X”.
During his seven years of prison, he sought more knowledge and remained a member of the Islam nation for 14 years. The leader Elijah Muhammed appreciated the young intellectual intuitions and oratory skills and made it the spokesperson for the organization.
In his speeches, Malcolm X has repeatedly reported “white demons”. Although he lived in the northern states – a sort of “promised land” for the blacks of the southern states, even more restrictive – did not deposit any hope in the “liberal” whites there. After all, he personally experienced the way blacks were treated as second -class citizens in all the United States.
Malcolm X had long been disdained by the Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King Jr., criticized King’s famous speech in Washington in 1963, who spoke of a united and united America that overcome all the racial barriers for considering it unrealistic. “No, I’m not American. I am one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism. […] And I see the United States with the victims of the victim. I don’t see American dreams; I see an American nightmare. “
Pilgrimage to Mecca and change of attitude
After being disillusioned by the organization’s leader, Malcolm X broke up with the Nation of Islam in March 1964.
In the same year he made a pilgrimage to Mecca and his impression on “white demons” began to change. “It was deeply affected by the hospitality and cordiality with which she was received, even white Muslims in Saudi Arabia,” writes Britta Waldschmidt-Sason in his biography. “And then, in the last year of his life, he moved away from this racist doctrine,” he told DW.
He launched himself in a new purpose: “Malcolm X wanted to create an alliance of all the people oppressed against the white colonial oppression,” says the biographer.
During a trip to Africa, governments praised their intention, but could not count on their support: “Obviously everyone depended on the aid to the development of the United States and most African governments would not have acted openly against the United States at that time”.
Instead, Malcolm X became at the center of the CIA, the American Intelligence Service. The Nation of Islam was also closed. “He knew he would be assassinated and it was a conscious decision on his part to face him,” says Waldschmidt-Nelson. “He probably said: ‘I can’t surrender now.’ After his experience in Mecca, Malcolm has undertaken a completely new path, open to collaborate with the Civil Rights Movement of King and, if necessary, even with the whites.
But it never happened. On February 21, 1965, he was killed on firearm during a lesson by the members of the Islam nation. He was only 39 years old.
Current Legacy
In the 80s, Hip-Hop artists celebrated Malcolm X’s legacy citing extracts from their speeches in their songs: “All this was very resounded,” said Michael E. Sawyer, professor of African American literature and culture at the University of Pittsburgh.
“It was a way to create this type of rebirth of black identity and a political identity”. The songs served by declarations of political war against white racism, the brutality of the police and the impoverishment of marginalized blacks.
In 1992, Spike Lee adapted Malcolm X’s autobiography into a film with Denzel Washington, who also helped to transform the revolutionary figure into an icon that forged the cultural identity of many blacks.
Today, like the efforts of the current government of the United States to whiten history and underestimate the consequences of racism in the formation of the country, and with the movement of Rendi America Great Again (sorceress), opposing any criticism of the alleged past glory of the United States, the words of Malcolm X are more relevant than ever: “You should not be so blind by the patriotism that it is not possible to face reality.”
Source: Terra
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