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Dedication

For Assata, Kadiri, Omaje and Ajani In memory of Brother Malcolm X

Preface

I have only ever once stood before an awaiting crowd and been unsure if I would be able to deliver. Looking out at the packed church, my only audience was my children, who were expecting me to do justice to their mother and my wife, Dr Nicole Andrews, whose life had been cut tragically short by cancer at just thirty-seven years of age. Aside from having to break the news of her passing to them, these were the hardest words I have ever had to summon up. I stumbled through thanking so many people for turning out and outlining her achievements: she was the first person I met to achieve a PhD with no corrections at all, and is still the only one I’ve met who, whilst heavily pregnant, has chased crackheads out of a community building, one we were renovating, in order to make sure it stayed on track. I only really found my footing in the eulogy when I joked that ‘Nicole is probably looking down rolling her eyes, but to make this make sense I am going to have quote Malcolm’. Nicole definitely would not have been surprised. I quote Malcolm so frequently that I was once dubbed by a disgraced comedian as a ‘devotee’. Speaking to the congregation, I certainly found a strength in spreading his gospel and I implored the crowd to remember Malcolm’s word’s ‘It’s already too late’ to inspire them to live their lives to the absolute fullest, as Nicole had done. At this point my children were probably numb to the Malcolm references. By then, after their protests, I had stopped playing his speeches during dinner. At two years old my eldest son thought the X-Men toys were in honour of Malcolm. In my house it is not an exaggeration to say that it is all Malcolm all the time. When I ended the eulogy by asking Nicole to ‘say hello to Malcolm for me’, it wasn’t just to put a rhetorical bow on the speech but a genuine expression of my personal and political connection to Malcolm and his work. The purpose of this book is to outline why

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the politics of Malcolm became the foundation of my worldview and how he is the intellectual we need to reshape the future.

I was fortunate to grow up in the wake of the Black Power movement in Britain. My parents’ bookshelves were teeming with classic texts that they had smuggled into the country. As I am typing these words, I am sitting in the shadow of many of the titles I liberated from my family home when I moved out. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, The Black Jacobins by Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James and various books by James Baldwin were the background to my upbringing. I was volunteered to work in the Harriet Tubman bookshop that my parents started as part of the Harambee Organisation they founded in 1973. By the time I picked up the Autobiography of Malcolm X as a teenager I was already well acquainted with Black political literature and had already had my transformative moment, when picking up Stokely Carmichael’s (later Kwame Ture’s) Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism. Malcolm talks about how when he started to read in prison, his thinking was changed as suddenly as the fall of ‘snow off a roof’.1 That was the impact of Stokely Speaks on my confused teenage mind, which had been convinced that to be a good student meant being (or at least acting like) a White one. I will always credit Stokely Speaks for jolting me awake, but it was Malcolm that wiped the crust from my eyes and provided the cold splash of water to truly bring me to consciousness.

Decades after he died, thousands of miles from where he lived, Malcolm’s voice came through with such clarity it felt as though he was talking directly to me. His words resonated because they explained so much of what I was feeling and experiencing at the time, so that it was at once comforting and at the same time a little eerie. Ever since then, and especially with the more that I have read and listened to, Malcolm’s vision has become the basis of my worldview.

Perhaps the most annoying challenge that I get to Malcolm’s thinking being the basis of my approach is that, living in Britain, it is wrong to seek inspiration from an American. This is wrongheaded

on so many levels, but the assumption that there is a ‘British’ way to understand the problem of racism is particularly questionable given that almost all Black people living here can trace our heritage to a former colony within a couple of generations. Part of the reason we are wary of embracing Americans is because the idea of American exceptionalism holds on so strongly over there. It is an odd approach to attempt to replace that with a British version. I promise you, we have no equivalent of Malcolm who is ‘British’, if by that you mean born or raised on this cold, rainy little island. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, given that we haven’t been here in large numbers for very long and most of us still live in the former colonies. In the Caribbean, Europe managed slave plantations by remote control, whereas America was a settler colony, meaning that slavery predated the founding of that nation. The result is that there are more than four times as many Black people in America as there are in the whole of Europe. America is also home to almost twice as many Black people as there are in the Caribbean. The only region in the diaspora with more Black people is Latin America, due to the number of enslaved people being taken to Brazil, which makes that nation’s Black population greater than any country other than Nigeria. In the English-speaking African diaspora there is little point in denying that America is the epicentre of the Black world, which is why, culturally and politically, its impact is outsized. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should blindly follow the American lead, but we shouldn’t turn away out of some misguided national pride. It felt like Malcolm was speaking to me because of the connection of his words to my experiences. Racism is a global system, not a national one. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were sparked because we watched George Floyd die in circumstances all too familiar to the fate of a disproportionate number of Black people in Britain. In housing, education, healthcare and employment we can see the same inequalities as in America playing out on our shores, and the same is true across the world. In the last year of his life Malcolm travelled across Africa and Europe, and was in my hometown, Birmingham, just nine days before he was murdered.

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Malcolm was surprised to discover how popular and well known he was around the world. He was treated like a foreign dignitary in the Middle East and Africa, holding meetings with heads of state and speaking at the Organization of African Unity summit in 1964.2 His popularity has not waned. I have spoken to young people in Brazil, South Africa and Ethiopia where his impact was as profound as it was on me. Malcolm was not speaking solely to America: he was (and still is) speaking for the Black world.

Malcolm X is the perfect example of the problem of seeing Black Americans as being an exceptional, separate part of the diaspora. His mother was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada and both of his parents were members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA ) founded by Marcus and Amy Ashwood Garvey in Jamaica in 1914.3 The UNIA was the largest ever Black political organization, building a membership of between two and eight million members across more than forty countries. 4 It was hugely influential on African-American politics, the latter being the nation where the majority of its members resided. The Nation of Islam, which Malcolm joined while in prison, took much of its organizational style from the UNIA . Radical and liberal groups drew inspiration from the Garvey movement. Malcolm’s father would take him to UNIA meetings as a child and so profound was the impact of the organization on Malcolm’s politics that Kwame Ture would argue his ‘basic ideology was Garveyism’.5 One of the few Black leaders Malcolm publicly praised in speeches was Marcus Garvey, who he described as a ‘bold, brave great Black man who came to America to try and unite Black people’, whilst comparing him to Jesus and Moses.6 Malcolm’s political blueprint coalesced after international trips and he was particularly influenced by his discussions with first Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. His vehicle for revolutionary change, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU ), took its name from the Organization of African Unity, with the explicit intention to directly connect the struggles on the continent with the whole of the diaspora.

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To classify Malcolm’s politics as ‘American’ is frankly ludicrous. As with Black political thought around the world, he was influenced heavily by Africa and the diaspora. In a very real way Malcolm was speaking to me, as a Black citizen of the world, which is why his ideas had such a profound effect upon me and continue to do so.

None of this is academic to me. I am trying to make Malcolm’s blueprint a reality through the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity, which takes its constitution from the OAAU. I have put my money where my mouth is by using the proceeds from this book to fund the Harambee OBU to try to build a global organization in his honour. We are going to hold the Convention of Afrikan People to mark what would have been Malcolm’s onehundredth birthday in May 2025. To say I am invested in Malcolm is an understatement.

Like most people, I came to Malcolm through The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the powerful story of Malcolm’s life (ghostwritten by Alex Haley) which framed Spike Lee’s biopic X in 1992. The book is a masterpiece of storytelling, showing us the young Malcolm whose family was devastated by the racist murder of his father and his mother’s mental health struggles which saw her institutionalized. Young Malcolm ends up living with his sister, Ella Collins, in Boston, and falling into the life of a street hustler, escalating up the ladder of criminality until he is imprisoned for burglary in 1946. At his lowest moment in prison he transforms his life, devouring books and joining the Nation of Islam (NOI). The NOI were a small cultlike organization with deeply questionable beliefs, but they allowed Malcolm to express his frustration with White society. He embraced the NOI ’s anti-White, hateful rhetoric that all White people were devils and became the violent Yang to Martin Luther King’s Yin, arguing for the complete separation of the races. According to Spike Lee’s version of the story, it is only when he leaves the clutches of the NOI (when he finds out their leader is sexually abusing his young secretaries) that Malcolm can become the true civil rights spokesperson he was meant to be. His visit to Mecca in 1964 and adoption of orthodox Islam is meant to signify his evolution

Preface

into the mainstream. According to this narrative, before his tragic assassination he was supposedly ready to embrace King and the civil rights struggle to redeem America and the world. But like all madefor-TV narratives, this is a fairy tale, and a very dangerous one at that. Malcolm was murdered on 21 February 1965, just a few months shy of his fortieth birthday, because he laid out the blueprint for Black liberation. Now, a hundred years after his birth, it is the perfect time to rid ourselves of the Malcolm myths and truly engage with his politics of liberation.

Make It Plain

I have lost count of the amount of times during Black History Month that I have heard complaints people are tired of hearing about ‘Martin, Malcolm and Rosa Parks’. It is true Malcolm is one of the most well-known Black political figures, a household name and icon, whose autobiography continues to sell millions of copies. Spike Lee’s film starring Denzel Washington in the 1990s was a hit and in 2020 Netflix created a mini-series called Who Killed Malcolm X? But the biggest irony about Malcolm is that although he remains a cultural idol he is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented figures in history. Reverend Albert Cleage, who organized with Malcolm, warned that:

Malcolm has become a symbol, a dream, a hope, a nostalgia for the past, a mystique, a shadow sometimes without substance, ‘our shining prince’ to whom we do obeisance, about whom we write heroic poems. But Malcolm is in danger of being lost in a vast tissue of distortions which now constitute the Malcolm myth.1

The Malcolm myth has two sides, which were being formed even before he died. Malcolm shot to national prominence when the Nation of Islam (NOI ) was featured on Mike Wallace’s five-part series The Hate That Hate Produced in 1959. Although he always pledged fealty to his leader Elijah Muhammad, it was Malcolm who was the star of the show, with his intelligence, wit and charisma leaping out of the television screens. But the documentary framed the NOI and Malcolm as peddlers of hate, fiery preachers who wanted America to burn in vengeance for the evils done to African-Americans.

Nobody Can Give You Freedom

Wallace described the series as an examination of ‘Black racism’ and ‘Black supremacy’, setting the tone for how Malcolm would be viewed in the mainstream. At the same time as the non-violent civil rights movement was making legislative in-roads, Malcolm became viewed as the violent ‘evil twin’ of the peaceful Martin Luther King.2 The press vilification of Malcolm was so thorough that it became a common theme of his speeches, often warning his audiences to not let the press distort their view of his personality. He recounted a story of having a conversation with a White woman on a plane for almost an hour before she noticed his suitcase was marked with the initials MX and asked what surname he could have that started with an X. When she finally realized she was talking to the Malcolm X she was stunned, and exclaimed ‘You’re not what I was looking for’. Malcolm had a similar conversation with a White student at Oxford and explained their surprise was due to their ‘looking for the horns that had been created by the press. Someone who was out to kill all White people, [who] was a segregationist, rabble rouser, extremist, subversive, seditious and someone who couldn’t hold a conversation with just anyone’.3 But Malcolm did not find this demonization of him problematic, in fact he revelled in his role, wearing his ‘hate teacher’ badge of honour with pride.

He laughed off his misrepresentation in the press, telling a group of White students at Michigan State that it would not have the desired effect of turning the Black masses against him, but the opposite:

the only one this type of propaganda alienates is this Negro who’s always up in your face begging you for what you have or begging you for a chance to live in your neighbourhood to work on your job or marry one of your women.4

In an interview before he died, Malcolm said that he understood ‘the only person who can organize the man on the streets is the one who is unacceptable to the White community, they don’t trust the other kind’,5 and as we will see in this book, he spent a lot of

time lambasting Black spokespeople who defended White supremacy. Malcolm’s appeal was precisely because he was unapologetic, and The Hate That Hate Produced sparked a wealth of admiration for his speaking the hard truths. He was someone who never ducked controversy, declaring at the London School of Economics: ‘I come here to tell the truth, and if the truth is anti-American, then blame the truth, don’t blame me.’6

The more insidious myth than that of ‘Malcolm the fiery hate preacher’ that sought to alienate him from the masses is the version that tried to co-opt him into the American project.7 After his assassination, the figure of the angry martyr for the revolution was a dangerous one and therefore his image was recreated to be more palatable. The new myth was that Malcolm died on a path of evolution to embracing civil rights, having rejected his wicked ways. Esteemed academic Michael Eric Dyson was relieved that Malcolm was ‘finally to make his rage work in the best interests of black folk . . . learning to work with people like Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders’.8 The academic text that best captures the later Malcolm myth is Manning Marable’s Life of Reinvention, which caused an uproar on publication in 2011. The book is a detailed memoir which is seriously undermined by engaging in personal gossip, speculating amongst other things that Malcolm was gay, bad in bed and had affairs, based on the flimsiest evidence. It was so poorly received that a collection of activists and academics, including those who knew Malcolm, responded with the Lie of Reinvention. 9 If you are interested in the beef then I recommend reading that book; but for our purposes I want to focus on the truly damaging aspect of the myth that Marable feeds into: the notion that Malcolm reinvented himself into ‘a quintessentially American’ civil rights leader. In a telling passage he argues that ‘despite his radical rhetoric, the mature Malcolm believed that African Americans could use electoral rights and the voting system to achieve meaningful social change’.10 The use of the word ‘mature’ is a patronising judgement of Malcolm’s radical, supposedly childish prior incarnation before he embraced democracy. We will discuss

Nobody Can Give You Freedom

the fallacious idea that using the electoral system is at odds with radical politics later on, but it is clear from Marable’s work that Malcolm was supposed to have emerged from his radical, separatist, extremist cocoon to become a civil rights butterfly. In order to uphold this lie, the clear revolutionary programme that Malcolm devised had to be erased from public consciousness. In service of this aim, or more generously, as a result of it, we have an academic consensus that ‘Malcolm X was eloquent and relentless in his analysis of the problems facing Black America, but he never spoke a solution’;11 that he did not ‘formulate any programmatic response to America’s racial strife’.12 We are left with a Malcolm who was strident, unapologetic, but who rejected his violent ways and was in search of a fresh political programme for his new self. That is a Malcolm that can be put on an American postage stamp and one who offers no concrete revolution for the Black masses. Ironically, given how important the Autobiography of Malcolm X has been to so many, including myself, it is that book that is most responsible for this dangerous Malcolm myth.

Underlying the problems with the Autobiography is that it was ghost-written by Alex Haley, who had interviewed Malcolm for Playboy magazine before they worked on the memoir. The pair took part in hours of interviews and Malcolm would write chapters and send them over to Haley for review, so he was clearly heavily involved. The book was unfinished when Malcolm died, so we will never know what he thought of how Haley put it together. But author Ishmael Reed quotes his editor, who worked with the book’s original editor, Anne Freidgood, who told him that ‘an angry Malcolm X burst into the offices of Doubleday and threw the manuscript of the Autobiography of Malcolm X across the room shouting “this manuscript has nothing to do with me”.’13 Having read the book after reflecting on Malcolm X’s life and legacy it would not surprise me if this account is true. The more times I read it the angrier I become about the final version.

To be charitable to Haley, the aim of the book changed as it was being written. When Malcolm started the project he was a member

of the Nation of Islam and wanted to use the book to help spread the word and solidify his standing with the leader of the sect, Elijah Muhammad. The focus on his transformation from a street hustler who ended up in jail to becoming an upstanding member of the Nation of Islam was meant to demonstrate the power of the organization (and its leader). Much of the book is about his days on the street, the gritty details of life as a hustler; in fact, you could argue that is the real emphasis of the project. But by the end of his time working on the book Malcolm had completely split with the NOI and was openly condemning the hypocrisy of Muhammad and the limits of the organization. Malcolm was charting a new course, having established the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU ) in 1964, and no doubt would have liked to use the book to promote his vision for racial justice. But there really is no worse source than the Autobiography if you are looking for the real Malcolm’s practical programme.

You get as much information on the OAAU as you would from reading a Black Panther comic. Consider the fact that the organization that Malcolm had dedicated his life to building, which he was recruiting members for and travelling around the world promoting while he was writing his autobiography, Malcolm mentions once in the original book. It is impossible that he did not discuss his work with Haley. In fact, it was Marable that revealed there are pages of notes on the OAAU taken by Haley in the process of writing the book.14 Marable recounted being given brief access to these pages by the private collector who owns them in the boot of the man’s car. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture announced that they had purchased the ‘missing pages’ from the autobiography and I was very excited because I thought these were the OAAU notes. When I visited, I found out it was actually a chapter called ‘The Negro’, which had been omitted and was fascinating to read, which we will explore in Chapter 7. But it wasn’t those missing pages. They may never see the light of day, but there is no chance that Malcolm didn’t want the OAAU to feature widely in his autobiography.

Nobody Can Give You Freedom

Haley has become a controversial figure after the Autobiography because of the fiasco relating to his book, Roots, which was also immortalized into a TV mini-series telling the story of Kunta Kinte, who is meant to be Haley’s direct ancestor from Senegambia. The book and TV series were a cultural phenomenon, catapulting Haley to fame. One of the most prominent books on my parents’ bookshelves was a first edition of Roots. But the truth of Haley’s account was undermined when he was accused of plagiarizing sections of the book and had to pay the equivalent of half a million dollars in damages.15 Haley admitted that the book was what he called ‘faction’, a blurring of fact and fiction, but always maintained that the overall story was true and that he was descended from Kunta Kinte, although there is debate as to how truthful even this history was. I will avoid leaping into the debate about Roots, but it is notable that both of Haley’s important works raise serious questions about his credibility. Haley was an odd choice to ghostwrite the Autobiography as he fit firmly into Malcolm’s category of a ‘bourgeois type [of Negro] who blinds himself to the conditions of his people and is satisfied with token solutions’.16 Haley was a supposedly ‘liberal Republican’ at a time when the party was opposed to even the modest gains of the civil rights movement.17 This made Marable sceptical of Haley’s reading, believing that that his political views impacted the writing. Marable revealed that Haley had written more than one note on the draft which described Malcolm as a ‘demagogue’. Given Malcolm’s original intention for the Autobiography to be about his own personal redemption at the hands of Elijah Muhammad and the NOI , Haley’s political views might not have mattered originally. In fact, the Nation of Islam embraced both the American Nazi party and the KKK , so Haley was more progressive than many of their bedfellows. But once the purpose became to showcase Malcolm’s political views and programme, there was perhaps no more inappropriate author to do the translation. As we will discuss later, Malcolm was least trusting of Black people who did the work of White supremacy.

Haley put a Black face upon the misrepresentation of Malcolm X.

In case you think I am being paranoid about Haley’s work and intentions, he was recently accused of having fabricated quotes from Martin Luther King in his 1965 interview with the icon in Playboy magazine, to make it seem as though the civil rights leader was directly criticizing Malcolm. Historian Jonathan Eig has compared a transcript of the interview between Haley and King to what was published in the magazine. He found that Haley had completely made up the line he attributed to King: ‘I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice’. Haley directed Martin Luther King’s condemnation of ‘fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence’ directly to Malcolm, when King never does this in the transcript.18 There is little doubt that Haley’s politics influenced his misrepresentation of Malcolm. The only real question is whether this was a case of doing a hidden master’s bidding of his own accord or if there was a hand on the whip coercing him into it. We know that the FBI were surveilling Black activists (and continue to do so), with a particular focus on King and Malcolm. There is a whole book called Malcolm X: The FBI File that includes some of the released surveillance notes. Malcolm even went public about a time when the FBI approached him to give them information about the Nation of Islam.19 We also know that as part of the FBI ‘counter-intelligence programme’ (COINTELPRO ) that the agency would plant agents within organizations and fake correspondence between groups to create discord. Part of the criticism of Marable’s Life of Reinvention is that he relies on letters that we cannot trust were genuinely written by the protagonists, given the Feds’ practice of faking correspondence between people to sow distrust. The FBI ’s infiltration of the Black freedom struggle was so total that Malcolm’s bodyguard, the first person to tend to him after he was shot was an informant. There is no doubt that the FBI were aware of the Autobiography , its contents and the danger it presented if Malcolm’s political programme was acted upon. This was particularly true after he died. Director of the Feds at the time, J. Edgar Hoover

Nobody Can Give You Freedom was obsessed with stopping the ‘rise of a Black messiah’20 and in death Malcolm could have become the martyr that rallied the Black nation around his radical vision. It is widely accepted that the FBI arranged for Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton to be drugged and then murdered in his sleep in 1969, 21 so I have absolutely no trouble believing they would have a hand in editing the Autobiography to present a palatable Malcolm myth. The alternative reading of the situation is actually still more depressing: that you don’t need a conspiracy to produce the revised Malcolm myth, given how efficiently the system of White supremacy works on its own. Whatever the case, the Autobiography laid the framework for the Malcolm we celebrate today: the angry, reformed man with no political programme.

Spike Lee’s 1992 film X only compounded the issue. Based on the Autobiography , it perpetuated the myth with a feature- length focus on Malcolm the hoodlum and convert. It also reduced Malcolm to a symbol, the X that was slapped on hats, T- shirts and jackets. The film became a classic due to Denzel Washington’s virtuoso performance as Malcolm. If you have sat through the more than three- hour epic, imagine it with pretty much any other actor in the lead role and I promise you it would have been lost to the dustbin of history. It was an empty gesture, a ‘prestige project’ 22 that pioneered movie marketing by packaging and selling the ‘dangerous Malcolm made safe’ myth. You leave the marathon movie with absolutely no insight into what Malcolm offered the world, other than a tragic redemption story. The end of the film perfectly sums up the limits of the project. Lee decided to ask South African president Nelson Mandela to end the film by reciting the lines from Malcolm’s 1964 speech at the second founding rally of the OAAU. It demonstrates the power of the Malcolm myth that someone who spent years making a film about him thought Mandela would be a good spokesperson for his message. As we will discuss later on, Malcolm savagely condemned the 1963 March on Washington for being a sell- out of the radical feelings of the Black masses. He chastized its integrated nature, asking:

who ‘ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “We Shall Overcome . . Suum Day . .” while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor?’23

If Malcolm had this to say of the minority Black population in America, I can only imagine what he would have said about Mandela, who was fighting a White minority. Apartheid was the most vicious, violent and open system of racial oppression in the postwar period. There was an armed struggle which Mandela was a part of and which landed him in prison on Robben Island. Mandela admitted that he unilaterally negotiated with the apartheid leaders and sold out the revolutionary struggle in order to have a smooth transition to a so-called democracy.24 He made a show of embracing F. W. De Klerk, the last apartheid president, who served as vicepresident in Mandela’s initial government. He is celebrated by the West because he was a puppet-master who sold out the revolution and led South Africa merrily singing down the continued path of colonial exploitation it is currently still on. Mandela was so far gone in approval-seeking that he actually flew into an all-White settlement to have tea with Betsie Verwoerd, the wife of the architect of apartheid.25 Malcolm would have savaged Mandela as nothing but a modern-day Uncle Tom African leader, but Lee chose him to conclude the message of the film. If that wasn’t bad enough, the final line of the Malcom speech Mandela was supposed to quote ends with the words ‘by any means necessary’, but he actually refused to utter those words because he was so committed to non-violence. You couldn’t make this up. Spike Lee actually asked the African equivalent of Martin Luther King to close the film about Malcolm X and had to edit in footage of Malcolm saying his infamous line because it went against Mandela’s sell-out sensibilities! Ironically, given the dubious nature of the source material in the Autobiography, this may have been the most fitting ending for this timid and inaccurate film. It was wrong to expect anything from the movie.

Nobody Can Give You Freedom

Kwame Ture fiercely criticized Lee’s approach to the film, arguing that he was –

selling his people for a fistful of dollars. Malcolm X was a revolutionary . . . Can you imagine for one minute Hollywood giving Malcolm X a hand? You might as well ask Zionists to make a film about [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat.26

The almost total acceptance of the ‘tamed’ Malcolm myth has meant that he can now be claimed by anyone to suit their own purposes. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s wife, just a few years after he died, warned that the ‘constant refrain that my husband was changing his beliefs’ had allowed ‘some people to invoke Malcolm’s name to justify some highly unorganized, anarchistic ventures that he would never have dreamed of becoming involved in’.27 It is worth stating from the outset that Malcolm was not a civil rights leader, he was the fiercest critic of the civil rights movement you will ever hear. Unlike the civil rights leaders, Malcolm did not believe that America could be redeemed if only Black people could access the levers of power through voting rights so that they could reform racism out of the system. He was also not in favour of violence for the sake of violence, and in fact never committed any political violence during his career. Just because he spoke to some left-wing organizations after he left the Nation of Islam this didn’t mean he was a Communist. Perhaps the most bizarre claim to Malcolm’s legacy is by the ultra-right-wing African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who dubbed himself Clarence X.

I came across this nonsense when I saw a podcast episode Clarence X and thought it must have been about a member of the NOI . It is difficult to explain my confusion when I realized it was about the Supreme Court judge. I assumed it must have been some misplaced White liberal joke.28 The podcast took a deep dive into Thomas’s life, talking to people who knew him when he was younger and charting his rise to become the most powerful supreme court justice in the USA . If Malcolm would have laid into Mandela, only God knows

what he would have had to say about Thomas. The second ever Black supreme court justice was picked for the role because George Bush senior needed a Black person to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall, who had retired due to ill health. Marshall was the lawyer who argued in front of the Supreme Court against racial segregation in the infamous Brown versus the Board of Education case in 1954, which he successfully won. On a related side note, Marshall thought Malcolm was a ‘low-life’ and refused to even acknowledge him in the street.29 This was likely because Malcolm spent so much time slamming that court victory as nothing but an empty token gesture. When Marshall retired Bush wanted a strong conservative judge to join the Supreme Court but needed to replace the first, and only, Black justice with another brother (this was 1991; they were not ready to even consider a Black woman). In selecting Thomas, Bush started a new era of affirmative action, placing Black conservatives in positions of power to be the Black faces of White supremacy, regardless of their qualifications. Even after Trump has packed the court with arch-conservatives, Thomas remains the most extreme example. He consistently votes to weaken voting rights protections, against affirmative action and even voted to allow the state of Texas to execute a Black defendant before the DNA evidence against him could be tested (thankfully, he was in the minority on that issue).30

Just days before Bush nominated Thomas, Marshall warned at his retirement press conference that he didn’t want a Black justice picked as a ‘ploy . . . to do wrong’. As if predicting the future, he explained that ‘there’s no difference between a White snake and a Black snake, they both bite’.31 It is so routine to call him Uncle Thomas32 there is no chance that Malcolm could have resisted the poetry. I struggle to think of any Black public figure so clearly the antithesis of Malcolm, so I couldn’t fathom how on earth the Clarence X label had stuck as anything other than parody.

Apparently, in college Thomas was obsessed with Malcolm, constantly playing his recordings and fashioning himself as a supposed Black nationalist. The crux of this appears to have been a misreading of Malcolm so bad you wonder whether those who indulge in it

Nobody Can Give You Freedom

are literate. For instance, we are assured by American so-called legal scholar Stephen Smith that ‘for anyone who cares to listen, Justice Thomas’s opinions thunder with the strong black-nationalist voice typically associated with one of Thomas’s personal heroes, Malcolm X’.33 Such illogic is only possible because of the Malcolm myth that removes any serious understanding of his political framework. Just because Thomas and Malcolm were both anti-civil rights does not mean that they were in unison. Malcolm thought civil rights could never provide freedom because they do not go far enough. Thomas is against civil rights because he feels that they stand in the way of Black people pulling their sleeves up and making progress without support from the state. Malcolm didn’t believe we should rely on White people (affirmative action etc.) because the Western system was incapable of providing justice for Black people. Thomas sets store in self-sufficiency because he has been deluded into believing that America is the land of milk and honey for all those who work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Malcolm called for a revolution that would have started with knocking people like Thomas off their White supremacy-appointed perches. Malcolm would have denounced Thomas as one of those ‘Negroes who have been put in that position by the White man himself. They’re not speaking for Black people, they’re saying exactly what the White man who put them in the position wants to hear them say’.34 It is utterly ludicrous to connect the two. As respected legal scholar Patricia Williams explains ‘Thomas invokes a mythical image of Malcolm X to serve his own needs’.35 Unfortunately, he is by no means the only one, and hopefully this book will help you to weed out the false prophets claiming links to Malcolm’s legacy.

Nincompoop with a PhD

Malcolm’s story has fascinated authors and publishers since the publication of the Autobiography. The numerous reprints of his memoir were joined by a number of biographies, notably Marable’s in 2011,

which was followed by Payne and Payne’s The Dead Are Arising, which aimed to give context to Malcolm’s life and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.36 But for all of the millions of words and hours of film and documentary dedicated to Malcolm his political message remains hidden. This is not a biography; there are plenty of places you can go to learn about the man. My aim is to simply outline Malcolm’s political ideas, his programme for revolution, which was clear and spelled out before he died. There have been scant attempts to do this work previously. The most recent demonstrates the problem of Black intellectual thought being co-opted into the university.

When I saw title of the book Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X by Michael Sawyer, I was both excited and intrigued. But as soon I opened the book I understood why I needed to write this one. In the first few pages Sawyer explains that his project was ‘employing the discipline of philosophy to examine the thought of Malcolm X’.37 He wanted to recognise the importance of Malcolm as a political philosopher and to elevate his theory into the academic canon. I can attest to the allure of this idea, as Malcolm’s ideas are the theoretical basis for all my work and I have felt the need to justify his work to my colleagues. Sawyer raises the issue of the lack of writing from Malcolm, because academia conflates intellect with written production. Just like Sawyer, in the past I have stressed the importance of Malcolm’s spoken word as being just as legitimate as though he had written those words down. While writing this book I gained even greater appreciation for just how much intellectual work Malcolm produced. The Last Speeches, a book which compiles only the speeches and interviews from the last three weeks of his life, is 266 pages long. This doesn’t even include everything. I know of at least two missing speeches from his time in Birmingham during this period. I have based this book on reading and listening to over fifty speeches and interviews spanning 1959 to 1965. There is no doubt that Malcolm has a robust body of work that can measure up to anything produced by academia. If I had written this book a few years ago, my intention might well have been to argue

Nobody

that Malcolm’s work be allowed legitimacy within academia. But I now realize that is the wrong way to treat his scholarship. Whilst his work is certainly just as credible as anything produced by the esteemed academics, he is not a political philosopher because his work is far more important than that. In fact, the discipline of political philosophy has no credibility to examine Malcolm’s work.

In Sawyer’s book, as in most academic texts on Black thinkers, the tendency is to evaluate Black political thought in relation to the established (mostly White) scholars. The problem with academia is not just that the curriculum is White, but the entire framework of knowledge is White. The founding fathers of the disciplines are dead White men who didn’t just hold racist beliefs, their entire intellectual frameworks were shaped by White supremacy.38 Academia may have belatedly opened up to Black students and to a lesser extent welcomed more Black academics into faculty, but the foundations and practices remain deeply rooted in White supremacy. If Malcolm were alive today, there is a good chance that with his passion for reading and intellectual brilliance he would have become an academic. But if he’d done so he would not have been Malcolm. Malcolm’s intellectual production is so ground-breaking precisely because he was not an academic. To explain this, we need only consider Sawyer’s ‘difficulty of disentangling the activist Malcolm X from the political philosopher’.39

As much as we would like to think that academic notions of knowledge have been transformed, they remain rooted in a belief that thought must be separated from action. That is why the university exists, to host the esteemed intellectual who theorizes the world at a distance. The idea that there is an ‘activist’ and a ‘philosopher’ and these two positions are somehow distinct sums up the problems with academia. I was listening to a speech made by Malcolm at Michigan State University in 1963 and there is a telling moment where he catches himself when speaking, and says ‘If I raise my voice, please forgive me. I’m not doing it out of disrespect. I’m just speaking from my heart and you get it exactly how the feelings let it out.’40 In 1963 Malcolm was the second most sought-after

speaker on American college campuses (after racist US Senator Barry Goldwater), so he spoke at enough universities to know that the students were used to their dispassionate professors outlining the ‘facts’. I have lost count of how many times I have been told ‘you are so passionate’, as though caring about your work is somehow an aberration. I have almost completely stopped attending academic conferences because I cannot sit through people reading out densely written, deeply boring papers. I am not exaggerating when I say to do so actually hurts my soul. Contrast the standard academic performance with a Malcolm speech and they could not be more different. If you want to understand Malcolm, the place to go is to the speeches, but you need to really listen to them. The pitch, the cadence, the jokes (Malcolm was hilarious), but just as important are the audiences, who are not passive but constantly participating with interjections – ‘Preach, Malcolm!’; applause, laughter and affirmation. Maya Angelou explained that when Malcolm would turn up to speak ‘he couldn’t talk for the first four or five minutes, the people would be making such a praise shout to him’.41 It’s impossible to imagine Malcolm the academic having that effect. We academics can barely get our students to turn up at all! This relationship with the audience is not just incidental, it goes to the heart of Malcolm’s importance and the limits of academic knowledge. To be able to consistently draw hundreds of people to speeches, carrying the crowd along in agreement, is a testament to the power of the ideas being conveyed. It is even more so when we consider who made up those audiences.

Malcolm drew his legitimacy from representing the masses, the grassroots. These are exactly the people who are excluded from the university. The academic bubble means that at conferences and in articles we are only speaking to other university-trained elites. Even the student body is highly selective. Depending on where you work, you can spend your entire career speaking and writing to mainly White staff and mostly White students, with a sprinkling of those Black people lucky enough to enter the hallowed halls of your institution. But even if you work at an historically Black

Nobody

college or university your career will be determined by how well you can engage with the Whiteness of academia. That means avoiding or ignoring the audiences that sustained Malcolm. But it is this organic connection to Black communities that makes Malcolm’s intellect so vital. There have been attempts to incorporate these kinds of approaches into the university. For instance, Patricia Hill Collins explained that for a Black feminist approach scholars must have an ‘ethic of personal accountability’, where the community knows they can trust you.42 But any academic reading this will have to admit that this is not standard practice and that the fundamentals of our jobs – writing, teaching, admin – largely keep us away from Black communities. Your promotion or application for tenure will depend on how much time you have committed to the academic bubble. This is the reason that Malcolm distrusted Black academics so much, because we are ultimately in bourgeois positions defined by and in service to Whiteness. Malcolm’s work was, and remains, better than that produced in the academy because it was rooted in the reality of the struggle. His activism is his philosophy, they are utterly inseparable. It is impossible to theorize about the struggle without being engaged in it. You cannot understand a concept like Blackness separate from the communities and activism that defines it. There is no way to comprehend White supremacy without appreciating the standpoint of those suffering the harsh end of it, or ‘catching hell’ as Malcolm would say. So, I am not going to try to justify Malcolm to the academy. I am not going to give you Malcolm via dead White men like Marx, Sartre or even dead Black men like Du Bois. I am going to give you Malcolm through Malcolm, his speeches and interviews. But, the obvious question this raises after everything I have just said is how can you trust this author, this particular ‘nicompoop with a PhD’ when you can’t rely on the rest?

It is true, I am a recovering academic and bear the title of ‘professor’, which I view in a similar way to that of ‘chief constable’. I’ve been trained in the ways of Whiteness and sold my soul to the academic industrial complex to reach where I am today. But

I was also fortunate enough to avoid being taught about race, racism and Blackness in the university. My parents’ bookshelf and activism were my introduction to ideas about Blackness and fights against White supremacy. British school curricula are allergic to talking about racism and I graduated from the Whitest psychology degree in human history at the University of Bath. By the time I took a sociology second year class on ‘race and racism’ I had already formed the framework of my thought that was so deservedly scornful of the mainstream view the professor had to give me a great mark. Although I have all the White credentials, just like Malcolm I would say that ‘my alma mater was books’.43 Malcolm’s intellectual ideas, along with a host of other Black radical thinkers, have been nurturing me for as long as I can remember being able to think. Of everything I am paid to teach and write about now, I learnt none of it in a university. I learnt it all from Malcolm.

Theory generated in struggle is simply better than that produced in the bubble of academia. Often these ideas travel into the university but they are slower to do so and their radical impulse is removed. When I heard about Critical Race Theory (CRT ) for the first time its ideas sounded like an echo. That’s because I had already heard that racism was a permanent feature of society and the so-called civil rights gains were actually mirages. Those are two of the key premises that Malcolm had been testifying to decades before they reached the halls of academia. So far behind were universities that it actually made Malcolm look like a prophet. I never take the label of critical race theorist because his work is my theoretical basis and once the ideas make it into the academy they are lacking Malcolm’s radical solution. CRT embraces the critique but ignores the obvious remedy. If racism is a permanent feature of Western society, then the only solution is revolution.

Academic Cedric Robinson is much praised for his book Black Marxism , where he is credited with developing the idea of racial capitalism. I promise this notion was circulating long before in Black movement circles. One of the concepts that I always teach

Nobody Can Give You Freedom

which is from Robinson is that the Negro, with no history, culture or civilization, was a creation of White supremacy in order to justify slavery.44 The Negro is more than just an identity, it is an essential creation that made the West possible through our unpaid labour and torture. But as valuable as Robinson’s work is, I struggle to recommend it to students, let alone share it amongst communities off campus. It is a dense academic treatise that is clearly written to try to ‘elevate’ Black thought to the White academy. But when I visited the Schomburg Centre I found that the missing chapter from the autobiography was on Malcolm’s articulation of the Negro, and I realized it was written more than twenty years before Robinson. I was delighted to find Malcolm’s words. They were readable, outlining the same concept but in ways that were readily understandable. Not only is the theory better, but it is more accessible. This goes back to the importance of the audience. Malcolm was speaking to the masses and so had to present his ideas in ways they could understand. Academics’ default audience is the university, which is framed by Whiteness. The convoluted, jargon-filled, unnecessarily complex and deeply boring style of presentation is the standard by which we are judged. I remember when I wrote my PhD, my supervisor said it was unscholarly to use the phrase ‘Marcus Garvey never set foot in Africa’. I dread to think what he made of the shrug emoji I put in my last book. Malcolm told us to ‘make it plain’ to ensure that we are reaching the right people, not the esteemed White people.45 I have also tried, with varying degrees of success, to put that politics into action. Following my PhD and learning about the OAAU, I founded the Organisation of Black Unity using the constitution of Malcolm’s organization. This has now become the Harambee OBU and, as I will explain later, we are trying to build the organization following Malcolm’s blueprint. This includes a website called Make It Plain, where we attempt to popularize Black radical ideas in an effort to help develop the programme of political education that Malcolm saw as so vital. For me this is not an abstract theoretical discussion but a living theory that I am applying in the real world. One of my

main motivations for writing this book is to convince people to join the movement to make Malcolm’s vision a reality.

Malcolm left behind the most important intellectual analysis and practical programme to overturn White supremacy. The Malcolm myth has distorted how we understand him to such an extent that he has become an empty symbol. For those looking to bring freedom to Black people worldwide, Malcolm is the first person we should look to for a framework to move forward. The purpose of this book is to make plain Malcolm’s diagnosis and his solution so that we can pick up the mantle and create the revolution, which is as necessary as it has ever been.

I also stress that there was only evolution in Malcolm’s thought after his departure from the Nation of Islam, and that you can see similar themes in his speeches from his time both in and outside of that organization. Therefore, you will find no chronology of events. I have picked out the key parts of Malcolm’s ideas and for the most part I have drawn on his speeches interchangeably (from when he was in the NOI and after he left). When necessary I have indicated where there were departures from earlier thought or evolution in his ideas, but for the most part I have used quotations from both time periods without making a distinction between them. The fact this is possible is testament to the continuity in his thought.

Inevitably, in a book like this I am attempting to speak for Malcolm, drawing on his work to outline what his position would have been if he were alive today. But I obviously cannot know what Malcolm would actually say had he lived. Martyrdom has frozen him at his most revolutionary, uncompromising best. The depressing lesson of history is that the longer people live, the more they disappoint. It may well be that an older Malcolm would have ended up a fullyfledged member of the civil rights fraternity, running for elected office and leaving Betty to marry a White woman. I strongly doubt it with all my being, but I honestly cannot tell you what might have gone on in his head in his later life; I don’t profess to be a medium.

Nobody Can Give You Freedom

What I can do with certainty (and a whole load of receipts) is give you the real mission of Malcolm X based on his impressive body of work. If you are serious about fighting for racial justice, it is a political programme that, whatever your views are, you must genuinely engage with. Once you cut though the noise of the Malcolm myth you will find a legacy that either terrifies or inspires you.

9780241681176

KEHINDE ANDREWS

Can Give You Freedom

N obody Can Give You Freedom

The Real Mission of Malcolm X

Kehinde Andrews

ALLEN LANE

Dedication

Preface

Preface

Preface

Preface

Make It Plain

Nincompoop with a PhD