Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [310]
In his 2003 oral history, Ossie Davis was asked why, in his famous eulogy, he had referred to Malcolm as a “black shining prince.” “Because a prince,” Davis said, “is not a king.” He implied that Malcolm’s premature death cut short his maturity and full potential as a leader. Another way of examining Davis’s insight is asking whether Malcolm’s vision of racial justice was fully realized or achieved. Again, a comparison between Martin and Malcolm is illuminating. Following his assassination, King’s image evolved from an anti-Vietnam protester and controversial civil rights advocate into a defender of a color-blind America. His birthday was celebrated by the U.S. government as a national holiday dedicated to public service. Politicians of all ideological stripes praise King’s nonviolence but rarely examine his fierce impatience with racial injustice and its relevance to our times. By contrast for several decades Malcolm was pilloried and stereotyped for his racial extremism. However, to most black Americans he became an icon of black encouragement, who fearlessly challenged racism wherever he found it and inspired black youth to take pride in their history and culture. These aspects of Malcolm’s public personality were indelibly stamped into the Black Power movement; they were present in the cry “It’s our turn!” by black proponents of Harold Washington in the Democrat’s successful 1983 mayoral race in Chicago. It was partially expressed in the unprecedented voter turnouts in black neighborhoods in Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988 and in the successful electoral bid of Barack Obama in 2008. Malcolm truly anticipated that the black electorate could potentially be the balance of power in a divided white republic.
Malcolm’s revolutionary vision also challenged white America to think and talk differently about race. In an era when some white entertainers still blackened their faces to perform, Malcolm challenged whites to examine the policies and practices of racial discrimination. Before postmodernists wrote about “white privilege,” Malcolm spoke about the destructive effects of racism upon both its victims and its promulgators. Toward the end of his life he could imagine the destruction of racism itself, and the possibility of creating a humane social order devoid of racial injustice. He offered hope that whites could overcome centuries of negative socialization toward blacks, and that a racially just society was achievable. He did not embrace “color blindness” but, like Frantz Fanon, believed that racial hierarchies within society could be dismantled.
Malcolm also changed the discourse and politics of race internationally. During a period when many African-American leaders were preoccupied with efforts to change federal and state policies about race relations, Malcolm saw that for the domestic struggle for civil rights to succeed, it had to be expanded into an international campaign for human rights. The United Nations, not the U.S. Congress or the White House, had to be the central forum. Equally important were the distinctions he made between black politics inside the United States versus liberation politics in Africa and the Caribbean.
Despite his radical rhetoric, as “The Ballot or the Bullet” makes clear, the mature Malcolm believed that African Americans could use the electoral system and voting rights to achieve meaningful change. His position calling for massive black voter education and mobilization was virtually identical to SNCC’s, and would later be embraced by the Black Panther