“You can’t separate peace from freedom
because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”
- Malcolm X -
Earl and Louise Little were a married couple that lived in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early 1900s. While they had three children to care for by 1925, both worked outside the home and undoubtedly educated and empowered many individuals. While serving as a Baptist minister, Earl Little also served as the Omaha chapter president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which worked to establish both educational and industrial opportunities for Black people, Louise was involved in the association as well, serving as the division secretary. Both Earl and Louise worked diligently with the UNIA, becoming big supporters of its founder, Marcus Garvey, a well-known Jamaican political activist at the time.
On May 19, 1925, their fourth child, Malcolm Little, was born. (1) Early on, Earl educated Malcolm about Marcus Garvey and his ideals and activism--education that Malcolm would hold in high regard for the rest of his life as information about racial equity was omitted by the formal educational institutions he later attended. Like his father and many other civil rights activists, however, Malcolm faced a great deal of negative attention for his early nonconformist education and the resulting empowerment. (2)
The Little family was berated continuously by hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, Malcolm would later recall that he had a run-in with the clan while still in his mother's womb. "When my mother was pregnant with me," he recalled in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, "a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home, brandishing their shotguns and rifles" (3). Soon, Earl Little moved his family away from Omaha, Nebraska, to a new home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After moving from Milwaukee to East Chicago then to Indiana, the family found themselves in Lansing, Michigan, (4) where they were sued for eviction due to their house being restricted by a covenant that blocked non-Caucasians from owning the home. They were soon forced to move again as a racist mob firebombed their house. Both policemen and firefighters eventually arrived at the scene, but the house still burnt to the ground because the first responders did nothing to stop it. After this, the family moved to a different part of Lansing.
On September 28, 1931, Louise had a presentiment that something would happen to Earl if he left the house. She asked him to stay put, but he refused and went about his duties as usual. The shock felt by Louise late that night was something she never recovered from as Earl was found barely alive atop a set of municipal streetcar tracks on the corner of E. Michigan Avenue and Detroit Street. While Earl’s death was attributed to a streetcar accident, it was alleged that he was murdered by white supremacists and left on the tracks.
Up to that moment, Malcolm had already seen his fair share of racist rhetoric, harassment, and trauma. Regardless, some say that this event opened up his eyes to just how cruelly and unjustly Black people were being treated. Louise, taking care of seven children all by herself after Earl’s mysterious death and barely getting by, was sent to Kalamazoo State Mental Hospital the day before Christmas Eve in 1938. Malcolm’s three younger siblings were moved into foster care not long after his mother was admitted to the hospital. (5)
With his parents and siblings gone from his life, Malcolm began robbing stores in search of a meal in his teens, a practice that foreshadowed many in his future. (4) He was then sent to a juvenile detention home in Mason, Michigan, after being expelled from school. Mason was a predominantly white city, which would undoubtedly put fear in any Black child at this time, but the couple that ran the home treated him fairly albeit not kindly. As Malcolm would later write in his biography, they treated him as a simpleton despite his experiences and intelligence.
Nevertheless, Malcolm was rather popular at his new school and was well-liked by his classmates. Perhaps it was his early education at the hands of his father that promised a great future as Malcolm earned straight As and even became class president. Things were finally going well for Malcolm until one of his teachers demolished his hopes of becoming a lawyer. "One of life's first needs is for us to be realistic," she told Malcolm in front of the entire class, "You need to think of something you can be… why don't you plan on carpentry?" New inside of Malcolm was a sense of ruined pride, and he dropped out of school at 15 years old only a year later to live with his half-sister, Ella, in Boston. (1)
Spending time with Ella brought something new to Malcolm's life. Up until then, Malcolm had been taught by his experiences to run from who he was, but Ella encouraged the opposite of that. She was a strong Black woman proud of her heritage and who rarely backed down in the face of adversity. Inspired by her example, Malcolm soon found a job working on the railroads, which brought him to New York City. At the age of 17, he began residing in Harlem.
However, Malcolm began changing and not for the better. He soon started, as described by many, dressing like a “hipster” (5) and got involved in drugs, prostitution, gambling, and nightclubs. When he was only 19, he stole Ella's coat and tried to pawn it off, leading to his arrest. He was later arrested again for mugging someone at gunpoint and robbing homes in Boston. (4) Eventually, Malcolm was sent to prison for ten years in 1946 when he was convicted of larceny, breaking and entering, and possession of a firearm after being caught with a stolen $1000 watch from a pawnshop.
Now under constant heavy guard and surveillance, Malcolm needed a new way to pass the time. A fellow convict, whom Malcolm nicknamed "Bambi", encouraged Malcolm to spend his sentence expanding his mind (5), which eventually made him turn to reading. "In every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk," he recalled in his autobiography, "You couldn't have gotten me out of books with a wedge." (6) Malcolm read whatever he could get his hands on, including historical books about slavery. At one point, he even tried to memorize the dictionary. (4) This led Malcolm to join the prison debate classes, a good place for him to be due to his now more articulate speaking skills. As a result of his learning, he also began developing somewhat anti-American political views, even writing a letter to Harry Truman in which Malcolm declared that he was not only against the Korean War but also a communist. This letter brought him constant surveillance by the FBI. (4)
Malcolm’s siblings often visited him in prison and eventually introduced him to Elijah Muhammad, the head of a Black nationalist group called the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims. (5) Under the group’s influence, Malcolm changed his last name from Little to "X", stating that he was removing his slave name. (4) While Elijah Muhammad and X’s own siblings introduced him to Islam's teachings, this version of Islam was very disjointed from Islam's original form. For good reason, X had previously developed a distrust of and disdain towards white people. It is actually heavily believed that his father was killed by a white supremacist group. That occurrence paired with all of the discrimination he faced from school teachers to his entire country led him to become enthralled by the new religion as it postulated ideas like white people, or “blue-eyed devils”, being created by an evil scientist (4).
After six years of prison time, X was released, and he moved to Detroit to work with Elijah Muhammad. Being so influenced by Islam, he became a minister in Harlem and Boston and even opened new temples in Hartford and Philadelphia. The Nation of Islam was relatively small when X began giving sermons, but the charisma of his personality paired with the racially unjust American environment attracted so many people that the Nation of Islam grew from 400 members to 40,000 members in only eight years (8). In 1961, he expanded further and promoted his messages nationwide with the newspaper Muhammad Speaks (9).
X began promoting activism utilizing tactics that revolved around bringing change "by any means necessary". X would promote violence further by proclaiming, "You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-cheek-revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution." (10). Not long after making this statement, another civil rights activist named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. heard tell of X's change-bringing methods. Dr. King often promoted peaceful protests to bring forth racial justice in America, such as the iconic March on Washington, but Malcolm criticized such methods as being to0 weak and ineffective in the long term. On the other hand, Dr. King responded by stating that X's often violent forms of protest had done "himself and our people a great disservice" in 1964 (11).
The FBI continued tracking X’s every move in hopes of preventing any further violence (4). One could say that, at this point, he was out of control. X was not an advocate for peaceful protests and integration. In response to MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech, he retorted, “Whoever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing ‘We Shall Overcome’... while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against?” (12) X’s strong opposition to peaceful protests can be largely attributed to the life he had lived up until that point. In the Autobiography of Malcolm X, he wrote that he “had learned in [his] life that if you want something, you had better make some noise” and that he had no real mercy for the current hateful state of America (3). This even led him to negotiate with the KKK--the very same group that nearly killed him before he was born--in hopes of using their joint forces to push for racial separatism by creating a “separate state” for Black Americans (13)
However, in 1963, things began to change. X learned that his mentor, Elijah Muhammad, was the father of many illegitimate children, something that went against Islam's teachings. Muhammad and X's relationship fell apart over time (7). The final blow was when Muhammad suspended X for reacting to John F. Kennedy’s assassination in an interview by saying, “Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never made me sad; they only made me glad.” He would later explain that this meant, to him, that the assassination was the result of radicalized violence that had been in America since it was first born--this was a very similar opinion to that of MLK’s, an action seen as a betrayal by Muhammad (14).
After his suspension, X left the Nation of Islam and converted to the traditional form, changing his name to El-Hajj Malik E-Shabazz after making the pilgrimage to Mecca and experiencing a complete 180º in terms of his views. He wrote, "The true brotherhood I had seen influenced [him] to recognize that anger can blind human vision." After this, he realized that it wasn't just one singular race causing all of the division but the concept of racism itself. With this in mind, he created the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which helped spread his new desire for unity (8).
His new vision did not live very long--at least not with Malcolm X himself preaching it. After hearing of the heavy opposition he was now preaching of his former mentor, many still belonging to the Nation of Islam set out to silence him. On Valentine’s Day in 1965, his New York City home was bombarded with Molotov cocktails while he was inside with his wife and four daughters. Luckily, they all escaped the assassination attempt (4). However, only a week later, Malcolm X was shot twenty-one times while on stage speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York, by followers of the extremist religion he had recently abandoned (15). Today, Malcolm X is still revered as one of the most prominent civil rights leaders in American history--and perhaps a more interesting one at that with his life ending soon after an attempt to redeem himself.
Reflection
Malcolm X is a complicated historical figure. While he was and still is a notable voice for racial justice and civil rights, one could find it kind of hard to write anything relatively nice about him. Still, focusing on the bad parts of history is just as important as focusing on the parts that inspire us most.
In the grand scheme of things, it can be hard to find an instance in Malcolm X’s life where the good outweighed the bad for a long period of time. As he wrote about the Ku Klux Klan going after his mother while she was pregnant with him, it’s doubtful that that moment--a moment that he cannot even remember--didn’t have a major influence on his life. Constantly being the victim of abuse, harassment, hate crimes, and segregation likely affected him in ways I can’t even begin to understand. Malcolm also had no real adult role models in his life with Elijah Muhammad and his prison reading materials being some of his first sources of guidance. Consequently, Muhammad gave him a completely logical option for responding to his trauma--to fight back and separate from the people who had caused Black people (including his father, mother, and himself) pain for centuries.
The story of Malcolm X is quite sad up until his final chapters. He did preach some truths in his time but also many narratives that only led to further division and hate. When one truly thinks about his life, it becomes more and more apparent that abuse, harassment, and segregation were all factors that led him to be both on the “right” and “wrong” sides in many ways. But while that is sad, this narrative becomes more tragic when we start to realize that so many people, especially young people, experience nearly the same thing, resulting in similar trauma and bitterness when attempting to understand the world.
Hate crimes have risen exponentially in the past few years (16), as have people’s reactions (both peaceful and violent) to them. Now, pair that with the effects of systemic racism: fewer opportunities, unequal housing, unequal pay, etc., etc., etc… Who knows? The next Malcolm X could come out of the broken home near the industrial plant in the impoverished neighborhood you skip driving through on your way to work.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter (BLM) perhaps saw much more representation than ever before. However, even when violent protests are fewer than peaceful ones, the overall message can be misconstrued by those looking to end the protests because the protests do not support their opinions and ideals. Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman, two writers from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, found through data that “when there was violence, very often police or counter-protesters were reportedly directing it at the protesters” and that 96.3% of the BLM events in summer 2020 reported no police injuries or property damage.
Unfortunately, the BLM protests were portrayed as being nothing but riots, looting, etc. by news sources a media outlets that leaned more towards the conservative side of the aisle. With Donald Trump being such a big influence on conservatives, an influence many will listen to without question, the message that the BLM protests were nothing but riots was able to spread further and further. However, history will more than likely heavily remember the BLM 2020 protests as some of America’s biggest examples of peaceful protests--models to look at that support America’s idealism of peace, as well as models to look at getting the message across, as Donald Trump’s handling of the racial unrest led to him getting some of the worst approval ratings in his presidency, this among many other factors being one of the biggest influences that led to Joe Biden’s victory.
While it’s certainly important to protest, it is more effective to peacefully protest rather than violently protest. Many studies have shown that peaceful protests actually bring about more change. In 2011, Gene Sharp, an American political scientist and founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, wrote a book titled Why Civil Resistance Works that showcased data from 1900 through 2016 demonstrating that nonviolent movements were “more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts [because they presented] fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement, information and education, and participator commitment”. A study by Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Princeton, showed that when primarily Black protests leading up to the 1968 Presidential election were nonviolent, Democratic votes were greatly elevated. However, the violent protests actually assisted Richard Nixon in winning the presidency, because those in favor of Nixon were opposed to the Democrats already, and the violent protests gave little to no reason to the Republican voters to support the liberal ideals presented by Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee (18).
So, if Malcolm X’s methods of establishing racial justice were accomplished, America could possibly be even more divided today, or, at the very least, have a much darker history. Racial justice is important, don't get me wrong, but data shows that peaceful protests are more conducive in the fight for racial justice. As explained in “Politics & Pollutants: the Ins and Outs of Environmental Racism”, you--yes you--can help combat the issues of racial inequality. And while you are doing your best to organize peacefully to make a change, you can encourage others--a number of other individuals that is unlimited I might add--to do the same.
Sources & Links
Earl Little’s Death: E. Michigan Ave and Detroit St. - Malcolm’s Lansing
Chapter 1: Nightmare | Malcolm X | The Autobiography of Malcolm X | Annotaded - Genius
“Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Palomar.edu
Chapter 25: Malcolm X - Sanford | The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute
Dr. King and Malcolm X Agree on Kennedy’s Death - Black Leader Analysis
The Enduring Mystery of Malcolm X’s Assassination - TIME Magazine
U.S. Hate Crimes At Highest Level In Over A Decade - Statista
The Problem with Protesting Violence with Violence - Scientific American
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