Some Reminiscences of Malcolm X

Unblemished, Uncorrupted Leadershipby John Henrik Clarke

approximate their words in developing theconstitution for the Organization of AfricanAmerican Unity, he was as happy as a child.

And it is little known that Malcolm X , andthis is what made him so devastatingly effec-tive, he had a non-Muslim "cabinet" that fedhim information but never told him what todo or how to do it. Yet we made sure that theinformation he dispensed was always correct.Noone told him what to do with the facts butthey made sure that the facts were straight.

The most memorable thing for me in thisregard is [one time when] he wanted some-thing on history - because I was in hishistorical cabinet. His man picked it up at 7,he didn't get to read it until 9, and at 11 hedebated four college professors on the Congosituation. He reduced them to crying chil-dren.

I gave him some newspaper clippings,some xeroxes of B.D. Morel's work on KingLeopold's Congo, and I gave him a smallbook, tantamount to a goodsized pamphlet,by Mark Twain, King Leopold's Soliloquy,that had a lot of statistics about murder in theCongo. I told him an old trick that I used toplay often when I was active in the left move-ment. When people are talking about some-thing you don't know anything about, alwaysswitch the conversation to something youknow about. [... ] Malcolm played that trickon those college professors, and they werebegging for mercy. That was Malcolm. Sharpin mind, sharp in information.

I'm going to talk briefly about some ne-glected aspects of his life and some mis-interpretations, some misconceptions aboutsome of the things he did. I do not think wehave studied his growth, his evolution velYwell. I do not think that we have put the lightemphasis on how he came out of the mire.[ ...]

I first met him in 1958 - he came to lookat the Nation of Islam's exhibit at the WorldTrade Show building, the African HeritageExposition. He saw someone hanging aroundme, a Hungarian girl, and he kept looking,and when she left, he came over and said,'That your woman?" I said, "No." He said,"Good. That's a dead-end street. I've beendown that street." He went away, then hecame over again, looked me up and down andsaid, "I bet you're a pork eater." I admittedthat I visited the pork chop once in a while

The following are excerpts from the remarks by Dr. John Henrik Clarke at the November 13forum.These are very critical times in our life asI a people. Once more we are standing at

the crossroads of history. And I have a great[feeling of] dilemma - that we are debatingminor things and neglecting major subjects.I have not seen the film, and therefore I willhave little to say about the film.

In my brief discussion with Spike Lee [... ]I suggested that maybe the film should openwhen they threw the mangled body of Mal-colm's father on the porch. And Malcolm asa kid, tugging at his mother's apron and as-king, "What happened to father?" And hismother going slowly out of her mind.

Because that was the beginning of themaking of the mind of Malcolm X. Becausehe began to deal with the contradiction in thisnation. He had to go through a whole lot ofother contradictions. People telling him whathe could not be. Then the challenge withinhimself. And the question, "Why can't I bewhat other people are?"

I think one of the main reasons why at thisjuncture in history that a whole lot of phonypeople are gravitating toward the image ofMalcolm X and a whole lot of sincere peopleare also gravitating toward that image, is thatthey sense something in Malcolm X that isneeded not only by this people but by allpeople. Unblemished, uncorrupted, uncom-promised leadership.

We've had so many hustlers disguised asleaders. So many peddlers ofpeople. Wekeeplooking back at Malcolm and keep examin-ing him over and over again. What was thelesson that he taught? He taught a lessonaround a subject that impinges on our mindsnow, and we are confused about how to grap-ple with that subject, and that subject is landand nation. Because land is the basis of na-tion.

You can talk all you want to about libera-tion. If you have no control over the land, youcannot solidify the nation. Zimbabwe is agood example. They came to pseudo inde-pendence with whites controlling most of theland and most of the food supply. That's notindependence. That's programmed depend-ence.

Now why the gravitation toward MalcolmX? Haven't we gone through a battery ofleaders? Haven't we examined them and[found them wanting]? What we miss in

February 1993

looking at a Malcolm X is how Malcolm Xrelated to the radical ministry of the past.

I knew Malcolm X from 1958, when wemet, until two weeks before he was assas-sinated, and I talked with him consistently. Idid not, even in the book that I compiled onMalcolm X, say very much about my rela-tionship to him. So many phonies popped upafter his death saying they were friends andpals of Malcolm X. I didn't want to be as-sociated with these phonies. So I kept myrelationship to myself. Most of it I have notwritten about to this day.

He was a man, one of the fastest learnersthat I have ever met in my life. You could givehim information and he would read this in-formation back to you, teaching you lessonsover and above your instruction to him with-out offending you. He would speak to severalaudiences simultaneously using the samewords without offending anyone in the audi-ence. He could speak to the reader and thenonreader, to the college professor and theilliterate, simultaneously, and his messagewould get across to all of them.

What then is the significance of MalcolmX for today? He called not only for the res-toration of nationhood, womanhood, man-hood, he called for us to restore to ourhistorical memory the time when we were notdependent on other people to make decisionsfor us. When we were the masters of our owndestiny. He called on us to reconsider ourposition, not in the United States, but in theworld.

The idea of an African American unitypatterned after the Organization of AfricanUnity started in the Saturday meetings afterhe broke with the Nation [ofIslam]. He beganto have these meetings at Old Flash Inn onMcCombs Place on Saturday morning whenthe cafe had no customers. Out of these meet-ings came the structure and the idea for theMuslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organizationof Afro-American Unity.

The constitution of the OAAU was fash-ioned in my livingroom. Charles Kenyatta,still alive, was there. Lynn Chipplet, now innorthern California, was the secretary. Myformer wife was there. My mother-in-law,still alive, was there. So I'm not talking aboutancient history or any kind of mystery. Whenwe found matching phraseology in the Or-ganization of African Unity, when we could

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and that I had been known to admire and toenjoy some chitlins. He suspected it.Throughout all our relationship he kept razz-ing me about being apork eater, a swine eater.He said, "You're a decent human being. I'mgonna give you 99. Leave that swine alone,I'll give you 100." I stopped eating porkabout fifteen years ago. It had nothing to dowith religion at all; it had something to dowith health. I wanted to live a little longer,and my high blood pressure just simplywouldn't take it.

Soon after this meeting he started a news-paper. He called it Mr. Muhammad Speaks.It later became Muhammad Speaks. And ifyou look at that first issue, if you're everfortunate enough to get a rare thing like that,you'll fmd an article I wrote on the historicalbackground of Nigeria. I told him how brokeI was. I had been recently married for thesecond time, and the job market wasn't goingtoo good. I was working at night at a bank andediting a magazine that paid me the mag-nificent sum of about $70 a week. My wifewas pregnant. Malcolm X paid me out of hisown pocket, I found out years later. It wasn'tthe Nation's money; it was his own money.

The March on WashingtonYou see, he began to pull around him peo-

ple who could advise him on the facts of theevolution and change in our movement. Hewas interested in every aspect of that move-ment. On the eve of the March onWashington[in 1963] he too was restless and asked forpermission to participate in the march. Per-mission was not granted. This was part of thebeginning of some difficulties [in the Nationof Islam]. When it was discovered that ElijahMuhammad's health wasn't too good, certainjealous rivalries began to develop within theFruit ofIslam, and among some other people,who were thinking he would be the naturalhead of the Nation in the absence of ElijahMuhammad. Certain forces began to moveagainst him within the Nation.

He had become the spokesman for theNation. He had given the Nation a nationalpresence. And many times, when he wasprefacing his speech with the words "TheHonorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us,"he, Malcolm X, was teaching lessons overand above anything the Honorable ElijahMu-hammad ever thought about. Yet he wascrediting Elijah Muhammad for his words.Because in Elijah Muhammad Malcolm Xhad found the lost father, the father that theythrew on that porch - the Ku Klux Klan. Hehad again found a father image in his life. Andhe loved and respected Elijah Muhammadlike a father and tried to communicate withhim up until within a week of his death. Onlyto have his letters and his tapes interceptedElijah Muhammad would die without evergetting those last messages and that plea fromMalcolm X for the two of them to get togetherand put that movement together again andheal the breach between them.

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These are some of the things very fewpeople know about, very few people writeabout.

Because Malcolm X knew the good thatthe Nation was doing, taking people out ofprison, making them whole again, makingthem clean up themselves again, making themthrowaway old habits for new habits, teach-ing them respect for women again, teachingthem responsibility again. And themovementof Elijah Muhammad was not stealing peoplefrom the little church or the big church, be-cause they weren't in there. These were thepeople out there with no appreciable rallyingpoint, with no appreciable leadership, whohad found basic leadership.

[You have to understand] the good of theNation ofIslam, whether you believe in Islamor not. And that's not the issue I'm trying toget across here, because I don't believe in anyform of organized religion. I believe inspirituality, and I believe in people. I believein commitment. I believe in the worth ofhuman beings. I believe in honor. I am anAfrican nationalist and a Pan-Africanist. Andif you ever gave me a proper defmition ofMarxism that would fit within my Pan-Afri-canism and my African nationalism, I wouldbe a Marxist. But if it takes me out of there,then you can have it. Because we had thesame thing, without dogma, without formu-lization, before Europeans wore shoes orlived in houses that had a window. We didn'thave to go to Europe for that kind of thinganyway, for that kind of society.

What I'm trying to get at is that on the eveof the March on Washington, when he wasnot given permission to participate in that bigarena - although in the fmal analysis it wasa picnic on the grass that achieved absolutelynothing. [To him] it was symbolic that theother organizations were going there, partici-pating. He wanted the right to do the samething. And I think he would have had some-thing meaningful to contribute to the Marchon Washington. It might have had substancewith Malcolm Xinit. Martin Luther King hada dream. Malcolm X would have had a plan.Soon after this, after the "chickens cominghome to roost" speech [he was silenced]. Andit really wasn't this speech. They wanted anexcuse to get him out anyway, so they usedthis flimsy excuse. And when he saw that hewasn't going to be asked to come back intothe Nation, he began to formulate ideas, or-ganizational ideas, of his own. [He began]hurriedly, with such personnel and such sup-port as he could get. Some were Muslims andsome were non-Muslims. Some followed himout of the Nation, some rallied around himout of respect. [... ] But he was moving fast.

Now when we go to Africa, the trip toNorth Africa was not as significant as the tripto WestAfrica. And yet the trip toWest Africais basically left out of the [Spike Lee] movie,so I've been told. There was an attempt topoison him in Egypt. This was no doubtbecause he did not know the warring factions

within Islam. In the name of Allah, there havealways been warring factions within Islam,and still are, even now. He got trapped be-tween these warring factions. Both of themwanted to control him.

When he went on the Hajj to Mecca, andwhen he wrote back that he saw black Mus-lims, white Muslims, brown Muslims wor-shipping together, that was an observation,not an analysis. Too many people think thismeans he was now an integrationalist. Soonafter he arrived back here, he made clear hehad not changed his ideas on race one iota-if you're trying to say that near the end of hislife he became an integrationalist.

Martin Luther KingWell near the end of his life he met Martin

Luther King. Martin Luther King and Mal-colm X had the same basic objective, walkingdown different roads using different method-ology. Martin Luther King's method wouldnot succeed, because Martin Luther King wasappealing to the conscience of the oppressor,not knowing that the oppressor had no con-science. It was idealistic, but it was totallyimpractical. Malcolm X said in simple directwords again and again, "The oppressor hasno conscience. The oppressor has not ac-cepted your manhood or your womanhood"

I think the most unfortunate thing of themany unfortunate things that happened toMalcolm X is that a bunch of political oppor-tunists gained control over his speeches.[This is a reference to Pathfmder Press, thepublishing house now influenced by the JackBarnes leadership team of the SWP. BettyShabazz, Malcolm's widow, gave Pathfmderexclusive rights to publish material by Mal-colm.] They began to publish his speechesand interpret them, trying to prove that he waswhat they desired him to be.

Malcolm X is too big to fit into any kindof bowl. He's too big to fit into any bowlmarked communism, socialism, or capital-ism. He was a believer in the ultimate destinyof his people. Among his many revolutionarystatements, his two last revolutionary state-ments [are the most important] - "Ballot orthe Bullet" and'.Message to the Grassroots".In both of them he dealt with political powerand the land question as the basis of thenation.

Some will argue about who assassinatedhim and why. But Malcolm X learned some-thing on his way home, [after] he arrived inParis and was barred from entering - [afterthat] he knew that the plan to destroy him wasnot designed by his own people. He knew thatthe apparatus was bigger than anything con-trolled by his own people. And he becamesomewhat fatalistic. He knew that mastermurderers were out to get him and no matterwhose hand pulled the trigger, that was notthe planning and design of Black people.

Once you show your people the true faceof power and what to do about it in this

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Bulletin in Defense of Marxism

Unblemished, Uncorrupted Leadershipoften felt that I was having a conversationwith an old friend And near the end of thatyear, sitting alone in my downstairs office,with the conversation going again, I askedfiguratively, "Malcolm, what can I do?" AndI felt that somewhere someone said, "Do yourbest work. In my memory and as a tribute tome, do your best work." I knew then that mybest work was part of what he lived for andpart of the reason he died. To tell the truth andsuffer the consequences - that was my bestwork. 0

Continued from page 14country, one of three things is going to hap-pen to you. You're going to be driven intoexile, driven into suicide, or you're going tobe assassinated. Once your people under-stand the true face of power and know whatto do about it, someone's going to have togive them some power, or they're going torake it. Once he began to teach that lesson hewas writing his own obituary. The same thingis true of Martin Luther King in his speecheson the war in Vietnam.

When Malcolm X was assassinated I was

February 1993

in Connecticut making a speech on greatAfricans in history. I was in the home of aJewish family, having dinner before thespeech. When they came in and told me theywere as cold as ice, and someone said, "Afterall, he was anti-Semitic." I didn't know whatto say. I wanted to hit somebody. I wanted tokick and scream. I went into that bathroomand cried like a child for fifteen minutes. Icame out and made a fast speech later that dayand came home.

But during that year after his death, after Ihad participated in the memorial for him, I

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