| Today we spend the hour
examining the life of Malcolm X - one of the most influential
political figures of the 20th century. Saturday would have been his
82nd birthday. We broadcast excerpts of Malcolm X in his own words and
speak to Columbia University Professor Manning Marable who is working
on a major biography titled "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" to be
published in 2009. Marable is the Founding Director of the Institute
for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.
- Malcolm X, speaking Feb. 1965, six days before he was
assassinated.
- Manning Marable, Professor and Founding Director of the
Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia
University. He is author of many books including "Living Black
History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake
America's Racial Future" and helped edit the "Autobiography Of
Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His
Writings, Letters, and Speeches."
- Malcolm X, speaking out against the war in Vietnam on
August 10, 1963 at the Black Front Unity Rally.
- Malcolm X, an excerpt from his famous speech "By Any
Means Necessary," June 28, 1964 at the founding rally of the
Organization of African American Unity.
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour examining the life and
death of Malcolm X, one of the most influential political figures of
the twentieth century. Saturday would have been Malcolm X's
eighty-second birthday. This is Malcolm X speaking a week before he
was assassinated in 1965.
MALCOLM X: …my house was bombed. It was bombed by the
Black Muslim movement upon the orders of Elijah Muhammad. Now, they
had come around to -- they had planned to do it from the front and
the back so that I couldn't get out. They covered the front
completely, the front door. Then they had come to the back, but
instead of getting directly in back of the house and throwing it
this way, they stood at a forty-five degree angle and tossed it at
the window so it glanced and went onto the ground. And the fire hit
the window, and it woke up my second oldest baby. And then it -- but
the fire burned on the outside of the house.
But had that fire -- had that one gone through that window, it
would have fallen on a six-year-old girl, a four-year-old girl and a
two-year-old girl. And I'm going to tell you, if it had done it, I'd
taken my rifle and gone after anybody in sight. I would not wait,
'cause in -- and I said that because of this: the police know the
criminal operation of the Black Muslim movement because they have
thoroughly infiltrated it.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Malcolm X speaking at a rally of the
newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity, February 15, 1965. A
week later he was shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
Today, we spend the our with Professor Manning Marable and hear
more clips of Malcolm X. Professor Marable, one of the leading experts
on the life and legacy of Malcolm X, a professor at Columbia
University, close to completing an important new biography called
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. It will be published in 2009.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
MANNING MARABLE: Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be back.
AMY GOODMAN: It is great to have you with us. It was six
days after he was speaking about the forces that were infiltrating
that Malcolm X was gunned down.
MANNING MARABLE: That's right, although there were pivotal
decisions that were made after this address. Malcolm met with the key
members of the two organizations that he had established: Muslim
Mosque Incorporated, MMI, which was largely a group of former Nation
of Islam members who left the NOI out of loyalty to Malcolm; and
second, OAAU, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which was a
secular organization of African American middle class and working
class activists who joined Malcolm in building a more radical black
nationalist movement in the mid-’60s.
The debate was, what do we do regarding the security of Malcolm X?
The organization made two decisions that were highly contentious that
evening: one, that none of Malcolm's bodyguards, usually provided by
Muslim Mosque Incorporated, would wear guns on the day of the big
rally, which was scheduled on Sunday afternoon at the Audubon on the
21st of February; and secondly, no one would be searched, which
actually was the standard protocol over the last several months at the
Audubon, because Malcolm did not want to frighten off middle class
Negroes who were coming around and joining his movement.
But Malcolm's own home had been firebombed the Sunday night before.
I talked with James 67X Shabazz, who was Malcolm's chief of staff, and
others who eyewitnessed the assassination, and I challenged them
personally and said, “How could you in good conscience have permitted
Malcolm -- even though he was the leader of the organization,
nevertheless, there is a process of consultation. You were a his
right-hand men and women. How could you have allowed him to do this?”
And they said to me, “Brother Manning, you just didn't know Brother
Malcolm.” Then Malcolm insisted upon it.
So one of the riddles that I’m trying to solve in the autobiography
is, why did Malcolm permit the context of the absence of security to
occur on that particular day, especially at a time when the NYPD, the
New York Police Department, and the FBI clearly set into motion
decisions that facilitated the assassination on that day?
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain exactly what happened on February
21, 1965, from the time, actually six days before, that we just heard
this clip.
MANNING MARABLE: Yes. To the best of our knowledge, the
assassination conspiracy is directly at odds with what the New York
District Attorney's office came up with in the murder trial of 1966.
According to the New York prosecutors and the NYPD, there were three
people who were responsible for the murder of Malcolm X: Talmadge
Hayer, Thomas Johnson and Norman Butler. These three men were
affiliated with the Nation of Islam. They were prosecuted and
convicted of first-degree murder. At the time, New York State did not
have a death penalty. They were sent to prison for a quarter of a
century.
It is very clear to me that Butler and Johnson were not at the
Audubon that day of the assassination. Talmadge Hayer was. He was shot
by Reuben Francis, the chief bodyguard of Malcolm X. But the
circumstances of the murder and all of the evidence that we have
points to six men, not three, who were involved in the assassination;
that the assassination was carefully planned for weeks; that, indeed,
the day before the Audubon rally that Malcolm X and the OAAU held,
that there was a one-hour walkthrough that night of the killers.
And what's curious were the actions of the NYPD and also the FBI.
The NYPD ubiquitously followed Malcolm around wherever he spoke in the
last year. They always had one to two dozen police officers. On this
day, they pulled back the police guard. Many writers have already
talked about this. But there were only two police officers in the
Audubon at the time of the actual killing. And these two were assigned
to the furthest end of the building, away from where the 400 people
had gathered in the main ballroom. There were no cops outside.
Usually, there were more than one or two dozen. So the police knew in
advance something was going to occur that day.
AMY GOODMAN: The two men who you say weren't there, where
were they?
MANNING MARABLE: They were miles away doing other things,
but they were not at the physical ballroom.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you spoken with them?
MANNING MARABLE: I’ve talked with one, Thomas Johnson. We
did a three-and-a-half-hour interview. And what's curious about it is
that Johnson says to me, “You know, I hated Malcolm X. I still hate
Malcolm X to this day,” and that “I tried to kill him. I was involved
in a murder plot in Philadelphia several weeks before. Had I been
ordered by Elijah Muhammad to kill Malcolm X that day, I would have
gladly done it.” This was the content of his interview with me.
AMY GOODMAN: How would he try to kill him in Philadelphia?
MANNING MARABLE: They had conspired to carry out a shooting
of Malcolm at the Philadelphia mosque. Malcolm was quite close to the
people in Philadelphia, because of his close personal friendship and
spiritual friendship with Wallace Muhammad, who was the head of the
mosque, one of the younger sons of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who
ultimately inherits the mantle of leadership. Today, he is Warith
Muhammad, who is a leading figure in the American Muslim community.
Malcolm was targeted by elements within the NOI. But I think that
what's clear is there were three different groups that had an interest
in silencing the new message of Malcolm X: law enforcement, and that
includes the NYPD and the FBI; elements within the Nation of Islam,
and by elements, I’m not entirely convinced that there was unanimity
within the Nation of Islam -- perhaps Elijah Muhammad took the view,
not unlike Henry II, in Thomas a Becket, that “Will somebody rid me of
this priest?” that I’m not sure if Elijah Muhammad gave the direct
order -- I haven't come to that conclusion, but what is clear is that
elements within the NOI, independently of Elijah Muhammad, clearly had
set into motion the actions of murdering Malcolm; and then, finally,
there were dissidents within Malcolm's own entourage, especially
within the MMI, who were extremely unhappy with the progressive
movements of Malcolm in the last six to nine months of his life.
Those who had loyally left the Nation of Islam, who had given up
everything that they knew and owned to join with this brother they
deeply believed in personally, charismatically, then were shocked to
discover Malcolm's denouncing of racism in all its forms and, more
importantly, Malcolm's new emphasis, especially toward the end of
1964, on women leadership within the black freedom struggle. Lynn
Shiflet, a key activist and leader of the OAAU, was directly at odds
with James 67X, the head of MMI, these two groups Malcolm had created,
one secular black nationalist progressive, one conservative and
largely socialized by the tenets of the Nation of Islam.
So Malcolm, himself, felt torn. Malcolm, in his autobiography,
describes himself trying to turn a corner, metaphorically, and that
the people who had given up so much to elevate him, he did not want to
leave behind, but at the same time history was pushing him toward a
new kind of direction. We see this in only three weeks before the
assassination, down in Alabama, where Malcolm goes to Selma, and he
joins with Dr. King and John Lewis and SNCC in the struggle of the
Selma march. And Malcolm reassures Coretta. He says, “I am not here to
disrupt the effort to register African Americans to vote or to
mobilize against structural racism in the heart of the Black Belt. I’m
here because I want to lend my support to the struggle and the fight
of Dr. King.” Malcolm was deeply committed to broadening the basis of
the black freedom movement beyond the principles of integration and
nonviolence of King, but not to destroy or disrupt the legitimacy of
King's role. Malcolm makes that very clear to Coretta. So Malcolm is
moving in some new directions. This caused great consternation within
the FBI, and it caused great consternation within Malcolm's own
entourage.
AMY GOODMAN: Where was Louis Farrakhan at this time?
MANNING MARABLE: Louis X was the head of the Boston mosque.
One must remember he was Malcolm's protégé. Indeed, Malcolm -- the
saying within the NOI by the late ’50s was that they were Malcolm's
ministers. There were about seven to ten young men who idealized
Malcolm. And while everyone was nominally loyal to the Honorable
Elijah Muhammad, nevertheless Malcolm's ministers were charismatic,
they were articulate, they were individuals, like himself, who joined
the Nation of Islam because it was the only formation out there that
spoke a black nationalist-oriented agenda and gave hope and pride and
self-respect to African Americans. And they used the strategies of
reaching out, of what they called, metaphorically, fishing. Farrakhan
was the most brilliant and articulate of these ministers.
In 1963, when it became general knowledge that Elijah Muhammad had
slept with a number of his secretaries and impregnated women within
the Nation, this was anathema. Any other minister would have been
tossed out, certainly silenced for at least ninety days. The Honorable
Elijah Muhammad rolled on. And so, this hypocrisy bothered Malcolm. He
consulted with the ministers. Farrakhan had a choice to make, and he
decided to side with Elijah Muhammad. But it was a difficult choice
for him.
I’ve interviewed Louis, as well, on several occasions. Farrakhan
told me a striking story about when the two men last met in Malcolm's
automobile one night in early 1964, where Malcolm said to Farrakhan,
“The things that are all happening to me right now, when they happen
to you, the isolation, the opposition of all of the ministers, that
will happen to you one day.” And Farrakhan looked at me and said, “And
that was exactly what the brother had predicted.” Ten years later,
that is what he faced, as well. Farrakhan is a riddle, and I haven't
made up my mind, but one of the great things, Amy, about writing
history is that you don't have to make up your mind right away. I’m
doing more research on it now. In about two years from now, I’ll give
you a more definitive conclusion.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Manning Marable of
Columbia University, writing the biography of Malcolm X. His new book,
though, now is Living Black History: How Reimagining the
African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future. We'll be
back with more excerpts of speeches of Malcolm X and more from
Professor Marable. Stay with us.
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