In late April 1962 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed black man, Ronald X Stokes, during a disturbance outside a Nation of Islam temple. Malcolm X, then the second most powerful figure in the NOI, rushed to the city. At a rally he told protesters: ‘You’re brutalized because you’re black, and when they lay a club on the side of your head, they do not ask your religion. You’re black, that’s enough.’ Sound familiar?
The Dead Are Arising, a new biography of Malcolm X, is timely. But perhaps this sobering book’s clearest message is that it will always be timely, because the story it narrates is timeless. In 1964 it would be Harlem, in 1965 Watts, in 1967 Detroit. Today, it’s Minneapolis and Louisville.
He may not have used the phrase, but Malcolm X was one of the innovators of concepts such as systemic racism. In contrast to his great rival Martin Luther King, Malcolm preached a gospel of separation, not integration, because he didn’t feel that white America would ever give blacks a fair chance. This wasn’t simply a southern problem but a national one, and it’s telling that Malcolm was born and raised in northern states such as Nebraska, Wisconsin and Michigan. ‘Mississippi,’ he once declared, ‘is anywhere south of the Canadian border.’
Bracing, perhaps — but such an outlook stemmed from all that African Americans endured. The system seemed rigged because it was rigged, not just in subtle, systemic ways but in the frequent, blunt application of physical violence and economic force: ‘The hate that hate produced,’ to go by the title of a 1959 television documentary on black radicalism that featured Malcolm and the NOI, and that about gets it right. This doesn’t excuse the hate, but it does explain it.
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