Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [260]
Yet although he had braved the cold and potential threats to be there, Malcolm’s comments about the effort reported by the Times were neither supportive nor encouraging. “Whites should spend more time influencing whites,” he advised. “These people have good intentions, but they are misdirected.” His complaint—that “Harlem doesn’t need to be told about integration”—largely missed the point.
Malcolm frequently ran into trouble like this in his speeches and remarks in early 1965, partly because he was trying to appeal to so many different constituencies. He took different tones and attitudes depending on which group he was speaking to, and often presented contradictory opinions only days apart. That he was not caught up in these contradictions more often owed to the fact that news traveled slowly across the country, that black politics were underreported, and that speeches were not regularly recorded. In his later speeches outside the United States, he was at his most revolutionary. There the Malcolm who sometimes advocated armed violence would appear, generating significant controversy, as would soon be the case in England. At home, he was more subdued, more conciliatory, yet on many occasions he would alternately praise King and other civil rights leaders one day and ridicule them and liberal Democrats the next. He also counted on the support of the Trotskyists, making overt appeals to them in speeches that seemed to be in support of a socialist system, often at the expense of building alliances to his ideological right. But Malcolm could not restrain himself, because he sincerely believed that blacks and other oppressed Americans had to break from the existing two-party system.
This balancing act partly explains his contradictions, but when it came to his ambivalence about King and movement liberals, Malcolm’s political beliefs may have led him to misunderstand the fundamental importance of the mainstream civil rights struggle to the large majority of black Americans. Whereas he, along with an increasingly large faction of the black left, criticized the flaws in the nonviolent approach, they did not acknowledge how rewarding even incremental progress was. In several speeches, Malcolm explained away Lyndon Johnson’s massive electoral mandate from millions of black voters by claiming that African Americans had been duped and “controlled by Uncle Tom leaders.” It apparently did not occur to him that great social change usually occurs through small transformations in individual behavior; that for blacks who had been denied voting rights for three generations, casting their ballots for reformist candidates wasn’t betraying the cause or being “held on the plantation by overseers.” To them, King was an emancipating figure, not an Uncle Tom.
He similarly misread the sentiment behind the EQUAL school desegregation rally. By 1965, the masses of black parents and children were fed up with substandard schools and the racial tracking of black and Latino children into remedial education. The vigil was part of a citywide struggle for educational reform. Social change that matters to most people occurs around practical issues they see every day, yet Malcolm still failed to appreciate the necessary connection between gradual reforms and revolutionary change.
That same weekend, Jack Barnes and Barry Sheppard of the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance interviewed Malcolm for the group’s publication, Young Socialist. In the resulting article, Malcolm explained why in recent months he had dropped the phrase “black nationalism” to describe his politics. During his first visit to Ghana the previous May, he had been impressed by the Algerian ambassador, “a revolutionary in the true sense of the word.” When