Black History Month: Some Remembrances
Harry Targ
(A Rag Blog repost from July 18, 2011)
“And finally, I am deeply grateful to the
real Malcolm X, the man behind the myth, who courageously challenged and
transformed himself, seeking to achieve a vision of a world without racism.
Without erasing his mistakes and contradictions, Malcolm embodies a definitive
yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership
should be measured.” Manning Marable, Malcolm X, A
Life of Reinvention, 2011, 493).
Manning Marable: Scholar/Activist
Professor Manning Marable was a member of the
Political Science and Sociology Departments at Purdue University during the
1986-87 academic year. His scholarship, activism, and ground-breaking books and
articles inspired faculty and students even though his stay at our university
was brief. His classic theoretical work, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black
America, along with over 20 books and hundreds of articles, inspired social
science scholarship on class, race, and gender.
His weekly essays, "Along the Color Line," were published in over 250
community newspapers and magazines for years. He once told me that writing for
concerned citizens about public issues was the most rewarding work he ever did.
He was a role model for all young, concerned and committed scholar/activists.
I just finished reading the powerful biography of
Malcolm X authored by Manning Marable. My encounter with this book was as
fixating and transforming as I remember my reading of Malcolm’s autobiography
in the 1960s.
On Malcolm X in the Classroom
While I lack the deep sense of Malcolm X’s impact on
African American politics and cultural identity that others have, I feel
compelled to write something about this reading experience. (Bill Fletcher’s
review and analysis of the Marable biography provides much expertise on the
subject. “Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography
Controversy: A Response to Critics," from The
Black Commentator, July 7, 2011.)
During my first year at Purdue University in north central Indiana in 1968, I
requested to teach a course called “Contemporary Political Problems.” Since I
was on the cusp of becoming a political activist in belated response to the
civil rights and antiwar movements, I thought I could use this course to have
an extended conversation with students about where we needed to be going
intellectually and politically.
My plan was to assign a series of books that reflected different left currents,
politically and culturally, and get us all to reflect on their value for
understanding 1968 America and what to do about it. We read Abbie Hoffman, Ken
Kesey, Herbert Marcuse, the Port Huron and Weatherman statements, and The
Autobiography of Malcolm X.
While my students and I embraced, endorsed, or rejected various of these
authors, we were profoundly impacted by the power of Malcolm X’s personal
biography and his transformations from the streets to the international arena.
As the word got out about the course, and largely because of Malcolm X, sectors
of the Purdue campus got the word that there was a new “radical” in the Political
Science department. (Therefore, I owe my growing enrollments to Malcolm X).
More important, during the second semester in which I taught the course, I had
a very quiet and respectful African American student in the class. He was a
member of Purdue’s track team. One day, after he showed up at the local airport
sporting a very thin, almost invisible, mustache the track coach ordered him
off the plane. Why? Because he had unauthorized facial hair. His modest
symbolic act, growing the mustache, and the universities response to his words
and deed, set off extended protest activities by African American students in
support of him over several weeks.
Shortly before this incident, we had spent a couple of weeks in class
discussing Malcolm X’s autobiography. During one class period this very quiet
person announced to the rest of us that we should consider ourselves lucky that
he chose to participate in this class.
I saw him 40 years later for a fleeting moment. He remembered me and said that
he had read Malcolm X’s autobiography for the first time in my class. The
student’s emerging boldness and his articulated sense of pride must have had
something to do with his reading of Malcolm X.
Manning Marable’s Biography of Malcolm X
Reflecting on the Marable biography, I was struck by
the capacity of people to change their ways of thinking, their ideologies, and
their practice. Marable attributes some of Malcolm X’s development to his
conscious desire to reinvent himself and to do so as he told his life story to
Alex Haley, his autobiographical collaborator.
Despite the world of racism, repression, and theological rigidity Malcolm encountered,
Marable records how Malcolm X’s experience and practical political work were in
fact transforming.
Different people gleaned different things from reading Malcolm X’s
autobiography, and the same is true of a reading of Manning Marable’s stirring
and frank biography. While those of us on the left were most inspired by the
last two years of Malcolm X’s life, my student was probably impacted as much by
Malcolm’s developing sense of pride and self-worth in a society that demeaned
and ridiculed people of color
Reading Malcolm and Marable reminds us that, while we bring change through our
organizational affiliations, each individual can have a role to play in
achieving that change. Not all of us can be Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Dolores
Huerta, or Mother Jones. But we can make a difference.
In addition, Manning Marable makes a particularly strong case for Malcolm X as
an internationalist. The United Nations had adopted a Declaration on Human
Rights in 1948 but human rights discourse was not part of the language of
international relations until Malcolm X demanded the international community
address the issue.
For Malcolm X, United States racism, while violating the civil rights of its
Black and Brown citizens, was also violating the fundamental human rights of
peoples at home and abroad. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X
was working to build a coalition of largely former colonial states to demand
that each and every country, and particularly the United States, respect the
human rights of all peoples. Multiple problems including racism, poverty,
disease, hunger, political repression, and sexual abuse were problems at the
root of twentieth century human circumstance AND the United States was a major
violator of human rights.
Marable described in great detail Malcolm X’s frenetic travels through Africa
and the Middle East to build a coalition of Black and Brown peoples to demand
in the United Nations and every other political forum the establishment of
human rights. Bombing Vietnamese people and killing Black children in
Birmingham were part of the same problem.
And, this campaign was being launched at the very same time that the countries
of the Global South were struggling to construct a non-aligned movement to
retake the resources, wealth, and human dignity that had been stripped from
peoples by colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. This was the position
that Dr. Martin Luther King came to in 1967, as articulated in his famous
speech at Riverside Church in New York. Malcolm X was introducing this global
human rights project in 1964.
Marable’s Malcolm X therefore transformed himself from a minor street hustler
to a Black Muslim to a visible world leader advocating a global human rights
agenda. This is the Malcolm X that has meant so much to us over the years,
along with his insistence that Black and Brown people be accorded respect
everywhere and that they should honor and respect themselves.
But, Marable carefully documents Malcolm X’s flaws as well as his strengths. He,
at various times, was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, not unsympathetic to
violence, and a man engaged in intense, sometimes petty, political struggles
with his organizational colleagues.
Manning Marable humanizes Malcolm X. Humanizing our heroes makes our efforts to
pass the messages and symbols of the past to newer generations of activists
more convincing. Young people do not need to see progressive heroes as
untainted by their own humanity. And when we present those who make a
contribution to building a better world to new generations, the examples of
their flaws make it clear that no one is beyond personal and political redemption.
Finally, the biographer, Manning Marable, as my statement at the outset
suggests, was a profoundly important scholar/activist. Marable used his
historical knowledge, social scientific analytical skills, and political values
to craft a career of writing and activism that impacted his students, his
academic colleagues, and his fellow socialists in the struggle for a better
world.
Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental
social change in a deeply troubled world.
