Here is a brief excerpt from a classic article by Marshall Frady that appeared in The New Yorker (October 4, 1992). To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Photo Credit: Richard Avedon/© The Richard Avedon Foundation
* * *
His presence hangs palpably in pop culture, from Bill Clinton’s jogging cap to Spike Lee’s film biography. Can his descendants find themselves in his painfully conflicted legacy?
“Do you know why the white man really hates you?” Malcolm X would ask his black congregations in the nineteen-sixties. “It’s because every time he sees your face he sees a mirror of his crime—and his guilty conscience can’t bear to face it.” In the midst of what seemed the high moral adventure of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s nonviolent civil-rights campaigns, Malcolm appeared as some marginal shadow-figure of wrath, always paralleling King’s progress. A ghetto street hustler turned grimly austere evangelist for a racial subsect of Islam known as the Black Muslims, he became one of those unnerving black figures who periodically rise up before the eyes of white society as an image of its own systematic dehumanization, at once a casualty of and a judgment upon America’s racism. In ghostly black-and-white news footage from that time, he can be glimpsed at street rallies of inner-city blacks—a long, lank, sober-suited figure, hatted and bespectacled—excoriating the white man in a level, measured tone with rapid licks of scorn: “We don’t want to have anything to do with any race of dogs.” Spearing his forefinger in the air, he cries, “Two-legged white dogs sicking four-legged dogs on your and my mother!”
Twenty-seven years after his sudden death, in a bedlam of gunfire in a Harlem auditorium, his presence still hangs palpably among us. It’s not merely in the speckling of “X”s on caps and T-shirts which one now sees everywhere (even on Bill Clinton’s jogging cap)—a ubiquitous pop rash that has anticipated the film biography by Spike Lee. In this cinematic Second Coming, Malcolm promises finally to pass, in one form at least, into the mythology of America. Of course, such theatrical reconstructions, like “JFK” and “Mississippi Burning,” can work their own polemically simplistic vandalisms on the past, coarsening the collective memory from which our understanding of our own times is formed.
Beyond his ascension into the pop firmament, though, Malcolm abides among us in a far more elemental sense. From the turbulent black awakening of the sixties, two lines of descent—two temperaments, two potentials—have contended for the spirit of black Americans: a tension between the children of Martin and the children of Malcolm. Though King’s perspective was far more radical than the eventual sentimentalism about him would lead one to suppose, it was suggested even in his day that his vision—of a transcendent, nonviolent struggle of moral confrontation that would shame a racist and essentially barbarous society into redemption—could never be more than a dream. But if it could be said that King’s vision expected too much of the species, Malcolm’s seemed a vision of humankind’s nature reduced to the basest, most minimal terms of anger and retribution for abuse. Malcolm proclaimed to his black audiences that only fools “could love someone who had treated them as the white man has treated you.” He demonized the abuser as a “blue-eyed white devil,” genetically beyond any moral appeal, who would never consent to admit blacks into his company and was unworthy of such ambitions anyway—a predator who could properly be handled only with contempt and threat.
* * *
Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Marshall Frady was an American Emmy Award-winning journalist and author particularly known for his work on the civil rights movement in the American South. In 1968, he published Wallace, a biography of George Wallace, later described by contemporary Marc Cooper as “an instant classic”.