Martin and Malcolm: how shall we honor our heroes?

Monthly Review, June, 1997

Each year I am faced with the question of how to honor Martin Luther King without fostering the illusion that three decades ago he had or could have had the answer to the questions that we face today.

Most people think that the way to honor great leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is to talk about what they accomplished, put them on a pedestal. I am wary of doing that because over the years I have found that besides giving the impression that the solutions to our present problems can be found in the words or deeds of past heroes, it leads us to ignore what I have found to be one of the most important qualities of revolutionary leadership - the ability to transform yourself, to evolve and change as reality changes and as you learn from your own experiences and the experiences of others.

This was especially brought home by what I saw all around me after Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Almost immediately young blacks, some of them still in their teens, began speaking up at community meetings, starting off with the words "Malcolm said," and going on to repeat his "by all means necessary" statement as if that was all Malcolm ever stood for. It was good to see them speaking up, but it was troubling to see them reducing Malcolm to simplistic political slogans. They had no idea that in the last year of his life Malcolm was undergoing another transformation, a transformation much more difficult than the one he had undergone 15 years earlier from being a hustler to being a follower of Mr. Muhammad. Because this time, instead of accepting and being accepted into an existing organization with a complete philosophy and ideology, he was confronted with the necessity of creating his own. Faced with questions more profound than he had ever had to grapple with, aware that he was still a student of revolutionary politics, he was being asked by militant blacks and curious reporters to provide answers which he knew he didn't have. As he put it in an informal conversation with Jan Carew a couple of months before his death:

I'm a Muslim and a revolutionary and I'm learning more and more about political theories as the months go by. The only Marxist group that offered me a platform was the Socialist Workers party. I respect them and they respect me. The Communists have nixed me, gone out of their way to attack me...that is, with the exception of the Cuban Communists. If a mixture of nationalism and Marxism makes the Cubans fight the way they do and makes the Vietnamese stand up so resolutely to the might of America and its European and other lapdogs, then there must be something to it. But my organization of African American Unity is based in Harlem, and we have got to creep before we walk and walk before we run.(1)

Having been boxed into the rigid ideology of the Nation of Islam for so many years, Malcolm was feeling the need to expand himself both personally and politically. So he traveled to Africa and the Middle East. He also had to make a living for his family. So he ran all over the country making speeches. At the same time he was convinced that he didn't have much time to live - that the U.S. government was out to kill him because by linking the struggle of blacks in this country with the struggle of people all over the world, he had become a threat to their domination of the world. As he put it in this same conversation, "The chances are they will get me the way they got Lumumba before he reached the running stage."

The last time I heard Malcolm speak, on February 14, 1965, the week before his assassination, I walked out because it was too painful. His home in Queens, New York, had been bombed that morning and his family had been driven out into the cold. But characteristically Malcolm was determined to keep the commitment he had made to speak in Detroit that night. By the time he came out on the stage at Ford Auditorium an hour after the meeting had been scheduled to begin, half the audience had left and after he started speaking, he rambled so much that people, including myself, began drifting away.

Although few people are aware of this, Martin Luther King's situation on the eve of his assassination in 1968 was remarkably similar to Malcolm's in 1965.(2) The passage of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, the Watts Rebellion in the summer of 1965, his incursion into Chicago in 1966 which had brought him face to face with the urban poor, the eruption of the Black Power slogan during Meredith's 1966 march into Mississippi, and the War in Vietnam had all made King painfully aware that the vision of integration of the "beloved community" which had inspired the struggle in the South did not meet the more complex needs of the new generation of blacks born and raised in "our dying cities" who were even then being referred to as the underclass. These developments had brought home to King the need to go beyond civil rights to create a new Movement that would bring about what he called "radical redistribution of economic and political power" and "a radical reconstruction of American society." Recognizing that we had entered into an era of rebellion but also recognizing that unceasing rebellions could only bring chaos, he was exploring a new kind of revolution that would combine a radical revolution of values with a radical transformation of structures and thus overturn what he called "the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism." He had no doubt that we had to go beyond middle class values. "It was only when Negro youth threw off their middle class values, only when they put careers and wealth in a secondary role that they made a historic contribution," he said in one of his last major sermons.(3) He had also recognized the limitations of the technological revolution. "We have guided missiles and misguided men," he said. "Instead of strengthening democracy at home," the technological revolution "has helped to eviscerate it. Gargantuan industry and government...leave the person outside. The sense of participation is lost, the feeling that ordinary individuals influence important decisions vanishes, and man becomes separated and diminished."