One of the reasons African Americans are enamored and enthralled with everyone else’s fame, while we short change our own, is because we rarely hear our stories as told by us.
What we get is snippets of history as unveiled to us by the larger culture.
Did you remember that Malcolm X was assassinated 50 years ago this year? If you’re African American and it means nothing it’s probably because your outlook on history has been filtered to you by people who don’t look like you.
Dallas Pastor and President of Rainbow PUSH, Dr. Freddie Haynes once quoted an African Proverb that was used heavily by Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe.
“Until the Lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Who’s taking notes for you? Seriously; the only thing most of us know about Malcolm X, his life and his death, other than Spike Lee’s movie, comes from people who probably caused his demise. FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover, hunted and recorded Malcolm and Martin.
Hoover considered both to be charlatans and Communists of the first order.
Mama says beware of men living with secrets because they are always in search of yours.
On Sunday, February 21, 1965, just two Sundays before “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Malcolm X arrived at the Audubon Room in New York. As he prepared to speak, suddenly, a seemingly causeless commotion gave way to a cadre of killers.
Malcolm’s impending death was probably no secret to then Hoover.
This assassination was uniquely carried out in the presence of the victims’ minor children…five little girls. The slaughter has roundly and historically been rumored as the final call of a rift between Malcolm and the Nation of Islam.
But like Tupac who died in broad daylight, mysteries still abound. Was it orchestrated by a federal conspiracy or his former comrades?
Malcolm’s life will never be com- memorated with a federal holiday, and that’s fine if it’s of our own choosing. The sad commentary is that if White America deified Malcolm like Patrick Henry, for essentially saying the same thing; “Give me liberty or give me death,” this 59th anniversary would have new meaning. Unfortunately, the maority culture continues to own or shun our version of our history.
The writer and public intellectual James Cone infers as much in his book; “Martin and Malcolm and America, a Dream or Nightmare?
Chapter two introduces Martin is titled the “Making of a Dreamer.” The next chapter the “Making of a “Bad Nigger” of course, speaks of the national depiction of Malcolm.
“As Martin is in danger of being romanticized as a saint, Malcolm is portrayed as a “Messiah of hate” and a “violence preaching black Muslim racial agitator.”
No Black person’s philosophy has been more maligned than Malcolm X’s. Largely because of fear and ignorance, significant segments of the media, government, church, and educational and civil rights establishments labeled Malcolm and his followers as a “black Ku Klux Klan of racial extremism.”
Cone attempted to further buttress his thesis. “The Washington Post described him as the “spokes- man of a bitter racism.” Newsweek called him an “Extravagant talker, a demagogue who titillated slum Negroes and frightened Whites with his blazing racist attacks on the white devil.” Time Magazine says that he was “an unashamed demagogue whose gospel was hatred, and who in life and death was a disaster to the civil rights movement.”
The New York Herald Tribune said that “the cause of the Negro equality efforts lost nothing valuable by Malcolm X’s passing.” Cone went on to reflect that media outlets from London to Berlin followed the pattern set in the American press.
But some of us like hearing Ossie Davis… an historian who literally followed the lion and the way he entered and exited Malcolm’s eulogy. Ossie, for me, is the final arbiter of Malcolm’s national significance.
“Here—at this final hour, in this quiet place—Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes—extinguished now and gone from us forever. And we will know him then for what he was and is—a prince—our own Black shining prince!—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
