To honor Malcolm X’s 100th birthday, British professor Kehinde Andrews recently spoke with Dr. Jared Ball, co-editor of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X.
Dr. Ball’s book was a reply to Marable’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, published in 2011. Marable purported to have shocking new information that went beyond the mythologized image of Malcolm provided in his autobiography. Marable claimed Malcolm exaggerated his criminal history, had an unstable marriage, and had a homosexual relationship with a White businessman.
Dr. Ball didn’t think the biography was a testament to Malcolm reinventing and improving his life. He saw the book as “a carefully constructed ideological assault on history, on radical politics, on historical and cultural memory, on the very idea of revolution.”
Professor Andrews asked Dr. Ball what Malcolm would say about today’s electoral politics.
An unusual question given Malcolm’s tenure in the Nation of Islam, which suggests that he lacked advanced political ideas. Malcolm was appointed minister in 1953 before being expelled from the organization in 1964. As a dedicated minister in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm advanced the teachings of their leader, Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad was a separatist who advised his followers not to engage in politics.
Muhammad’s restriction stunted Malcolm’s political development for over a decade.
Keith Gilyard’s book John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism describes Killens and his colleagues’ meeting with Malcolm in 1962. These intellectuals interrogated Malcolm about politics. Gilyard wrote, “They found Malcolm rather weak in terms of political theory and economic formulation. Malcolm could not or would not enter into a conversation about democratic socialism or Pan-Africanism, and his hosts thought whimsical his talk of government-sponsored separatism.”
During the same time period, Black conservative journalist George S. Schuyler stated, “On several occasions I appeared on radio broadcasts with [Malcolm X] and was initially astonished by his wide ignorance. When he launched into an excoriation of White people in the name of Islam, I called his attention to the fact that the majority of Moslems were Whites, mentioning the millions in the Middle East, Southern Europe, and elsewhere. He was surprised to learn this and had no ready reply when I pointed out that the Moslems were more responsible for the African slave trade than were the Western Europeans.”
Malcolm believed the Nation of Islam’s myth that a scientist named Yacub developed a devil race in the form of White people. However, after his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm stated that he met White Muslims who embraced him as a fellow human being. Malcolm concluded that Islam was void of racism and suggested that if White Americans learned Islam America’s racial problem would be solved.
Schuyler stated Malcolm did not learn on his trip that “slavery was widespread in Arabia, nor about the slave traffic from Africa to Mecca, where ‘pilgrims’ are still sold for payment of their passage to the holy city.”
In 1964, Malcolm founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).
Malcolm planned to get politically involved since he was free from the Nation of Islam. Unfortunately, he was assassinated in 1965. It’s difficult to imagine Malcolm’s political thought had progressed from where it was at the Killens gathering in 1962, but in his conversation with Professor Andrews, Dr. Ball reinvented Malcolm into one of the most brilliant political thinkers of the twentieth century.
Dr. Ball contended that after leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm began to set the standard for political leadership and radical engagement with in the electoral process. When Malcolm founded the OAAU, he proclaimed that the organization’s political doctrine would be Black nationalism. This means that Black people should run their own candidates and hold whoever is elected accountable to the community.
But these aren’t high standards.
A high school civics textbook’s glossary will include the phrase electoral politics and define it as the process by which voters elect representatives to make choices on their behalf while allowing citizens to hold elected officials accountable.
Malcolm merely articulated a Black version of a basic concept.
According to Peter J. Paris in Black Religious Leaders: Conflict in Unity, Malcolm would eventually “discover the philosophical difficulties implied by the nomenclature ‘Black nationalism,’ which excluded those true revolutionaries in Africa and elsewhere who were not Black.”
In his famous 1964 speech, The Ballot or the Bullet, Malcolm discussed Black nationalism. Malcolm made a statement that his admirers have disregarded. He said, ““We must know what politics plays in our lives. And until we become politically mature, we will always be misled …So the political philosophy of Black nationalism only means that will have to carry on a program of re-education [to] make us become more politically conscious and politically mature.”
It’s clear that Malcolm projected his own lack of political sophistication onto the Black community. However, Dr. Ball claimed that Malcolm was eliminated because of his approach to Pan-Africanism, socialism, armed struggle, radical internationalism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Zionism.
It’s difficult to say which version of Malcolm deviates the most from reality: the reinvented Malcolm of Manning Marable or the reimagined Malcolm of Dr. Jared Ball.
