Malcolm X, one of the most influential African American leaders of the 20th Century, was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19 Shortly after Malcolm was born the family moved to Lansing, Michigan. Earl Little his father joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) where he publicly advocated black nationalist beliefs, prompting the local white supremacist Black Legion to set fire to their home. Little was killed by a streetcar in 1931. Authorities ruled it a suicide but the family believed he was killed by white supremacists.

Malcolm dropped out of high school after a teacher ridiculed his aspirations to become a lawyer. Malcolm worked odd jobs in Boston and then moved to Harlem in 1943 where he drifted into a life of “hustling.” He avoided the draft in World War II by declaring his intent to organize black soldiers to attack whites which led to his classification as “mentally disqualified for military service.”

Malcolm was arrested for burglary in Boston in 1946 and received a ten year prison sentence. There he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI). Upon his parole in 1952, Malcolm was called to Chicago, Illinois by NOI leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Like other converts, he changed his surname to “X,” symbolizing, he said, the rejection of “slave names” and his inability to claim his ancestral African name.

Recognizing his promise as a speaker and organizer for the Nation of Islam, Muhammad sent Malcolm to Boston and then in 1954 to Temple Number Seven in Harlem. Although New York’s one million blacks comprised the largest African American urban population in the United States, Malcolm noted that “there weren’t enough Muslims to fill a city bus. “Fishing” in Christian storefront churches and at competing black nationalist meetings, Malcolm built up the membership of Temple Seven. He also met his future wife, Sister Betty X, a nursing student who joined the temple in 1956.

Malcolm X quickly became a national public figure in July 1959 when CBS aired Mike Wallace’s expose on the NOI, “The Hate That Hate Produced.” This documentary revealed the views of the NOI, of which Malcolm was the principal spokesperson and showed those views to be in sharp contrast to those of most well-known African American leaders of the time.

Soon, however, Malcolm was increasingly frustrated by the NOI’s bureaucratic structure and refusal to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. His November 1963 speech in Detroit, “Message to the Grass Roots,” a bold attack on racism and a call for black unity, foreshadowed the split with his spiritual mentor, Elijah Muhammad. However, Malcolm on December 1 was suspended from the NOI for his comments in responce to JFK Death, “chickens coming home to roost” which to Muslims meant that Allah was punishing white America for crimes against black people.

Malcolm used the suspension to announce on March 8, 1964, his break with the NOI and his creation of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. Three months later he formed a strictly political group, called the Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU) which was roughly patterned after the Organization of African Unity (OAU).

His dramatic political transformation was revealed when he spoke to the Militant Labor Forum of the Socialist Worker’s Party. By April 1964, while speaking at a CORE rally in Cleveland, Ohio, Malcolm gave his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech in which he described black Americans as “victims of democracy.”

Malcolm traveled to Africa and the Middle East in late Spring 1964 and was received like a visiting head of state in many countries including Egypt, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ghana. While there, Malcolm made his hajj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia and added El-Hajj to his official NOI name Malik El-Shabazz.

The transformed Malcolm reiterated these views when he addressed an OAAU rally in New York, declaring for a pan-African struggle “by any means necessary.” Malcolm spent six months in Africa in 1964 in an unsuccessful attempt to get international support for a United Nations investigation of human rights violations of Afro Americans in the United States. Upon his return to New York, his home was firebombed. Events continued to spiral downward and on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

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  • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    19 hours ago

    Someone asked about “why did capitalism develop in Europe instead of China” last week, and I have a little bit more of a partial answer.

    Europe had a frontier (the Americas) where nascent capitalists could rest, recuperate, and build wealth and power away from the prying eyes of the traditional aristocracy. If you compare any equivalent frontiers for China or India, the frontier was not as friendly (or didn’t exist; there were simply other empires there). So our hypothetical Chinese 15th century capitalist cannot accrue power outside of the traditional powers in China.

    You can even sorta see this today, in places like Israel where unethical practices (even beyond killing Palestinians) can be tested and tried out. Even outside of Israel, the “capitalist” innovations of greater exploitation happen in countries that do not have established power structures that can or would stand up to capitalists. Being able to flit between countries in order to avoid scrutiny is one of capitalists greater strengths as, say, a labour movement in the UK gets powerful enough to challenge hegemony (to say nothing of labour aristocracy). This is especially compared to previous aristocratic power structures, which tend to be local and disempowered if they flee to another country.

    Like I said, this is only a partial explanation, but one that ties colonialism and capitalism together and explains why it happened in Europe rather than China (though it does raise the question of why hypothetical capitalists in China didn’t do the same colonialism in the Americas or SEA, perhaps those hypothetical capitalists couldn’t exist for other reasons).

    • HarryLime [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      18 hours ago

      I think a better explanation is that Europe was made up of medium-sized states that were in constant competition with each other, while having a ruling class that struggled with debt. This meant that they had to seek out new frontiers to expand their capital, and were forced to adopt disruptive reforms that they would otherwise not be inclined towards. Eventually, every European state was incentivized to adopt the political economy that had been created by the Netherlands and Britain.

      The capitalist mode of production existed in China, India, and the Ottoman Empire, but these were large, land-based Empires whose ruling classes were incentivized not to disrupt their political economies. The European states were forced into the disruption of capitalism through competition with each other.

      • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        7 hours ago

        I think the experience of the 30 years war explains why capitalism ignited in Europe over China, but China had periods of warring states where you could see that competition leading to the establishment of capitalism. China even sent out Zheng He’s treasure ships, they totally could’ve colonized (they didn’t even have to deal with scurvy because people ate sprouted beans and had enough vitamin C) - but they didnt have the same relationship to debt or expansion like the small to medium western Europe nations did. China was the center of the world and the Emperor ruled all the world already, just to varying degrees of autonomy at its unruly frontiers where other independent nation states existed lol. I think it mightve been just sheer happenstance that it hit Europe first rather than elsewhere but it does make sense that it hit Europe first. Like if it was about rolling dice, every other country had to roll a 2 or 12 and Europe only had to roll a 7 (out of 2 dice)

    • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      17 hours ago

      The reason that China wouldn’t make it to America is because there are no passage winds like there are over the Atlantic and the entire trade system was built around the monsoon system in the Indian Ocean (so the ships were built for that rather than passage winds like European ones).

      Polynesians did manage to get across to the Americas, but there is far less pressure to find trade routes when you are at the center of a seaborne trade system that spans from East Africa to Oceania. Getting direct access to that market is the major reason for Europeans creating ocean faring vessels. And China did try establishing more direct control, (Zheng He and his expeditions for example) but it was simply not profitable.