Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [5]
“As-salaam alaikum,” Malcolm proclaimed, extending the traditional Arabic greeting. “Walaikum salaam,” hundreds chanted back. But before he could say anything further, there was an unexpected disturbance about six or seven rows back from center stage. “Get your hands out of my pockets!” a man shouted to the person next to him. Both men stood up and began to tussle, diverting everyone’s attention. From the stage, Malcolm yelled out, “Hold it! Hold it!”
The two principal rostrum guards, Charles X Blackwell and Robert 35X Smith, scrambled to break up the men. Most of their colleagues also moved from their positions to quell the disruption, leaving Malcolm completely alone onstage. It was then that the conspirator in the first row stood up and walked briskly toward the rostrum. Beneath his winter coat, he cradled a sawed-off shotgun. About fifteen feet from the stage, he stopped, pulled back his coat, and lifted his weapon.
For many African Americans, February 21, 1965, is engraved in their memory as profoundly as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., are for other Americans. In the turbulent aftermath of his death, Malcolm Xʹs disciples embraced the slogan “Black Power” and elevated him to secular sainthood. By the late 1960s, he had come to embody the very ideal of blackness for an entire generation. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, he had denounced the psychological and social costs that racism had imposed upon his people; he was also widely admired as a man of uncompromising action, the polar opposite of the nonviolent, middle-class-oriented Negro leadership that had dominated the civil rights movement before him.
The leader most closely linked to Malcolm in life and death was, of course, King. However, despite having spent much of his early life in urban Atlanta, King was rarely identified as a representative of ghetto blacks. In the decades following his assassination, he became associated with images of the largely rural and small-town South. Malcolm, conversely, was a product of the modern ghetto. The emotional rage he expressed was a reaction to racism in its urban context: segregated urban schools, substandard housing, high infant mortality rates, drugs, and crime. Since by the 1960s the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived in large cities, the conditions that defined their existence were more closely linked to what Malcolm spoke about than what King represented. Consequently, he was able to establish a strong audience among urban blacks, who perceived passive resistance as an insufficient tool for dismantling institutional racism.
Malcolm’s later-day metamorphosis from angry black militant into a multicultural American icon was the product of the extraordinary success of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, coauthored by the writer Alex Haley and released nine months after the assassination. A best seller in its initial years of publication, the book soon established itself as a standard text in hundreds of college and university curricula. By the late 1960s, an entire generation of African-American poets and writers were producing a seemingly endless body of work paying homage to their fallen idol. In their imagination, Malcolm’s image became permanently frozen: always displaying a broad, somewhat mischievous smile, spotlessly well attired, and devoted to advancing the interests and aspirations of his people.
From the moment of his murder, widely different groups, including Trotskyists, black cultural nationalists, and Sunni Muslims, claimed him. Hundreds of institutions and neighborhood clubs were renamed to honor the man whom actor Ossie Davis had eulogized as “our manhood, our living, black manhood.” A Malcolm X Association was initiated by African Americans in the military. In Harlem, activists formed a Malcolm X Democrat Club. In 1968, the independent film producer Marvin Worth hired James Baldwin to write a screenplay based on the Autobiography, a project the novelist described