What PC? 1996 August/WPCAUG96.ISO/database/power/wordwork.fil

Text File | 1996-06-13 | 12.4 KB | 282 lines

In the Sixties, black
rage spoke with many
voices, but the
touchstone for all the
various separatist sects
was the loving,
integrationist message
of the great Baptist,
Martin Luther King.
Malcolm X, however,
was his own man, his
voice both violent and
self-doubting. In an
age when Marxism
seemed to hold the
answers, Malcolm became a Muslim ahead of his time, and
20 years before the Ayatollah declared war on the "Great
Satan of western imperialism". Allah, declared Malcolm,
possesses the full "360 degrees of knowledge". After
seven years' imprisonment as a Harlem hoodlum, this
auto-didact emerged to preach black power and black
separation; by calling himself X he erased his own slave
name. "What shade of black African polluted by devil
white man are you?" he asked his Muslim congregation.
He described his own grandfather as a "red-headed devil",
a rapist who "pollutes my complexion". But Malcolm X's
Autobiography backs away from racism. During a
pilgrimage to Mecca he had discovered that Islam is
colour-blind. On February 21, 1965 he was assassinated
by Muslims loyal to Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam,
with which he had broken. He became a symbol of pride
and integrity to which many African-Americans remain
fiercely loyal
@
2.2
One of the eight children of Louise and Earl Little,
Malcolm saw his father, a Baptist preacher from rural
Georgia, constantly hounded by the Ku-Klux-Klan, first
in Omaha, Nebraska, and then in Lansing, Michigan,
where finally he was killed by being thrown under the
wheels of a trolley; his mother, Louise, ending up in a
mental hospital; and his brothers and sisters scattered over
various foster homes. He was "adopted" by the white lady
of one of the foster homes, and stayed with the family until
he was 14. He was brilliant at school, winning straight
A's, but was told to scale down his aspiration of a career
as a lawyer to becoming "a mechanic or a carpenter". He
quit school and went to Harlem, where he became a
successful hustler. He was in and out of jail.

It was during a long prison sentence in Boston, in 1952,
that he came under the influence of the teachings of Elijah
Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. Eventually, he
was to become the most prominent and articulate minister
of this faith, a bowdlerized version of Islam.
@
2.3
Malcolm X became the chief spokesman of the Black
Muslim movement in New York. Elijah Muhammad (born
Elijah Poole) lives in seclusion at the so-called Temple of
Islam in Chicago. Their quarrel is believed to have arisen
from a struggle for power in the movement, whose
membership is put variously between 50,000 and
250,000. It is puritan, separatist, and transcendental.
Malcolm X's declared policy was to establish a non-
sectarian black nationalist party. He accused the Black
Muslims of perverting the creed of Islam.

Recently he said the Black Muslims were working with the
American Nazi Party and the Ku-Klux-Klan to perpetuate
segregation for their own purposes. He said that in
December 1960, he and another member of the movement,
Jeremiah X, went to Georgia to discuss tactics with a
leader of the Klan who "wanted to sell us a county-size
parcel of land so that our programme of segregation would
sound more feasible".

At this time, he continued, he was blinded by his faith in
Elijah Muhammad. The leader of the Nazi Party was
permitted to attend Black Muslim meetings, and the Nazis
and the Klan wanted militants kept in the Black Muslim
movement because if they were unleashed into the civil
rights movement "they'd get all the 'Uncle Tom' so-called
leaders to stop talking and start doing something". The
Black Muslims wanted him out of the way, he said,
because he knew of these contacts.
@
2.5
By the early 1960s, Malcolm X had also emerged as a
vehement opponent of the mainstream civil rights
movement then being led by Martin Luther King. And it
was this that created a body of thoughts and sentiments,
later to be labelled Black Power.

"Once we accept ourselves, we're acceptable to everyone",
he once said to fellow Afro-Americans. In short, he called
for an end to the self-hatred with which black Americans,
conditioned by history and contemporary white European
aesthetic and cultural values, had come to regard
themselves. He emphasized the connexion with Africa and
the African past not as part of the "Back to Africa"
movement but as a source of political and economic power
to be used by Afro-Americans in their struggle to liberate
themselves by "any means necessary".
@
2.6
Malcolm X, the American Negro leader, spent less than
three hours in Smethwick today and exchanged a brief
word with two or three local people. His visit, described
by Alderman C.V. Williams, mayor of Smethwick, as a
deplorable attempt to create more tension, was openly
regretted by other Midlanders in touch with the
immigration problem.

Malcolm X told a reporter: "I have heard that the blacks in
Smethwick are being treated in the same way as the
Negroes were treated in Alabama - like Hitler treated
Jews." If he were a coloured immigrant, he said, he would
not wait until the fascists had built the gas ovens.

At a press conference at the Grand Hotel, Birmingham,
Malcolm X said the English were becoming increasingly
racialist and the Smethwick situation could develop into a
brutally violent affair. The source of his information was
not clear and on other subjects his facts seemed arguable -
for instance, it became obvious that he had not realized that
the Government's immigration restrictions also applied to
white immigrants.

Mr. Cedric Taylor, chairman of the Standing Conference
of West Indian Organizations for Birmingham and District,
said: "Remarks about gas ovens are, I feel, the worst thing
that anybody could say. I am upset at this sort of thing
when people are trying to sort themselves out. Conditions
here are entirely different from those in Alabama. The
West Indians are not the sort of people who would want to
follow Malcolm X."

This evening Malcolm X spoke at a private meeting called
by Islamic students at Birmingham University. Tomorrow
he will return to America, where he will report to a four-
college seminar in Massachusetts on his visit to Smethwick
and Birmingham, England.
@
3.1
Malcolm X, the Negro nationalist who was a leader of the
Black Muslim movement until he broke with it, was shot
dead this afternoon while addressing a rally in a ballroom
in Manhattan. Police said two other men were injured by
gunfire, and arrests had been made.

Malcolm X, whose real name was Malcolm Little, was on
the stage at the Audubon ballroom in Washington Heights,
a district in upper Manhattan on the fringe of the Negro
quarter of Harlem. Eight or 10 shots were fired altogether,
and Malcolm X fell to the floor with three shots in the face.
He was taken to the Vanderbilt clinic of the Columbia-
Presbyterian Medical Centre, a few doors down the street,
where he was found to be dead.

There was immediate uproar in the hall. A man was seen
running away with a .45 revolver in his hand, and the 300
or 400 people attending the rally ran out into the street
shouting and screaming.

Police said later that the crowd in the hall seized two
Negroes and fought with the police for possession of
them. One of them was spreadeagled by one group of men
while others punched and kicked him. The other was
thrown to the ground and kicked. It took 10 policemen to
get them away to a patrol car. A sawn-off rifle was
discovered behind the stage, wrapped in a jacket.

Mrs. Little, the dead man's wife, was among the crowd.
She was escorted away by an angry group of Malcolm X's
followers, who threatened press photographers in the
street outside.

Last week, Malcolm X's house in the Long Island
borough of Queens was set on fire by petrol bombs. The
house was bought for him by the Black Muslims, and after
he left the organization he stayed on, claiming that the
house had been given to him and resisting eviction
proceedings. After the fire, he and his family moved out, a
few hours before a city marshal arrived with an eviction
order. The incident followed a quarrel with Elijah
Muhammad, the founder and leader of the Black Muslims.
@
3.3
She was only four when she saw the bloody body of her
father, the famous black activist Malcolm X, lying on the
ground after being torn apart by bullets in a theatre in
Harlem. Three decades later, the tables have turned. She
stands accused of plotting to murder the man she thinks
was responsible for her father's death

At first it looked like a simple case of revenge, in which
Qubilah Shabazz, Malcolm X's 34-year-old daughter, was
so haunted by the memory of her father's murder that she
decided to settle scores with the man she accuses of being
one of the assassins.

But it is much more complicated. Far from being the grim
sequel to a long-running family feud, the case has had the
surprising effect of uniting Malcolm X's family and
supporters with the very figure they have blamed for his
murder: Louis Farrakhan, America's most controversial
black leader. The intended victim of Shabazz's alleged plot
has offered an olive branch to Shabazz, saying that she,
not he, is the real victim.

Farrakhan, a flamboyant figure known for his snappy suits
and rabble-rousing rhetoric, is accusing the government of
entrapping Shabazz in a plot against him - intended, he
argues, to divide the black community and weaken his
Nation of Islam movement, which has become a potent
mouthpiece for black American grievances. This has made
it a potentially explosive case: the government will risk
stoking up black anger if it convicts the daughter of a man
regarded by many in black America as a martyr in the same
league as Martin Luther King. She faces 90 years in jail
and a $2.5m fine if found guilty.

Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam while in prison for
theft and was once the foremost spokesman of its racist
party line. But he left the movement after a bitter row,
when he discovered that its then leader, his mentor Elijah
Mohammed, had secretly fathered seven illegitimate
children. The Nation of Islam could not forgive such
treachery. Two months before Malcolm's assassination,
Farrakhan, who took over the movement's leadership in
1978, wrote in the Nation's newspaper: "The die is set and
Malcolm shall not escape. Such a man is worthy of death."

Although three men were convicted of Malcolm X's
murder, no coherent explanation of their culpability
emerged. Farrakhan always maintained his innocence and
apologised for creating an atmosphere of hatred. Yet he
showed no real repentance: two years ago he sounded glad
that Malcolm X had been killed. "And if we dealt with him
like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it
of yours?" he told one interviewer.

But instead of igniting the old feud, the case has had the
reverse effect, with the Shabazz family and Farrakhan
seemingly reunited after three decades of animosity. "I
held her in my arms as a baby," said Farrakhan last month,
recalling happier times before his rift with Malcolm X.
Together they have concluded that the government is out to
pursue black activists into the next generation.

The prosecution's case has been weakened by its key
witness. Michael Fitzpatrick, an old boyfriend of Shabazz,
is a former FBI informer who once co-operated in an
investigation aimed at Jewish militants, for which he was
paid $12,000 a month. He is now in trouble with the
authorities over a charge of possession of cocaine.

The FBI says that eight telephone calls between Shabazz
and Fitzpatrick clearly show that she discussed the
possibility of assassinating Farrakhan. But the latter's
refusal to complain can only undermine the FBI's case. In
addition, Shabazz's alleged down-payment to a hit man of
$250 seems too little to provide proof of her commitment
to murder.

William Kunstler, the flamboyant New York civil rights
lawyer leading Shabazz's defence, believes the FBI sting
was designed ultimately to harm Farrakhan. "It's the same
thing that happened 30 years ago with Malcolm," he said.
"The government doesn't have to pull the trigger, but they
create the atmosphere in which the nuts operate. There are
people out there who love Malcolm and also some who are
deranged, so they will kill Farrakhan thinking they will
avenge Malcolm's death.

"It's this whole threat of a black messiah - that someone
can galvanise the black community, and it scares the
bejesus out of the system."