THE AFTERLIFE OF MALCOLM X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America, by Mark Whitaker
Malcolm X last took the stage at New York’s Audubon Ballroom in 1965. His protégé and fellow apostate from the Nation of Islam, Benjamin 2X Goodman, introduced Malcolm that evening as “a man who would give his life for his people.” Within minutes, Benjamin witnessed his 39-year-old mentor fulfill that prophecy. Three assassins rushed the stage and left Malcolm’s body riddled with 21 bullet wounds. His four daughters and wife, Betty Shabazz, then pregnant with twins, bore witness from the front row. After a round of haphazard evidence collection, the Audubon staff cleaned up for a party that evening.
The 1960s brimmed with talk of spilling blood in “revolutionary suicide” and “redemptive sacrifice.” Days before his death, Malcolm ominously declared that he lived in “a time for martyrs.” But true martyrdom, at least of the sort that remakes a culture, is rarer and more mysterious than such rhetoric suggests. While any life may be, in principle, offered as sacrifice, it must be consumed in kind, as raiment to be treasured rather than recklessness to be disavowed. How Malcolm X, as despised in life as he was deified in death, became one rather than the other is one of the great curiosities bequeathed by the 20th century.
Six decades after his demise, Malcolm’s influence remains inexhaustible and promiscuous. The words he weaponized against racist mythologies and liberal pieties alike have traversed the orthodox divisions of politics and culture, forever changing how we talk about race, religion and America’s role in the world. In “The Afterlife of Malcolm X,” the former Newsweek editor in chief Mark Whitaker endeavors to give Malcolm’s profound impact an account worthy of its sprawl and significance.
The past 15 years have been a rich time for Malcolm scholarship — the historian Manning Marable and the journalists Les and Tamara Payne won Pulitzer Prizes for their respective biographies. But Whitaker, the author of books about Black Power and Bill Cosby, makes an important intervention. Shaking off the biographical archives, he returns the Malcolm debates back to their true wellspring: the totemic force of his memory in our popular imaginations.
Whitaker provides a jaunty refresher on the “Malcolm-Manias” that swept through America in the late 1960s and early ’70s with the rise of the Black Arts Movement and Black Power, and again in the late ’80s and early ’90s in hip-hop, film and fashion. His death had an especially profound effect on the popularity of Black nationalism, the notion that African Americans have a right to collective self-determination and sweeping obligations of solidarity to one another (even at the expense of supposed duties to the United States). In Whitaker’s account, familiar faces with ties to different flavors of Black nationalism — the filmmaker Spike Lee, the poet Amiri Baraka, the sprinter John Carlos — all receive their due.
But so do white Americans who played an unsung role in Malcolm’s afterlife. Most thrilling is Whitaker’s recovery of the Newsweek reporter Peter Goldman’s excellent investigative work on the assassination and the sham convictions pursued by New York City law enforcement. Most humorous is the story of the white drummer and Bristol, Conn., native Keith LeBlanc. Armed with Shabazz’s blessing in 1983, LeBlanc put out the first hip-hop recording to sample Malcolm’s speeches, “No Sell Out,” and paved the way for rappers like Public Enemy and KRS-One to do the same.
Unearthing this curiosity speaks to a paradox in Malcolm’s afterlife. Part of his cultural legacy is the idea that Black thought and art ought to be, in Whitaker’s paraphrase of the cultural critic Larry Neal, “by and for Black people” and not “aimed at appealing to white audiences or searching for universal meanings.” Yet the passions this Black nationalist idea excites, along with the creativity it unleashed, touch a deeper anxiety in the present: Can the Black community still stand apart in an era of international exchange, mass immigration and the internet? Could it ever?
A version of this question hovers uncomfortably over “The Afterlife of Malcolm X,” which insists on seeing its hero as paradigmatically American. Whitaker is especially keen on tracing Malcolm’s impact on Black conservatives in the United States like the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. In an infamous interview from 1987, Thomas claimed Malcolm for a conservatism that preached self-help over welfare and integration: “Where does he say Black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?”
Malcolm did once write, “Let the Black people, wherever possible, however possible, patronize their own kind, hire their own kind, and start in those ways to build up the Black race’s ability to do for itself.” But Malcolm was nothing if not a thinker always revising and reinventing himself. By the end of his life, the rhetoric of communitarian self-reliance was superseded by a broader vision of Black internationalism and third world solidarity.
Whitaker dutifully tracks the last year before his subject’s demise, following Malcolm as he travels the Middle East, Africa and Europe; converts to orthodox Islam; and denounces all forms of “racialism.” Strangely, the author does not go back to look for the footprints of this journey, even though it’s clear that the legacy of those trips is formidable. As scholars like Hisham Aidi have noted, the marginalization of Islamic youth in European cities after 9/11 and the rebellions that erupted across the Arab world around 2011 sparked renewed fascination with “the specter of Malcolm X.” Malcolm’s autobiography became a best seller in Cairo, and Black Panther groups cropped up from Athens to Gothenburg to resist far-right violence in Europe.
Malcolm also tried to organize an effort among post-colonial countries to charge the United States with human rights abuses before the United Nations. Whitaker describes this quixotic plan, but does not mention that in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, activists led by the A.C.L.U. forced an emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council to investigate systemic police violence in the United States, resulting in a report the following year. The move took inspiration, in the words of one A.C.L.U. official, from “great Black leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who believed in internationalizing the struggle for human rights and racial justice in the United States.”
One never grasps, in Whitaker, this element of Malcolm’s influence, even where it might be felt. In his treatment of the most notorious men of the Black Power movement — Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael — Whitaker revels in dissecting the hints of Malcolm in their lives as they stirred J. Edgar Hoover to fear a Black America united in armed rebellion. But when Cleaver travels to Algeria in the late ’60s to build support for a global Black Panther Party and Carmichael heads off to Guinea and helps establish the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, they fade from Whitaker’s story.
The plea against the provincial view of Malcolm’s influence is more than a scholarly quibble. To take him seriously today is not to canonize him, sanitize his contradictions or excuse the wrongs of his most objectionable followers. It is to wrestle, as he did, with the moral costs of solidarity and the possibility of an internationalism that neither flatters the nation nor mistakes its violence for virtue.
At a time when racist reaction runs roughshod over constitutional rights and historical memory — and as the world bears witness to the unfolding humanitarian catastrophes in places like Gaza and Sudan with too much silence and strategic equivocation — Malcolm’s demand for an ethics unbounded by national interest and mythology feels more urgent than more paeans to “self-help.” At the end of his life, Malcolm dreamed beyond race and nation. We do his memory no justice dragging him back to such cramped quarters.
THE AFTERLIFE OF MALCOLM X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America | By Mark Whitaker | Simon & Schuster | 426 pp. | $30.99
The post What Did Clarence Thomas, the Black Panthers and the World See in Malcolm X? appeared first on New York Times.
