By: Vincent L. Hall
Did you remember that Malcolm X was assassinated 60 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, 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.
An ABC News report in 2011 put her advice into perspective.
“In public, Hoover waged a vendetta against homosexuals and kept “confidential and secret” files on the sex lives of congressmen and presidents. But privately, according to some biographers, he had numerous trysts with men.
Mama was right!
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 terrorized his four little girls, but it was probably no secret to J. Edgar Hoover.
Most will never celebrate Malcolm, 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 60th anniversary would have new meaning.
But they own 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, titled “The Making of a Dreamer.” The next chapter, “Making of a ‘Bad Nigger” of course, speaks of the national depiction of Malcolm.
“As Martin is roundly 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 civil rights establishments labeled Malcolm and his followers as a Black Ku Klux Klan of racial extremism.”
The Washington Post described him as 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 actually followed the lion and how Davis delivered Malcolm’s eulogy.
“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. In 2025, we need more of our own Lions!
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
