13. Albert Cleage, “Myths About Malcolm X,” in Malcolm X, ed. Clarke, p. 15.
14. Oba T’shaka, The Political Legacy of Malcolm X (Richmond, Calif.: Pan Afrikan, 1983); Malcolm X, The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X, ed. Benjamin Karim [Goodman] (New York: Arcade, 1971).
15. T’shaka, Political Legacy of Malcolm X, pp. 244–245.
16. Ibid., pp. 57, 118.
17. Karim, Introduction to Malcolm X, End of White World Supremacy, pp. 21–22.
18. Gordon Parks, “Malcolm X: The Minutes of Our Last Meeting,” in Malcolm X, ed. Clark, p. 120.
19. On his repudiation of the white devil theory, see Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 362–363. For Malcolm’s desire to meet Robeson a month before his death, see Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 528.
20. I take up this issue in “Beyond Essentialism: Expanding African-American Cultural Criticism,” in Reflecting Black, pp. xiii– xxxiii.
21. The debate about cultural and racial authenticity as it relates to who is able to interpret Malcolm’s legacy legitimately has most recently occurred in writer-activist Amiri Baraka’s attacks on Spike Lee about Lee’s film portrait of Malcolm X before his film appeared. Implicit in Baraka’s charges that Lee would not adequately or accurately represent Malcolm is the belief that Baraka’s representation of Malcolm is superior. Baraka’s hagiographical recollections of Malcolm and his refusal to concede that Lee’s claims and representations of him may be equally valid are a prime example of the often insular intellectual climate surrounding debates about Malcolm. The irony here, of course, is that of all current black directors, with the possible exception of John Singleton, Spike Lee appears most suitably disposed to represent a vision of Malcolm that jibes with Baraka’s cultural views, given Lee’s Afrocentric film and aesthetic vocabulary and his neonationalist cultural perspective.
22. Malcolm X, “Answers to Questions at the Militant Labor Forum,” in By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter, by Malcolm X, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), pp. 22–23.
23. See Henry Young’s two-volume study, Major Black Religious Leaders (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977, 1979).
24. Louis E. Lomax, When the Word Is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World (Cleveland: World, 1963), and To Kill a Black Man (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1968); James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991); Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, 2d ed. (1973; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). For a discussion of moral saints, see Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” Journal of Philosophy 8 (1982): 419–439; and Robert Merrihew Adam’s response to her essay in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 164–173.
25. Of course, the classic treatment of the Black Muslims during the leadership of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X is C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon, 1961, 1973). Also very helpful is E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). For a treatment of the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and it transition to orthodox Islamic practice and belief under Wallace Muhammad as the World Community of al-Islam in the West, see Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam, 1930–1980 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1984). For a historical and analytic treatment of the Nation of Islam, including its history under Elijah and Wallace Muhammad, and its separate revitalization as the second incarnation of the Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan, see Martha F. Lee, The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1988).
26. Lomax, When the Word Is Given, pp. 87, 68.
27. For an extended review of Cone’s book, see my essay “Martin and Malcolm,” in Reflecting Black, pp. 250–263.
28. Of course, Malcolm’s life and thought represented and addressed various aspects of both religious and revolutionary nationalism. In this regard, see John H. Bracey Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Nationalism in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 505. Also see Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism. For a fine historical treatment of the heyday of black nationalism, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978).
29. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, p. 151.
30. Ibid., p. 170.
31. Other works explore the relationship between King and Malcolm, along with comparative analyses of other intellectual and religious figures, in a religious and social ethical context. For two fine examples, see Peter Paris, Black Leaders in Conflict, 2d ed. (Louisville: Westminster Press/John Knox Press, 1991); and Robert M. Franklin, Liberating Visions: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice in African-American Thought (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1990).
32. Ralph Ellison, quoted in Robert B. Stepto and Michael S. Harper, “Study and Experience: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Stepto and Harper (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 458.
33. For insightful treatments of Du Bois, see Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986); and, of course, the definitive treatment of Du Bois to date, David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868 –1919 (New York: Holt, 1993). For the definitive treatment of Booker T. Washington, see Louis Harlan’s two volumes: Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 ); and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
34. Lomax, To Kill a Black Man, p. 10.
35. George Breitman, “More Than One Way ‘To Kill a Black Man,’” in The Assassination of Malcolm X, ed. George Breitman, Herman Porter, and Baxter Smith (New York: Pathfinder, 1976), pp. 131–144.
36. Robert Franklin also makes use of Goldman’s notion of public moralist in his excellent book Liberating Vision ’s, a comparative study of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.
37. There is a swelling literature on the possible plots and theories of how Malcolm was murdered. While the close study of this literature is beyond my purposes here, it certainly constitutes an intriguing category of debate around Malcolm. See, for example, Breitman, Porter, and Smith, eds., Assassination of Malcolm X; and Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1992).
38. For arguments that Goldman’s views about Malcolm’s assassination support the official government story, and that the CIA and the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS)—the name of the New York secret police agency at the time of Malcolm’s death—were implicated in his assassination, see George Breitman, “A Liberal Supports the Government Version,” in Assassination of Malcolm X, ed. Breitman, Porter, and Smith, pp. 145–166.
39. Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X, p. 191.
40. Martin Luther King Jr., quoted in David Halberstam, “When ‘Civil Rights’ and ‘Peace’ Join Forces,” in Martin Luther King Jr.: A Profile, ed. C. Eric Lincoln, rev. ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), p. 202.
41. Clayborne Carson, “Malcolm and the American State,” in Malcolm X: The FBI File, ed. David Gallen (New York: Carroll Graf, 1991), p. 18.
42. Ibid.
43. See George Devereux, Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry, trans. Basia Miller Gulati and George Devereux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1966), and Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grov
e, 1967); Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner Books, 1979); Bruce Brown, Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life: Toward a Permanent Cultural Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); Margaret MacDonald, ed., Philosophy and Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954); and relevant work of the Frankfurt school, including Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas. For a collection of essays by these authors, see Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982). For a treatment of their work in relation to psychoanalytic theory, see C. Fred Alford, Narcissism: Socrates, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
44. Richard Lichtman, The Production of Desire: The Integration of Psychoanalysis into Marxist Theory (New York: Free Press, 1982), p. ix.
45. Ibid., pp. ix–x.
46. Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969). For a more controversial psychobiographical treatment of a historical figure, see Erikson’s study of Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1958).
47. Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (1981; London: Free Association Books, 1989).
48. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
49. Ibid., p. xiii.
50. For an important historical examination of white working-class racism, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
51. Other Marxist, socialist, and progressive approaches to race theory and racism attempt to theorize race as a socially, culturally, historically, and politically constructed category that undergoes change over space and time. See, for example, Cornel West, “Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 17–33; Lucius Outlaw, “Toward a Critical Theory of ‘Race,’” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 58–82; Michael Eric Dyson, “The Liberal Theory of Race,” and “Racism and Race Theory in the Nineties,” in Reflecting Black, pp. 132–156; Leonard Harris, “Historical Subjects and Interests: Race, Class, and Conflict,” and Lucius Outlaw, “On Race and Class, or, On the Prospects of ‘Rainbow Socialism,’” both in The Year Left Z: An American Socialist Yearbook, ed. Mike Davis et al. (London: Verso, 1987); and Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1986).
52. See Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1965).
53. Wolfenstein, Victims of Democracy, p. 37.
54. Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1991).
55. Ibid., p. ix.
56. Ibid., p. x.
57. Ibid., pp. 41–42.
58. Ibid., p. 54.
59. For further discussion of this subject, see Dyson, “Beyond Essentialism,” pp. xiii–xxxiii.
60. For insightful discussions of the predicament of black intellectuals, see, of course, Harold Cruse’s pioneering The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967); Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Cultural Critique, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 109–124; and Jerry Watts, “Dilemmas of Black Intellectuals,” Dissent, (1) Fall 1989: 501–507.
61. Christian ethicist Katie Cannon writes about the “white academic community’s flourishing publishing monopoly on the writing of black history, black thought, and black worldview. Black scholars did not abdicate their roles in these fields to white academicians. Blacks have written monographs, theses, conference papers, proposals, and outlines for books on various aspects of black reality since the 1700s, but white publishers did not give them serious consideration until the 1970s” (“Racism and Economics: The Perspective of Oliver C. Cox,” in The Public Vocation of Christian Ethics, ed. Beverly W. Harrison, Robert L. Stivers, and Ronald H. Stone [New York: Pilgrim, 1986], p. 121).
62. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Penguin, 1982).
63. Lomax, To Kill a Black Man, p. 142.
64. Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X, p. 189.
65. George Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (New York: Pathfinder, 1967); Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1965); By Any Means Necessary; and Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, ed. Bruce Perry (New York: Pathfinder, 1989).
66. Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 69.
67. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, p. 159.
68. Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 65.
69. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, p. 159.
70. Given the variety and complexity of black nationalist thought, Malcolm could have accommodated and advocated such changes had he had sufficient time to link his broadened sense of struggle to the subsequent social and political activity he inspired. It is important, however, not to overlook the tensions between groups like SNCC and Malcolm while he lived. As Lomax says: “. . . Malcolm was never able to effect an alliance with the young black militants who were then plotting the crisis that is now upon the republic. His trip to Selma was arranged by SNCC people but no alliance resulted. The Black Power people would later raise Malcolm to sainthood but they would not work with him, nor let him work with them, in life” (To Kill a Black Man, pp. 157–158).
71. Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 27.
72. Ibid., p. 34.
73. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, p. 128, quoted in Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 35.
74. Malcolm X, “The Harlem ‘Hate-Gang’ Scare,” in Malcolm X Speaks, p. 65.
75. Ibid., p. 69.
76. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, pp. 159–160.
77. See Leon Trotsky, Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination (New York: Pathfinder, 1978).
78. C. L. R. James, interview in Visions of History, ed. MARHO (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 270.
79. I do not mean to rule out other genres in which Malcolm’s life and accomplishments may be examined. For an example of a science fiction approach to his life and thought, see Kent Smith, Future X (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1989), which appears to have been influenced as much by Schwarzennegger’s Terminator films as by ideological currents in African-American culture.
CHAPTER 21. MIXED BLESSINGS: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND THE LESSONS OF AN AMBIGUOUS HEROISM
1. Gary Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), p. 109.
2. Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: John Day, 1943), p. 153.
3. Ibid., p. 154.
4. For a good social characterization of the figures who surrounded King in the civil rights movement, see Taylor Branch’s commanding social history, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1955–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
5. This quote is from Benjamin Mays’s introduction to Lerone Bennett, What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (Chicago: Johnson, 1976), p. ii.
6. Hook, The Hero in History, p. 157.
7. Bennett, What Manner of Man, p. 131.
8. James P. Hanigan, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Foundations of Nonviolence (New York: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 31–32.
9. Wills, Cincinnatus, p. 132.
10. Conrad Cherry, God ’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 6.
11. Paul G. King, Kent Maynard, and David O. Woodyard, Risking Liberation: Middle Class Powerlessness
and Social Heroism (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1988), p. 15.
12. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. iv.
13. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have A Dream,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 219.
14. Ibid., p. 219.
15. Ibid., p. 217.
16. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), pp. 74–75.
17. These terms refer to the important works of James Scott. See especially Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
18. These Census Bureau figures are usually reported on annually by Robert Greenstein in Christianity and C risis. For a good example of such reporting, see John Bickerman and Robert Greenstein, “High and Dry on the Poverty Plateau,” Christianity and C risis, October 28, 1985, pp. 411–412.
19. For example, the Supreme Court is now, in effect, “Reagan’s Court,” due to Reagan’s appointees, who legally enact his conservative political agenda. For commentary on how the Supreme Court has turned back the clock on affirmative action, see my “Deaffirmation,” Nation, July 3, 1989, pp. 4–5.
20. For a brief exploration of racism in both segments of society, see my article “The Two Racisms,” Nation, July 3, 1989, pp. 4–5.
21. Washington, ed., Testament of Hope, p. 38.
22. Roger Hatch describes the relation between the perspective of the mature Martin Luther King Jr., and Jackson’s vision for America, and addresses Jackson’s evolution into the second phase of the civil rights movement, which concentrates on equity in every area of life (particularly economic justice), in Beyond Opportunity: Jesse Jackson ’s Vision for America (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), esp. pp. 11–23.
23. Washington, ed., Testament of Hope, pp. 67, 70.
CHAPTER 22. “GIVE ME A PAPER AND PEN”: TUPAC’S PLACE IN HIP - HOP
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 84
