Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is celebrated every year. Washington and several other states have official holidays on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Even Dartmouth celebrates it with cancelled classes and some sort of lecture series.
Unfortunately, despite the King celebrations, a different hero of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and'60s, remains forgotten. That man is El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, or Malcolm X, as he is more commonly known. This man who exemplifies the Harlem-to-Harvard story (although he did not actually attend Harvard, he gave several admirable speeches at the University), sadly remains forgotten.
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little into a poor Baptist family in Omaha, Neb., on May 19, 1925. The son of a Baptist preacher and "outspoken promoter of social and economic independence for blacks" who was brutally murdered by white supremacists, Malcolm had political activism in his blood.
After his house was burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, Little and his siblings were forced into foster homes and reform schools. Little moved to Boston to live with his half-sister in 1941 after he dropped out of school at age 15, then fell into the underworld of Harlem, New York, at the age of 17.
There, he turned to a life of crime and drug-addiction, committing armed robberies for a living.
At the age of 21, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a minor robbery.
In prison, Little began to read with enthusiasm. He decided to improve his vocabulary and grammar by memorizing the dictionary as well as various other books.
He also started to read about Elijah Muhammad and his misnamed Nation of Islam, a Black Nationalist organization whose followers were called Black Muslims. The Nation of Islam, unlike the real Islam, preached not only economic and social independence for blacks, but also promoted a racist propaganda. Elijah Muhammad claimed that blacks had created whites in a freak scientific experiment as devils to scourge the black race. What attracted Little to this "faith," however, was its emphasis on the establishment of a black empire and its belief that blacks would one day rule the earth.
After his release from prison in 1952, Little went to Detroit to become a full member of the Nation of Islam.
He changed his name to Malcolm X, dropping the "slave name" of Little. With his dazzling oratorical and people skills, Malcolm X soon rose up the ladder of the Nation of Islam, and was appointed as the Head of the New York Temple of the Nation.
He soon surpassed Elijah as the foremost spokesman of the Nation.
Malcolm X preached economic independence for all blacks and freedom from white racist policies. He also believed that black people must develop their own society and ethical values, including the self-help, community-based enterprises that the black Muslims supported.
Initially, he opposed Martin Luther King, Jr.'s movement to integrate African-Americans into mainstream American society, and declared that nonviolence was the "philosophy of the fool."
He called for a violent "black revolution", which renounced any sort of "compromise" with whites. While Martin Luther King was giving his "I have a dream" speech, Malcolm X quipped "While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare."
However, Malcolm X's high-profile, radical agenda and popularity among black Muslims and whites alike, put him in direct conflict with Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X was consequently disbarred from the Nation in 1964.
Soon after, he started a new organization to promote his own beliefs. In 1964, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and visited several other African and Muslim nations in which he was treated as a hero. On this trip he realized that his theories of black supremacy were false, and that whites were not necessarily evil after all. He then converted to Sunni Islam and changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. After his return to the United States, he created the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a nationalist organization that sought to unite all black organizations fighting racism against blacks. He renounced his racism against whites and began to encourage blacks to vote, to participate in the political system, and to work with each other and with sympathetic whites and Hispanics for an end to all forms of racial discrimination. He felt that racism was "not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem, a problem of humanity."
Malik El-Shabazz started to work on his autobiography, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965), with Alex Haley, but he predicted that he would not live to see it published. True to form, Malik El-Shabazz was assassinated on February 21, 1965, by members of the Nation of Islam, who, under orders from Elijah Muhammad, felt that El-Shabazz was a danger to their organization.
El-Shabazz's biography has inspired generations of readers who have been impressed by his rise from a petty criminal to a spiritual leader, from a preacher of anti-white racism to "an advocate of interracial and international brotherhood." Although his legacy is rather complicated and sometimes contradictory, his most enduring message remains "one of black self-respect and self-help, combined with his uncompromising rejection of racism."
