Malcolm X
By Clifford Jackson
February 21, 2025 will be the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. He along with Martin Luther King Jr during the last year of their lives were the most hated men in America. His relationship with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam was officially severed in March of 1964 and then in June with his public indictment of Elijah Muhammads infidelity’s. The death threats were daily from members of the Nation of Islam . This was further complicated by the fact that J Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, sent a memo to the FBI’s New York office in June of 1964 that said “ do something about Malcolm X”. J Edgar Hoover was a criminal with
relentless attacks on the civil rights movement . He developed the “ co intel program “ that used all kinds of illegal wire taps,surveillance of the NAACP, SNCC, and the Black Panthers to disrupt , intimidate and undermine the effectiveness of these organizations. In the case of the black panthers Hoovers machinations led to the slaughter/assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969 by the Chicago police department. His racism was ubiquitous in terms of everything he did especially when it came to Malcolm X. There was an effort by Hoover along with others to charge Malcolm X with violation of the Logan Act , an archaic law from the latter part of the 18th century that prohibited any U.S. citizen from unauthorized correspondence with foreign governments.
Malcolm X had become a threat not only on the national stage but internationally. We have had a sanitized message about Malcolm X changing his views about whites after he went to Mecca on his hajj and saw whites that were Muslims. His pilgrimage to the Middle East was not just about practicing orthodox Islam. It also allowed him to connect on the international stage with the anti colonial struggles going on in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
He met with Kwame Nkrumah of Ghannaand Gamil Nasser of Egypt and spoke to 33 heads of African nations at the organization of African unity’s annual meeting in Cairo, Egypt, in July 1964. As Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who was at the meeting, said, “No one, without exception, had the impact that Malcolm had.” This was significant because the rapine, subjugation and exploitation of Africa, Asia and Latin America by the white western world for the past 500 hundreds years was now being challenged on a global scale by Malcolm X that had never been seen before.
Malcolm X in March of 1964 started two organizations: The Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and Muslim Mosque Inc. This allowed him to have members in his two organizations without them having to be Muslims. Malcolm X was in the process of bringing the United States to the world court for all of the racist and oppressive policies towards the 22 million African Americans that were living in the US at that time.
Ten years earlier Paul Robeson had tried to do the same thing with his condemnation of the brutally racist policies of the United states towards black and brown people. He paid a price for it as far as his career being destroyed and his passport being revoked.
President Eisenhower expanded the civil rights division of the justice department to try to reconcile this hypocrisy as far as America is the so-called beacon of freedom and the apartheid state that actually existed in this country that Robeson had promulgated to the world and that Nikita Kruschev had said was America’s blatant hypocrisy. The fact that America was touting itself as the leader of the ” free world” and yet, as Malcolm X said, ” we suffer the dehumanizing racist policies in this country daily” was too much for the powers that be to handle.
As Marlon Brando said about Malcolm X, “Once he became a unifying force for oppressed people against the white world, he had to go.” Taking the United States to the UN and charging it with violating the HUMAN rights of 22 million African Americans, along with the hatred from members of the nation of Islam especially Joseph Shah, his former aide, was pushing Malcolm X to his inevitable day of destruction that he knew was coming soon.
That is why Malcolm X was and still is my hero. No one had the dedication and courage to fight against this racist system here in America under this kind of duress that had destroyed the identity of millions of black and brown people that we see to this day. In December of 1964, he spoke at the Oxford Union at Cambridge in England in a debate defending the concept of ‘Intelligent extremism defending liberty and justice”. On February 12, 1965, he went to Smethwick in England on behalf of the Indians, Jamaicans, and other colored people who were facing ferocious racism at the hands of whites. His house was firebombed a week later when he returned.
The Monday before his assassination, he went to Detroit for a pre-planned speech and saw Rosa Parks for the second time, who said, as she had said before, “Malcolm X is my personal hero.” You will never find this in history books because one of the principal evils of this country’s history is to wipe out the truth and sanitize the true character of this country.
Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are not heroes; they are mendacious politicians who will say, as both of these individuals have said about America’s pathologically racist and criminal history, “That is not who we are.” Dr. King was a hero and leader who understood that the DNA of this country was racism and corruption when he said,” We are integrating into a burning house.” Malcolm X was also a hero who said, “We stand here as black people as human beings, and we expect to be treated as human beings, and we will achieve those rights as human beings by any means necessary.” Both of those men understood that this is America with all of its ugliness that we certainly see playing out today.
Malcolm X stood for the international brotherhood of all races, and not the canard and lie of the American QUILT that politicians like Obama and Harris try to convey. There was no greater leader and spirit in this world than EL Hajj Malik EL Shabazz(Malcolm X).
Clifford Jackson, Larchmont
