Martin Luther King Jr. and the Socialist Within

By Stephen Joseph Scott

To date, the image and memory of Martin Luther King Jr., social justice warrior, peace activist and civil rights icon in the United States, and around the world, has been manipulated, watered-down or diminished of meaning to serve the very forces of capitalist power and domination that the man spent his life in opposition to. In school textbooks in the U.S. for example, young people are taught about King the moderate man of peace, but not the radical King who, criticized by other civil-rights-leaders for speaking out against the Vietnam war, proclaimed, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, the U.S. to be, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” By sanitizing the image of the man, they, corporate and governmental powers, not only control the narrative, but they dumb-down and oversimplify the message by lobotomizing the historical record. As W.E.B. Du Bois, American intellectual, asserted: “The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example: it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.” What Du Bois was saying is that by stripping, containing and distorting historical narratives the learner is robbed of the substance, nuance and otherness that history should provide. Each year in January as King is honored in the eyes of the public, there is little mention of the demands of the man and his mission: his fight for economic justice in a society that was built on inequality from the very start, “We can’t have a system where some of the people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty.” King the radical has been passed-over and neutralized in order to make a moderate image of the man more digestible, not only to whitewash the general public and students alike, but to also pacify the capitalist and white supremacist power structures that he so fiercely opposed.

In an early and intimate correspondence, written in 1952, to his then jeune amour Coretta Scott, King declared “I am more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” When addressing a book sent to him by Coretta: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, King expressed: “On the negative side ... Bellamy falls victim to the same error that most writers of Utopian societies fall victim ... idealism not tempered with realism.” King was a pragmatist who understood fully the cause and effect of a capitalist system that pushed aside the needs of its populous in the name of profit, “So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism.” This letter reveals that King was an admitted Socialist and firm in his agreement with Bellamy’s prediction of the inevitable degeneration of capitalism.

Reflecting upon his longtime hero and mentor, Norman Thomas, King espoused the 1932 Socialist Presidential nominee’s views as an inspiration to his own antiwar stance concerning Vietnam in an article published in Pageant magazine in June 1965, “Thomas, a Presbyterian minister, found his interest in socialism stimulated by the antiwar declaration of the Socialist Party in 1917.” It was to President Franklin Roosevelt’s acclaim, that he, once in office, took on much of Thomas’ socialist platform when putting together his well-known New Deal program: “Old-age pensions for men and women 60 years old; Abolition of child labor; The six-hour day, five-day week with no wage reductions; Health insurance and maternity insurance; and, Adequate minimum wage laws.” King inspired by Thomas’ unorthodox socialist approach to the issues of his day, steadfastly admired his principled stand calling him “The Bravest Man I’ve Ever Met,” and embodied Thomas’ following sentiments in words and deeds, “The hope for the future lies in a new social and economic order which demands the abolition of the capitalist system.” The seeds were planted; the capitalist opponent and unyielding guardian of socialist values stood evident throughout King’s ministry.

January 10, 1957 marked the birthday of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and his father, to fight for civil rights and economic fairness. Increasingly throughout the 1960s, King became more anticorporate; and, more explicitly judgmental of capitalism as a system of innate inequality. In May 1967, while speaking at a SCLC staff meeting, King pushed radical against the injustices baked into the fundamental structure of capitalism, as well as the corrupt and unethical political system that allowed it to ride roughshod over its own population, “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” Meaning, the movement had to demand a radical-paradigm-shift in the administrative and monetary structures that undergirded the American system of capitalism, “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together you cant [sic] really get rid of one without getting rid of the others the whole structure of American life must be changed.” Again, in August 1967, at a SCLC annual conference, King asked, “Why are there forty million poor people in America? ... When you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth ... you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” King was insistent that the resistance to an unjust system of inequality had to arise. In fact, in that same speech, in defense of workers’ rights, King invoked Walter Reuther, leader of organized labor, founder of the United Auto Workers of America and civil rights activist, “Walter defined power one day. He said, power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.” King, the supporter of cooperative ethics, denoted unions and the ability of workers to bargain collectively against corporate supremacy as an essential tool in checkmating capital and its abuses.

As explained by historian Thomas Jackson, in his work From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, King was definitive as to where public policy in the U.S. needed to go, “Policy must ‘reduce the gap’ between the poor and the majority by making the poverty line a percentage of median income." King argued, raising the poverty line, which was inordinately low in 1964, would bring a response to millions of working poor that President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty overlooked. In King’s estimation, the inadequacy of the government’s solution to the War on Poverty coupled with the war in Vietnam equaled a travesty that disproportionately punished the disenfranchised:

[T]he war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons ... to die.... So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools ... I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

The war in Southeast Asia, in King’s view, was not only a brutal attack on a distant and poor “third-world” country half way around the globe, but a direct assault on America’s poor and working class populace. Again, what King was asserting was that race, war and economics were inextricably woven within the fabric of the U.S. political economy.

A New York Times editorial, dated April 7, 1967, published just three days after King’s powerful antiwar declaration above, encapsulated the prevailing counter assessment of the time. By ignoring class altogether, the conservative view of the day was camouflaged by “temperance,” insisting that the war in Vietnam and racial injustice in the United States had nothing to do with each other, “The moral issues in Vietnam are less clear-cut than he suggests; the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.” The point this editorial avoided was the enormous sums of public funds spent on the war, and their violent social and economic impact domestically, which King defined as wasteful and destructive, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money.” In place of King’s economic mandate, the editorial used an erroneous conflation designed to convince the reader that melding the anti-war movement with civil rights was more about coupling the issues of race and militarism rather than King’s actual emphasis, economic justice.

King first announced his Poor People's Campaign (a multiracial non-violent crusade focused on jobs and dignity for the poor) at a staff retreat for the SCLC in November 1967. After having crisscrossed America building an alliance for his PPC, gathering support through a coalition of Blacks, farm workers, Native Americans and poor Whites, King delivered a speech, on March 10, 1968, in NYC (just a month prior to his assassination), entitled “The Other America.” King sermonized before a union, Local 1199, mostly comprised of African Americans, “If all of labor were to follow your example of mobilizing ... our nation would be much closer to a swift settlement of that immoral, unjust, and ill-considered war.” It was this kind of tutelage, this kind of unifying, enlisting and organizing of King’s multiracial army of the poor and working class, that threatened the establishment, i.e., government officials, corporate elites and mainstream media. Furthermore, in that same speech, King challenged not just the establishment and its propaganda, but also those among his ranks that doubted the efficacy of his mission to end the war:

I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.

King, the theologian, in defense of his anti-war stance, harkened back to the teachings of the social gospel as his grounding – itself, a radical pacifist document; and, a passionate plea for the rights and dignity of the poor.

On a prior date, April 14, 1967, at Stanford University, King had given a different version of the same speech, one in which he invoked Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, author and former slave. King publicly attacked the United States and its long vicious history of elite control, systematic racism and unjust class bigotry:

This is why Frederick Douglas [sic] could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger ... freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time.

King’s acknowledgement of Douglass helps to clarify his radical view of the long and inhumane historical narrative, which defined America. He was telling his audience that in a system founded on greed, white supremacy and inequality, freedom was not “freedom” if one was Black or poor. Written from his cell years earlier, in 1963, in his now celebrated Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King penned, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” In a top-down system of cascading violence King, the shepherd, attempted to give voice to the voiceless and consciousness to the beleaguered masses.

When matching the inequities of the American economic system against other systems, in May 1965, while speaking before the Negro American Labor Council, King lauded the Scandinavian modus of democratic socialism and demanded a fair and just redistribution of America’s affluence: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” Again, years earlier, from his jail cell in Birmingham, King, the radical humanist, had elegiacally weaved together the socialist values of the collective within faith, race and socioeconomic condition, “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states ... We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Additionally, public statements like, “I think black people and poor people must organize themselves ... we must mobilize our political and economic power,” congealed King’s position as a “Communist,” as well as a dangerous man whose every move needed to be tracked. Even if one publicly condemned communism as King certainly did, as far back as his Atlanta sermon, given on September 8, 1953, asserting, “Let us begin by stating that communism and Christianity are at the bottom incompatible. One cannot be a true Christian and a true Communist simultaneously.” A open denunciation of communism of this sort mattered little to the foundations of power that were bitterly opposed to the rights and unification of Blacks, the poor and the working class, “Perhaps the quintessential example of a target of state surveillance was Martin Luther King Jr. The surveillance of King was carried out with great intensity by the FBI, in concert with local police forces.” The powers of the State were now solidified and King was the target of that solidification, “[King was] subject to increasing scrutiny and harassment from the FBI, which had wiretapped his phones since 1963,” however, it did not begin under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; it began much earlier, as early as the first freedom marches in Montgomery Alabama in the mid-1950s.

The FBI directive, dated January 4, 1956, is proof positive that the U.S. government was purposefully investing manpower and resources into tracking King as early as 1955: “On 7 December [1955], the FBI’s Mobile Office began forwarding information on the bus boycott to FBI director J Edgar Hoover.” The document, although redacted, reveals that the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge was working closely with a Montgomery Police Officer gathering, with intent, as much defamatory evidence as possible against King in order to take him and his non-violent call for social-justice down.

The security state not only tracked King’s every movement, but it also harassed him for years using an array of methods from penetrating surveillance to psychological coercion. The foundations of power were deeply distressed by King’s radical decrees, and, his non-violent movement of civil disobedience, “The FBI was so concerned about King’s radicalism and potential for inciting a black revolution that it deemed his activities a threat to national security.” In fact, the FBI sadistically mocked, taunted and provoked King to commit suicide in an anonymous letter sent to him November 21, 1964 - just nineteen-days prior to his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway:

You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that ... like all frauds your end is approaching ... your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you ... It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies ... you are done ...  there is only one thing for you to do ... and you know what it is.

This FBI missive proves that the forces within government were willing to stop at nothing to end, what they considered, an imminent threat to the status quo. In fact, by April 3, 1968, after returning to Memphis (one day prior to his assassination), King’s hostility toward the U.S. political economy and its endemic inequalities grew into an overt attack on corporate America, “We are asking you tonight ... to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis ... Tell them not to buy–what is the other bread? Wonder Bread.” This direct challenge to the pecuniary interests of American business only intensified the image of King as a menace.

Governmental forces so loathed King the man and what he stood for, that they pursued the diminution of his persona for years after his murder in Memphis, Tennessee, “While the FBI did intensely track King through his death, it actually continued to besmirch his name even after he was assassinated,” but what authoritarian forces working on behalf of capitalist interests could not completely eviscerate they inevitably subsumed. During his speech on the creation of a national holiday for King - November 2, 1983, some fifteen-years after King’s brutal assassination, Ronald Reagan was one of the first conservatives to publically confiscate, misappropriate and alter King’s image to that of the “extraordinary” American, “In the fifties and sixties, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination. The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” In spite of the fact that Reagan, and most reactionaries in the U.S., long considered King a traitor, a communist subversive, and, an adversary to corporate and state power, Reagan used King’s words not only to support conservative ideals and policies, but also for his own political gain. Facing re-election in 1984 and waning poll numbers, “[Reagan and] his political advisers hoped for some positive effect among black and moderate white voters.” Reagan, in what can be considered a public-relations-coup, exalted King’s words through a histrionic burst of American exceptionalism, "All of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning ... land where my fathers died ... from every mountainside, let freedom ring," which, as preformed before the nation, deliberately sanitized, ignored and diminished the purpose of King’s mission which stood in direct opposition to the destructive forces of corporate greed.

Finally, what this conservative, and later neo-liberal, approach to King’s views conveniently overlooked, whether in political-thought or school textbooks, is King’s class oriented fight for justice. Throughout his brief life, King affirmed, in private and in public, his socialist beliefs – from his stance on race, war and poverty, to his evaluation of the global political economy. What the foundations of power have attempted to subvert, at all costs, was King’s clarion-call for the unification of the poor, “There is amazing power in unity. Where there is true unity, every effort to disunite only serves to strengthen the unity.” Again, Martin Luther King Jr. was a Socialist and radical humanist at his core, a resolute teacher of the social gospel, a committed supporter of cooperative principles and a firm champion of collectivist values. As a result of his commitment to those ethics, principles and values - he, not only fell victim to the pernicious and menacing powers of the capitalist state, but he also steadfastly and resolutely sacrificed his own life.

Stephen Joseph Scott is  a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist, record producer and actor – a self-taught musician, writer and performer; now living in Philadelphia.  As a musician, He uses American Roots Music, a blend of influences including Country, Soul, Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Bluegrass and Folk to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.  In the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Steve explores the inward and outward fragility of the human condition within a decimated working class – to which far too many fall victim. Emanating from his own humble origins, Steve expresses what he calls the “wrenching torment” of common folk: abuse, neglect, regret, struggle, sacrifice and loss! His latest video: "We Know They Lied" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4_oSycHBCM

To the Memory of Malcolm X: Fifty Years After His Assassination

By Ike Nahem

"I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin…"

- Malcolm X, One Month Before His Murder

"There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee, even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain - and we will smile. Many will say turn away - away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man - and we will smile. They will say that he is of hate - a fanatic, a racist - who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle! And we will answer and say to them : Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him. Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people."

- Eulogy delivered by Ossie Davis at the Funeral of Malcolm X, Faith Temple Church Of God, Harlem, February 27,1965

The Assassination

On February 21, 1965 , Malcolm X, the great African-American and US freedom fighter and outstanding world revolutionary leader, was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom in upper Manhattan's Washington Heights on Broadway and 165th Street in New York City. Commemorations of this bitterly sad anniversary that truly altered US and world history have been held in New York City, Malcolm's home base, across the United States, and throughout the world.

Malcolm X was a peerless orator of tremendous wit and power as well as an indefatigable and effective political organizer. On that fateful and horrible 1965 day he was murdered in cold blood, in front of his wife and children, while addressing a full house of over 400 people, under the auspices of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the non-religious political formation he founded after his split from Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam (called the "Black Muslims" in the US media).

The gunmen were undoubtedly agents and operatives of the Nation of Islam (NOI). From the moment Malcolm X left the NOI he was subjected to the most vile personal attacks and slanders from Louis Farrakhan and other NOI leaders, including open calls for his death. While the evidence directly linking NOI leaders to the murder plot continues to be covered up, their moral and political responsibility is unquestionable. But this truth also begs the larger question of the direct or indirect responsibility of the United States government in Malcolm X's death. It is known that US government agencies, that is, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) within the United States, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which took over during Malcolm's international travels, had stepped up their illegal surveillance, harassment, and hounding of Malcolm X after his departure from the NOI. Federal and local cops and spooks had Malcolm X under constant surveillance. The New York Police Department (NYPD) knew two weeks in advance that Malcolm X was being targeted for assassination. NYPD had at least one undercover agent in the OAAU and had a wiretap on Malcolm X's phone. Yet no police were in sight at the Audubon Ballroom when he was murdered right in the open. It is also know that part of the FBI's COINTELPRO operation directed against Malcolm X included exploiting and instigating person venom against Malcolm by his former associates and manipulating the atmosphere of hostility and provocation.

Much of the documentation of this outrageous and illegal US government harassment - which included poison pens letters, instigating and promoting false rumors, personal antagonisms, the leaking and planting of disinformation in the media, and so on has come to light from lawsuits under Freedom of Information Act legislation. In a then-secret 1968 memorandum, Hoover wrote that the FBI must, "Prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. [Malcolm X] might have been such a 'messiah'…"

A Hero of My Youth and Always

My first lasting memory of Malcolm X was when, as a 13-year old boy in southern Indiana I was shaken by a graphic photo-spread of his assassination in the old LOOK magazine which my parents subscribed to. I had developed the habit of reading newspapers and following what was called "current events" in school so I was aware of and instinctly sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement, as were my parents, although they had no direct involvement. A year or two later, we moved to the relatively big city of Cincinnati, Ohio and I went from a segregated small-town high school to a late-1960s urban cauldron.

The racial and social composition of my new high school was, more or less, about 40% "white" working class and middle class, 40% Black working class, with the rest, including me, mostly Jewish. It was a volatile mix in extremely volatile times, with the Black rights struggle literally exploding nationally as the Vietnam War - and mounting opposition to it - escalating. Interesting alliances and struggles formed in my new high school alongside racial antagonisms and tension. Black and white students united to change the schools draconian dress code; T-shirts, long-haired "hippies," and Afros proliferated. My high school was even written up in LIFE magazine in one of the era's ubiquitous pieces on the alienation and rebelliousness of "today's youth."

A few of my radicalizing Jewish friends and I gravitated to some of the outspoken Black students. I started sneaking off to attend civil rights protests. At one point we organized a controversial protest over the required recitation of the "Pledge of Allegiance" to the US flag at morning homeroom. Where the closing line says, "One Nation Under God, With Liberty and Justice For All," we added, ""If You're White." That landed us in the Principal's office.

When Martin Luther King was assassinated, the Black ghetto in Cincinnati exploded and my High School was shut down by students who refused to attend classes, considering it an insult to King's memory that schools remained open.

One day in 1967 I was looking to spend my sparse allowance money on some music at a rock-and-roll and "soul music" store in downtown Cincinnati when there in the stacks, in a section called "Spoken Word," I saw an LP titled "The Wit and Wisdom of Malcolm X," excerpts from his speeches. At $1.49 I could afford it. It was an earthshaking experience for me. What eloquence and logic I found within those grooves. What powerful use of language, what masterful employment of analogy and metaphor. What uncompromising exposure of hypocrisy and duplicity. What passion and compassion

Perhaps most unexpected for me was the profound and brilliant humor. At the time I had ambitions to be a comedian and I devoured comedy albums and movies as well as books on comedy "theory" - Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Slappy White, the Marx Brothers, Burns and Allen, Flip Wilson, Don Rickles, and all the regulars on Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. I found out that the feared and hated (by some) Malcolm X was funny as hell! I played that soon-to-be scratchy album on my rickety record player to the point where I'm sure I drove my mother crazy. Soon after that purchase I stayed up all day and night and read The Autobiography of Malcolm X nonstop barricaded in my room. Like so many millions of others, reading The Autobiography was a real turning point in my life outlook and in the development of my political and social consciousness.

The Autobiography

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a riveting and astonishing book that rises to great literature. Translated into over 30 languages, it should be essential reading for any literate human being in this country and indeed on this Earth. But if your only introduction and exposure to Malcolm X is this wonderful book, you will be unable to grasp and understand his world historical significance and true legacy, both the continuity and the profound transformation of his short, remarkable life.

The Autobiography was a book dictated by Malcolm X to Alex Haley on the run over the last two years of his life, while he was engaged in a grueling schedule of intense political organizing in the United States that was intertwined with extensive international travel that broadened and sharpened his moral and political outlook. His collaboration with Haley began while Malcolm X was still a member of and under the discipline of the Nation of Islam. But by the end of 1963 Malcolm's estrangement from the NOI was reaching a climax. For Malcolm X the radical split, which had been building for some time from moral and political motivations, became a personal and political liberation that was the catalyst pushing him forward. Responding later to a reporter trying to tie him to old NOI dogmas, he stated, "I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else's control. I feel that what I'm thinking and saying is now for myself. Before it was for and by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind, sir!

Malcolm X was unable to edit and correct many specific mistakes and misinterpretations in The Autobiography. He was unable to explain and elaborate on the new positions and his rejection of NOI nostrums he had promulgated by rote as an NOI leader. One example of this was his position against interracial marriages which he changed as he dumped Muhammad's "Yacub's theory" that "all whites" were the devilish offsprings of the experiments and machinations of an evil scientist from way back when. An expression of his old position was contained in The Autobiography. But in a November 23, 1964 press conference -less than three months before his murder - Malcolm was asked, "Are you against the love between a black person and a white person." His answer: "How can anyone be against love? Whoever a person wants to love that's their business - that's like their religion."

In general, Haley's editing of The Autobiography transcripts dilutes or deletes what was a sharp shift and trajectory to the left in Malcolm's political and philosophical views. Steadily, and more and more explicitly, Malcolm X embraced anti-capitalist and pro-socialist standpoints as he understood them. Within the Nation of Islam, Malcolm had always positioned himself on the side of the Black masses, the working people, as opposed to the more "respectable" "Black bourgeoisie," as he put it, who were afraid to "rock the boat." His blistering, uproarious popularization of the class divides within the oppressed Afro-American nationality at the time of the mass struggles of the 1960s was articulated brilliantly in his classic oratorical construction, "The House Negro and the Field Negro" that he inserted into many speeches. (This can be easily found on YouTube and elsewhere online.)

Outside the NOI, and in close contact with revolutionary internationalists of all skin colors and nationalities who were influenced by Marxist ideas and working-class struggles, these questions had moved more and more to the center of Malcolm's consciousness at the end of his life.

Malcolm wished to change and reformulate many things in The Autobiography, especially in the last chapters covering the period of his split from the NOI. Haley resisted, citing deadline pressures and Malcolm was murdered before the book was published. The printed book focuses on - doing a generally beautiful job - the narration of Malcolm's turbulent and searing life experiences. But the published narrative is incomplete. To fully appreciate the complete journey and legacy of Malcolm X, The Autobiography must be supplemented by reading and studying the man and his ideas directly in his own words.

Fortunately this is possible in print, audio, and video. Pathfinder Press is a small but prestigious socialist publishing house ( www.pathfinderpress.com ), affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a Marxist group which developed a close relationship with Malcolm X, and published his speeches, before his death. Pathfinder undertook immediately after Malcolm X's death a major project, in collaboration with his wife Betty Shabazz, to gather and publish as much direct material of Malcolm X's considerable output - speeches, essays, transcripts of interviews and press conferences, and so on from the crucial last year-and-a-half of his life. All of this remains in print today, completely uncensored and in basic chronology, so the reader can see for themselves the development and political evolution of this genuine American revolutionary. (I was a member of the SWP for over 20 years from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s and played a small part in helping Pathfinder to proofread and prepare for print some of the later published volumes.).

Targeted for Destruction

During this last period of his life Malcolm X functioned under and confronted - almost alone - tremendous pressures and life-threatening circumstances. He was literally marked for death by the NOI. A week before his assassination, his Queens, New York home was firebombed as he, his pregnant wife, and their four daughters were sleeping, all narrowly escaping death. The NYPD "investigation" was slovenly and perfunctory, implying he did it himself!

The Split

Malcolm X's accumulating and mounting estrangement from the Nation of Islam intensified with his deep revulsion and abhorrence at a sordid sexual scandal and cover up involving Elijah Muhammad. This brought to the fore growing and irreconcilable political differences between Malcolm X and the conservative NOI hierarchy over how to achieve Black freedom in the United States. The differences were not abstract or theological in content, but had red hot immediacy because the context was the exploding movement among the Black masses for freedom that characterized the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. The obscurantist and hidebound Nation of Islam (NOI) preached religious piety and individual self-improvement and abstained from the mass political struggles and mobilizations that were rocking Black communities North and South.

Malcolm was attracted to these struggles and wanted the NOI, which his organizational skills had largely built into a significant presence in the Black ghettos and among Blacks incarcerated, as Malcolm had been, in US prisons, to jump into these struggles. But under Muhammad's extreme sectarian outlook - which disdained mass political struggle and counterposed "self-reform," abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and promoting the NOI's growing business interests (which made Muhammad a rich man), this was rejected. Malcolm began to feel like a prisoner within the NOI. It was not only the growing mass mobilizations of the Civil Rights Movement and the growing political militancy and radicalization among Black youth and working people that found resonance within Malcolm X. He was also increasingly conscious of the contradictions and absurdities of the philosophical rationalizations put forward in the above-mentioned "Yacub's theory" for the "separatist" program of the NOI. Malcolm's accumulating break with all this quasi-religious mystification and hocus-pocus became definitive once he was liberated from the NOI straightjacket. Among the elements of the NOI positions that Malcolm jettisoned was his open rejection of the anti-Semitism and scapegoating of Jews that was embedded in the NOI outlook.

Rid of NOI dogma, Malcolm's trip abroad across the African continent and to the Middle East and Mecca facilitated his final break with race-based theories and generalizations about "white" people. He sharpened his view that "race" is, at bottom, itself a myth and a wholly artificial political construct. In the United States, he said, "white" essentially means "boss," that is, that "white supremacy" has no rational scientific content or meaning other than as an expression of and rationalization for the oppression, subordination, and degradation of the Afro-American people or nationality.

Anti-Imperialism

A voracious reader of history and politics Malcolm began to develop a coherent anti-imperialist world outlook. He knew his facts and he had a keen grasp for the historical framework to sort out and understand factual contradictions. As a result he was a master at sniffing out and untangling media distortions, lies, and half-truths. With withering contempt he exposed media disinformation and lying spin regarding anti-colonial struggle for independence and national liberation across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. He bristled when "Western" media, echoing Washington's line, attacked the Mau-Mau freedom fighters in Kenya who were fighting the brutal rule of a declining British imperialism, as "savages." The bourgeois media, Malcolm never tired of pointing out, were masters at "turning the criminal into the victim, and the victim into the criminal."

Even before his split with the NOI, Malcolm was, like Martin Luther King and the emerging new generation of US civil rights leaders and activists, deeply affected by the African independence struggles that burst onto world politics in the post-World War II period through the 1950s and 60s. He connected the experience of what he termed "Afro-Americans" to the struggles in Africa and the rest of the so-called Third World. The Black freedom struggle, he argued, was part of, not separate from the worldwide anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle. Both were interconnected and exploding at the same time under the dynamics unleashed by the massive revolutionary changes ushered in by World War II and its end. Malcolm sought to build practical relations of political collaboration with leaders of oppressed peoples around the world.

Washington Targets Malcolm

The powers-that-be in Washington were at this time the unchallenged leader of the capitalist world and facing the post-World War II explosion of colonial independence and national liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Washington sought to prevent the vacuum left by the weakened and withered ex-colonial empires of Britain, France, and other European powers from resulting in radical social revolutions along the lines of the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban Revolutions. These national liberation struggles were seen as both a threat to US and "Western" economic and financial interests as well as an arena of "geopolitical" "Cold War" competition with the Soviet Union and "Red" China.

As previously said, Malcolm X was under permanent surveillance and harassment by agencies of the United States government - the Lyndon Johnson White House and its J. Edgar Hoover-led FBI. The US State Department and CIA dogged his every step during his overseas travels to newly independent African countries and elsewhere. A month before his murder, Washington pressured the French government to bar his re-entry to the country where he had been invited to speak before a huge gathering. Washington feared his broad political appeal after he gained his moral and political independence from the NOI and began to devote his indefatigable energy to organizing in the United States and internationally.

In particular, Washington was horrified over Malcolm's outspoken condemnation of the brutal US intervention in the Congo, his early, sharp opposition to the escalating US war in Vietnam, and his open, enthusiastic embrace of the Cuban Revolution. Additionally, Washington undertook a big effort to counter Malcolm X's major campaign to bring before the United Nations General Assembly for a vote the human rights violations against African-Americans in the United States, which was gathering support internationally and in the US. In the period before his murder Malcolm was preparing to go on a speaking tour of US campuses to speak out against US aggression in Vietnam.

The Congo

Events in the Congo had a powerful impact on the political consciousness the evolution into a revolutionary of Malcolm X.

What transpired in the Congo was surely one of the greatest crimes of both the 19th Century, repeated again in the 20th Century. A Belgian colony, the Congo, in the 19th Century under the rule of King Leopold, was essentially a semi-slave territory where huge profits for Belgian capitalists were extracted among rubber workers and other toilers under the most horrid conditions, including amputations of workers limbs for supposed labor infractions. Belgian Congo was a laboratory for the genocides of the 20th Century, with an estimated 4-8 million indigenous Congolese killed under Leopold's reign of terror. (For documentation see the classic indictment by Mark Twain, King Leopold's Soliloquy, written in 1905 by the great American novelist, essayist, and satirist and Adam Hochschild's grim and vivid 1998 best-seller, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.)

By the 1950s Belgian rule was in crisis and no longer tenable as the Congolese people became a leading contingent of the post-World war II struggles for independence that swept the African continent from top to bottom. The decrepit, declining Belgian rulers conceded the holding of elections to be followed by a formal process leading to independence. The central figure and inspiring leader of the Congolese independence struggle was the teacher Patrice Lumumba who handily won the promised elections and established a popular government that began to implement desperately needed measures in a large country which the Belgian colonialists had left destitute with a puny number of schools and hospitals and no infrastructure other than what was needed to transport the country's vast mineral and other wealth out of it. Lumumba's government also staked out an independent non-aligned foreign policy which Washington found intolerable.

The departing Belgians, with Washington's backing, began from day one to subvert and work to destroy Lumumba's government. Along with the South African apartheid state they financed, armed, and promoted separatist forces led by the notorious mercenary and killer Moishe Tshombe. With growing chaos, and under United Nations cover, Washington and Brussels engineered a coup against Lumumba in September 1961. Lumumba was taken hostage and brutally murdered in January 1961. The CIA had a direct hand in all of this. The imperialist coup installed a lackey regime led by the tyrant Tshombe that Washington and Belgian could depend on to protect the nation's vast copper, rubber, and other mineral holdings for super-profitable exploitation by imperialist capital.

As resistance to the pro-imperialist coup mounted among the Congolese followers of the martyred Lumumba, Washington and Belgium organized a racist mercenary army. In cahoots with apartheid South African and the British colonial-settler state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) they recruited racist and ultra-rightist mercenaries from the United States, other European states, and some anti-Castro counter-revolutionary exiles from Cuba. These forces, under barely covert US CIA supervision, carried out murderous bombing raids against "rebel-held villages" and other terrorist atrocities and massacres that resulted in many thousands of Congolese deaths.

These crimes, and the shameless lies turning reality on its head in the big-business US media towing the US government's line, infuriated and galvanized Malcolm X. He continuously spoke out against Washington's crimes, in solidarity with the Congolese people. He spoke the bold and unvarnished truth in the face of imperialist propaganda. In the last interview he gave before his death to the Young Socialist magazine, Malcolm stated, "Probably there is no greater example of criminal activity against an oppressed people than the role the US has been playing in the Congo, through her ties with Tshombe and the mercenaries. You can't overlook the fact that Tshombe gets his money from the US. The money he uses to hire these mercenaries - these paid killers supported from South Africa - comes from the United States. The pilots that fly those planes have been trained by the US. The bombs themselves that are blowing apart the bodies of women and children come from the US. So I can only view the role of the United States in the Congo as a criminal role."

US-led "Western" policy action eventually led to the installation of the dictator Joseph Mobutu (aka Mobutu Sese Seko) who led an exceedingly venal and vicious regime for over 40 years, becoming a multi-billionaire until his regime collapsed in 1997.

Malcolm X and the Cuban Revolution

Malcolm X was a strong supporter of the Cuban Revolution even before he left the NOI. Among the first acts of the revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959 was the radical extirpation of all laws and state practices upholding Jim Crow-style segregation in Cuba. Afro-Cubans were among the greatest beneficiaries and most enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution and as fighters in the guerrilla army. Malcolm X was prominent among a large layer of Black intellectuals and activists including W.E.B. DuBois, LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), Robert F. Williams, William Worthy and many others who welcomed and defended the Cuban Revolution, which was coming under increasing US attack.

The Cuban Revolution had already begun to implement radical social programs (of which smashing legal segregation was one), including a radical land reform, that was having a definite material impact on those US economic and financial interests which utterly dominated Cuban society. The Eisenhower Administration was already deeply involved in the initial planning of what became the Bay of Pigs invasion, and was leading the bipartisan consensus across the US government that the revolutionary Cuban government had to go down.

In September 1960, while still in the NOI, Malcolm X met with Fidel Castro in Harlem. The circumstances of Malcolm and Fidel's meeting have become legendary (for details see Rosemari Mealy's excellent Fidel and Malcolm X: Memories of a Meeting, Ocean Press). Faced with unacceptable impositions and expenses by the management of the Shelburne Hotel, the Cuban delegation to the special fall gathering of world heads of state at the United Nations packed up and moved uptown to the Theresa Hotel in Harlem and enthusiastic crowds of African-Americans and other friends and supporters of the Cuban Revolution.

Malcolm's attitude to the Cuban Revolution was favorable before he exited from the Nation of Islam: "The Cuban Revolution, that's a Revolution. They overturned the system," he said in his last major speech as an NOI representative. But his political attraction to its revolutionary internationalist and socialist program deepened after his split from the NOI.

Malcolm's admiration for the Cuban revolutionaries not only flowed from his consciousness of the vigorous anti-racist measures carried out by the Revolution, but also from the words and deeds of the revolutionary Cuban government in support of African liberation in general and the Congolese anti-imperialist struggle in particular. Che Guevara not only spoke eloquently at the United Nations condemning imperialist policy in the Congo, saying "All free men must be prepared to avenge the crime of the Congo," but later actually fought there with followers of Lumumba, attempting to organize an effective revolutionary resistance.

Malcolm X personally invited Che to speak in Harlem in December 1964, but his appearance had to be put off over security concerns. As Malcolm read Che's solidarity message, he said, "I love a revolutionary. And one of the most revolutionary men in this country right now was going to come out…" When the crowd responded to Che's solidarity message with strong applause, Malcolm said the applause "lets the man know that he's just not in a position today to tell us who we should applaud for and who we shouldn't applaud for."

From Pariah to Icon

It would be hard to find a figure in US history more slandered, vilified, and misrepresented while he was alive than Malcolm X. He was labeled a "hatemonger," a "racist-in-reverse," a promoter and man of violence, and worse. This was not confined to blatant racists and segregationists but was the standard line in more respectable and genteel liberal society. When it came to Malcolm X, especially after he broke free from the dogma and narrow confines of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, moved sharply to the left, and began to speak out and organize freely, the gloves came off among most liberal voices, and a furious hatred came to the surface. This was captured in the classic Phil Ochs satiric ballad, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" whose opening stanza goes, "I cried when they shot Medgar Evers, Tears ran down my spine, And I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy, as though I'd lost a father of mine…But Malcolm X got what was coming, He got what he asked for this time, so love, love me, love me…I'm a liberal."

Perhaps the most notorious example of this was a scurrilous editorial in the liberal, sophisticated, pro-civil rights New York Times, published the day after he was murdered. To the Times editorial board Malcolm X was "an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose." With a stunning and brazen disregard for the slightest accuracy and truth, the editorial asserted that Malcolm X held a "ruthless and fanatical belief in violence…[that] also marked him for notoriety and for a violent end." Continuing on the insinuation that Malcolm X was responsible for his own death, the Times editorial continues, "He could not even come to terms with his fellow black extremists. The world he saw through those horned-rim glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still with his exaltation of fanaticism.

"Yesterday someone came out of the darkness that he spawned, and killed him…[T]his murder could easily touch off a war of vengeance of the kind he himself fomented." The bile and vitriol of that shameful editorial was echoed in the even-more liberal Nation magazine which placed Malcolm X on the "Negro lunatic fringe" that was, furthermore, "defeatist."

Later that year, the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Malcolm X Speaks, unedited and uncensored full presentations of his actual speeches and words, were published by the maverick Grove Press, the latter book in conjunction with Pathfinder Press. They became instant classics and best sellers, especially among Blacks and students. It was no longer possible to write such lies and garbage about Malcolm X and both the New York Timesand The Nation changed their tune, publishing reviews and articles that were highly favorable and sympathetic to Malcolm X, reflecting the new esteem and appreciation of him in growing layers of society, Black and Caucasian. Over time a new mythology regarding Malcolm X began to congeal, a new distortion of his political and moral trajectory, this time not from open opponents but purported friends and admirers. Of course, it helped that he was dead.

Today, fifty years after his murder Malcolm X has become as icon. There is a US Stamp issued with his likeness, major streets are named after him, the legendary Autobiographyis considered a classic, still selling briskly and assigned to numerous high school and college classes. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and numerous other liberal and conservative political figures have cited it as a major influence on their lives.

Nevertheless, this latter iconization of Malcolm X, more often than not, is the other side of the coin that previously disparaged him when he was alive, in the sense that he has been transformed by "mainstream" forces into a harmless icon, with his sharp revolutionary anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist political program diluted and softened. The conscious or unconscious operation strains to turn Malcolm X, who was above all else a genuine revolutionary, into a conventional liberal or conservative, someone who can be folded into the traditional spectrum of bourgeois Democratic and Republican party US politics. This is a travesty of the actual Malcolm X and his actual political and moral trajectory.

The death of Malcolm X was a devastating blow to the Black freedom struggle in the United States and for oppressed and exploited people in every continent worldwide. In the US, Malcolm was trying to establish the Organization of Afro American Unity as an independent Black political movement, that is, completely independent of both the Democratic and Republican parties. He rejected lesser-evilism and the two-party set up and division of labor that oversaw the capitalist system of racism, imperialism, and exploitation. "The difference between the Republican and the Democrats," Malcolm would say, "is that the Republicans stick the knife in your back six inches, and the Democrats pull it out one." That perspective of complete political independence and principled opposition to both capitalist parties has never since had such a powerful voice.

The absence of Malcolm after 1965 had a deleterious impact on the revolutionary upsurge of the "Black Power" movement in the late 1960s which he greatly inspired. The movement had its greatest organizational advance with the mass growth of the Black Panther Party led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, but the Panthers floundered and collapsed under heavy illegal government harassment and murderous repression, as well as its own ultraleftist, militaristic, cultist, and opportunist mistakes under tremendous pressure. The Panthers and the 1960s generation of revolutionary-minded fighters would have benefited greatly from Malcolm X's political clarity, organizational skills, tactical savvy, and discipline.

A new political reality is opening up in the United States today. A new generation of youth, of all nationalities, is radicalizing and mobilizing from Ferguson, Missouri to Staten Island, New York and across the US. This has been sparked by a wave of police killings of unarmed, mostly Black and Latino, civilians and subsequent Grand Jury exonerations in clearly manipulated settings. This reality now confronts the US ruling Establishment. The framework for this new consciousness and struggle is the grotesque obscenities that now mark the so-called criminal justice system in the US, with its mass incarceration of youth, especially Black and Latino youth, the virtual impossibility of seeing any kind of justice in case after case of police killings and brutality, and more broadly the mounting impact of the permanent capitalist economic crisis, growing impoverishment, and increased working-class struggles for decent jobs and wages, against obscene inequality in education, health care, and so on. Those coming into the fight will find no greater historic champion and inspiration in the fight for their better future than Malcolm X. For those who take the time to search, discover, and study this towering human being, beautiful vistas will open up before you.

This article originally appeared on the July 26 coalition's website .

Ike Nahem is a longtime anti-war, labor, and socialist, and activist. Nahem is the coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York and a founder of the New York-New Jersey July 26 Coalition (july26coalition.org). Nahem is an Amtrak Locomotive Engineer and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the Teamsters Union. He can be reached at ikenahem@gmail.com with comment or criticism.