In defending the intellect of a first Black president—Barack Obama—who had come under caustic critique by some media channels for his policies, a December 2011 blog post article cited a quotation representative of the language, style, and poetry depicting, honoring, commemorating, and eulogizing Malcolm X. The blog cited Malcolm as stating, “What do you call an educated negro with a B.A. or an M.A., with a B.S., or a PhD?” The answer? “You call him a nigger, because that is what the white man calls him, a nigger” (DeVega 2012).

We begin this chapter with Malcolm’s controversial (perhaps...

There is something special about a topic of conversation and study that stays current in the flow of academic scholarship and the social movements over many decades. The life and legacy of Malcolm X is such a topic. But, one might ask, why? In this volume we propose a theoretical answer to this question, both in general and in particular relationship to Black Studies.

One model for our task was taken up by Max Weber in his discussion of the transition from charisma to bureaucracy (Weber 1968). The special features of a dynamic individual in a particular context can command...

Much has been written about Malcolm X as an African American nationalist, civil rights leader, minister of the Nation of Islam, spellbinding orator, Pan-Africanist, world traveler, intellect, as well as founder of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Be that as it may, little has been written about him as an educator, scholar, and historian. Therefore, the purpose of this essay is to discuss Malcolm X as an educator, scholar, and historian.

An educator is a person whose work is to teach, train, enlighten, and empower others. An educator is a teacher who teaches and...

The mid-twentieth-century Black freedom struggle, dating roughly from the 1954Brown v. Board of EducationU.S. Supreme Court decision to 1980 and the beginning of the Reagan-Bush presidency, was an epic historical moment in the long sweep of the Black oratorical tradition. That period saw the emergence of an explosion of oratorical energy all across the United States. Local and national intellectual-activists, Black Arts poets and writers, and local and national leaders used their speechifying gifts to convey provocative ideas about and analyses of the Black condition, ofttimes leaving their audiences spellbound. Black rhetoric was used as a weapon of...

Studying the life and legacy of Malcolm X as a masculinist enterprise, that is, entirely from a male perspective, misses key aspects of the politics of race and gender within the history of the black diaspora. The traditional gendering of Malcolm X as analpha malereflects a global fascination with black masculinity but erases the importance of Malcolm X’s political relationships with black women.¹

Malcolm X has been culturally reproduced as the epitome of black revolutionary masculinity. His writings, photographs, video clips, speeches, and images establish the masculine as a revolutionary norm while marginalizing the role that The positioning...

Malcolm X has been the inspiration for numerous works of literature, and, especially during the 1960s, the Black Arts Movement (BAM) era, when African American expression through verse was especially pronounced, he became the subject for a unique body of poetic works, constituting an important subgenre of BAM poetry. He developed an iconic persona as gifted orator and spokesperson, not only for the Nation of Islam (NOI) and later for the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), but also for the larger African American community and perhaps the younger generation in particular.

The effectiveness of Malcolm X’s oratory can be linked...

In August 2003, the (unpublished) Malcolm X Papers Collection was purchased by Christy S. Coleman, president of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Coleman paid $250,000 for the collection that she bought from James (Jimmy) E. Allen—an antique collector known as “the Southern Picker,” and coauthor and editor ofWithout Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America—and his partner, John Littlefield. These papers were appraised for their authenticity by Wyatt Houston Day Bookseller of Nyack, New York, in July 2003 and reappraised on May 26, 2006, for insurance purposes. According to the museum’s records,...

Black Studies scholar Maulana Karenga suggests “one of the most important achievements of black studies scholars is to have put forth contestation in Africana studies as a fundamental mode of understanding self, society, and the world … seek[ing] to create a space and process for students to recover, discover, and speak the truth and meaning of their own experience, to locate themselves in social and human history” (2000, 167). Reflecting upon the global history of self-liberating social movements of the past sixty years, one must not overlook or ignore the role of Malcolm El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz as a monumental transformative...

In 1997, Robert Little, Malcolm X’s brother, addressed issues concerning African American youth in urban environments. This discourse was during a meeting about how to best provide positive youth development especially for young African American males. Mr. Little, who was an executive administrator in the Michigan Department of Social Services, reflected on Malcolm X’s opinion that the gender-separate education model for the Nation of Islam (NOI) Schools was a good model for African American communities in Detroit. The contents of their model underscored a positive youth development application tailored specifically for youth in urban environments.

Robert Little had not been...

My story shadows Malcolm’s. I was a leader in the Black Panther Party in Detroit and sent to prison in 1971 after an FBI investigation. A victim of COINTELPRO, I spent twenty-one years behind bars, earning my bachelor’s degree and becoming the first prisoner ever admitted to a graduate program at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Having earned a PhD in history, I am now an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. I write through the current chapter a snippet of an autobiography of my own to reveal how Malcolm’s journey was my own. Like...

George Breitman, editor ofMalcolm X Speaks, gave a lecture at a memorial meeting sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum in New York on February 11, 1966. It was almost a year after Malcolm X was assassinated. At one point, Breitman revealed the segment of society in which Malcolm’s ideas were “taking root.” They were budding “especially among the young people,” he disclosed, “those in their twenties and late teens, and younger even than that” (Breitman 1967, 151–52). In 1968, an unidentified white faculty member at Tougaloo College, a historically black Christian college in Mississippi, told a reporter, “Malcolm...

In traditional African societies, spiritual beings intrude into the daily lives of the earthly bound (Reed 2003, 1–3). And within the African American religious tradition, various forms of belief have been integral for producing courageous, disciplined, and hope-filled human beings against the tyranny of Jim Crow segregation in the south and social degradation in the north. For many Black religious traditions, there is no separate place for secular things and another for the sacred. There was no separation of religion and politics, for example, when Denmark Vesey, trembling with saintly desire, led a violent slave revolt in 1822.

The...

After some four hundred years in the English colonies and the United States, black socioeconomic well-being relative to that of non-Hispanic whites continues to be a very serious problem. A brief review of two critical indicators for well-being in America’s largely pay-for-service economic system accentuates the point.¹ In a 2003 study Arthur B. Kennickell, Federal Reserve Board, reports that blacks hold 2.5 percent of the nation’s total net worth or wealth, compared to 93.1 percent held by non-Hispanic whites.² And annualized black joblessness from 1972 to 2011, as reported in 2012 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, went below...

Malcolm X’s views have been characterized as “revolutionary nationalist,” which is often contrasted with “cultural nationalist”; but this is conceptually confusing and, in light of Malcolm’s black nationalist ideology, a distinction without a difference (Henderson 1997). Malcolm X’s black nationalism led him to advocate “political revolution” as well as “cultural revolution”—the latter thesis is among the most undeveloped aspects of Malcolm’s revolutionary ideology. Malcolm’s call for black cultural revolution was consistent with his recognition that the black liberation struggle in the United States was part of a larger liberation struggle going on throughout the world.

Malcolm’s thesis had a...

Malcolm X advocated major changes within the United States and around the world to improve the situation of Black people. In truth, Malcolm defended revolutionary changes (Malcolm X 1973; Karim 1992; Lincoln 1994; Marable 2011) including those in Latin America and the Caribbean. Significantly, Malcolm embraced the Cuban Revolution as an example of the type of serious change necessary to free Cubans from American imperialism and as an example of the type of liberating change sweeping the world. He specifically linked these international changes to the type of national change required in the United States for African Americans to be...

Known by many names—X, Malik, Shabazz, and as the quotation above indicates, Omowale—the man who was born as Malcolm Little used names to construct and signify a self-identity throughout his conscious life and political practice. In previous chapters, we have already seen how X signified an unknown heritage from Africa. Malik and Shabazz signified a preferred religious affiliation toward Islam away from Christianity, a religion that Malcolm associated with U.S. racism and the subversion of his African identity. With both names (X and Malik Shabazz), Malcolm underscored the intersectionality of the African unknown and Islamic naming identity as...