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By Root 1832 0

directly back to Malcolm. In his autobiography, Carmichael explains that as an undergraduate at Howard University in the early 1960s he had first viewed Bayard Rustin as his political mentor. He attended the public debate between Rustin and Malcolm in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 1961, expecting Bayard “to win the debate hands down.” But like others there he was overwhelmed by Malcolm’s advocacy. “What Malcolm demonstrated that night . . . was the raw power, the visceral potency, of the grip our unarticulated collective blackness held over us. I’ll never forget it.” Three decades after Malcolm’s triumph over Rustin, Carmichael was still inspired by the proud man who personified blackness: “A spotlight picked him out as he strode, slim, erect, immaculately tailored, to the mike on an otherwise darkened stage.”

There is now a tendency of historical revisionism, to interpret Malcolm X through the powerful lens of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: that Malcolm was ultimately evolving into an integrationist, liberal reformer. This view is not only wrong, but unfair to both Malcolm and Martin. King saw himself, like Frederick Douglass, first and foremost as an American, who pursued the civil rights and civic privileges enjoyed by other Americans. King struggled to erase the color bar of stigmatization and exclusion that had relegated racial minorities to second-class citizenship. As in the successful 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, King wanted to convince white Americans that “race doesn’t matter”—in other words, the physical and color differences that appear to distinguish blacks from whites should be meaningless in the application of justice and equal rights.

In striking contrast, Malcolm perceived himself first and foremost as a black man, a person of African descent who happened to be a United States citizen. This was a crucial difference from King and other civil rights leaders. When he was a member of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm saw himself as a member of the tribe of Shabazz, the fictive Asiatic black clan invented by W. D. Fard. But by the final phases of his career, and especially in 1964-65, Malcolm linked his black consciousness to the ideological imperative of self-determination, the concept that all people have a natural right to decide for themselves their own destiny. Malcolm perceived black Americans as an oppressed nation-within-a-nation, with its own culture, social institutions, and group psychology. Its memories of struggles for freedom were starkly different from those of white Americans. At the end of his life he realized that blacks indeed could achieve representation and even power under America’s constitutional system. But he always thought first and foremost about blacks’ interests. Many blacks instinctively sensed this, and loved him for it.

King presented a narrative to white Americans that suggested that Negroes were prepared to protest nonviolently, and even die, to realize the promise of the nation’s Founding Fathers. By contrast, Malcolm proposed that the oppressed had a natural right to armed self-defense. His narrative was that of the history of structural racism—from the transatlantic slave trade to ghettoization—and his remedy was black reparations, compensation for the years of exploitation blacks had endured. This is why Malcolm, had he survived to the 1990s, would not have been an enthusiastic defender of affirmative action as a centerpiece for civil rights reforms. Affirmative action was never designed to promote full employment or to transfer wealth to African Americans. What Malcolm sought was a fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in the United States—not a violent social revolution, but radical and meaningful change nevertheless.

Another critical difference between the two leaders was their relationship to the African-American middle class. King was the product of Atlanta’s well-educated, affluent black petite bourgeoisie. He was a graduate of More-house College and Boston University; Malcolm had left school without completing the ninth grade. His “university