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By Root 1947 0

Party in Oakland in the 1970s. But outside of the United States, despite his respect for Nkrumah, he did not see electoral politics and gradual social change as a viable approach for transforming postcolonial societies. He endorsed revolutionary violence against the apartheid regime in South Africa, and guerrilla warfare against the neocolonial regime in Congo and in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. Nelson Mandela, who in 1961 founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation), the secret armed wing of the African National Congress, was a hero to Malcolm because of his identification with guerrilla attacks against white South Africa. Although today Mandela is perceived as a racial reconciliator, much like King, a half century ago the future president of South Africa largely shared Malcolm’s views about the necessity of armed struggle in Africa. So the view that there were “two Malcolm Xs”—one who advocated violence when he was a Black Muslim, and a second who espoused nonviolent change—is absolutely wrong. To Malcolm, armed self-defense was never equated with violence for its own sake.

Malcolm envisioned a modern version of Pan-Africanism, based on a global antiracism. The United Nations World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, was in many ways a fulfillment of Malcolm’s international vision. Hundreds of religious, social justice, and civil rights nongovernmental organizations engaged in transnational dialogues, examining racism from a truly global perspective. Of the 11,500 delegates and observers, about three thousand were Americans, and nearly two-thirds of that number were black Americans. Malcolm believed that black freedom in the United States depended on internationalist geopolitical strategy.

The unrealized dimension of Malcolm’s racial vision was that of black nationalism. A political ideology that originated before the Civil War, black nationalism was based on the assumption that racial pluralism leading to assimilation was impossible in the United States. So cynical were many nationalists about the incapacity of whites to overcome their own racism that they occasionally negotiated with white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, in the mistaken belief that they were more honest about their racial attitudes than liberals. Yet as Malcolm’s international experiences became more varied and extensive, his social vision expanded. He became less intolerant and more open to multiethnic and interfaith coalitions. By the final months of his life he resisted identification as a “black nationalist,” seeking ideological shelter under the race-neutral concepts of Pan-Africanism and Third World revolution. He had also come to reject violence for its own sake, but he never abandoned the nationalists’ ideal of “self-determnation,” the right of oppressed nations or minorities to decide for themselves their own political futures. Given the election of Barack Obama, it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens. If legal racial segregation was permanently in America’s past, Malcolm’s vision today would have to radically redefine self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be “post-racial.”

Finally, and perhaps most important, Malcolm X represents the most important bridge between the American people and more than one billion Muslims throughout the world. Before immigration law reform in 1965, the most prominent group of self-identified American Muslims was the heretical Nation of Islam. As Malcolm learned more about orthodox Islam, he became determined to propagate the meaning of that faith to audiences regardless of race. Even before his death, Malcolm became widely known and well respected across the Islamic and Arab diasporas. He reached out to Islamic sects and organizations reflecting widely divergent opinions and theological tenets—Wahhabi Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Nasserite socialists in Egypt, African Sufis in Senegal, the Muslim Brotherhood