Renewing the Fight for the Truth

Malcolm X: A Great Revolutionary Whose Record Defies Distortion

by Joe Auciello

Controversy about Malcolm X’s final year arises again and again, and so the effort to establish the truth about him has to be constantly renewed. One of the earliest assessments of Malcolm X is a 1967 pamphlet by George Breitman and Rev. Albert Cleage, titled Myths About Malcolm X: Two Views. The aim of Breitman’s contribution was to “see and understand the whole man,” i.e., the Malcolm before the split with the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Malcolm after that split. Breitman, like everyone else who writes or speaks about Malcolm X, certainly had a point of view, and he made no secret of it. Breitman, however, grounded his interpretation in a full and fair examination of the facts. Not all of Malcolm’s commentators and critics rise to this standard.

The specter of Malcolm X still haunts those who fought him so viciously in his last months. Self-serving stories about Malcolm X continue to be told, most recently and notably at a forum in Boston on March 3 this year. The meeting, sponsored by Socialist Action, was called to examine the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and to explain “the U.S. government role in silencing Black activists and the civil rights movement.”

The urgency of this issue, the truth about the assassination of Black leaders, was heightened by a recent trial ruling which found that indeed there had been a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King, as King’s family has contended. Further background to this meeting was the fact that the government records published so far are totally inadequate.. (A book by Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File, was published in 1991. The FBI edited the documents before they were released and, as is their usual custom, deleted heavily from them.) At the March 3 meeting, an audience of some 60 people heard two speakers demand that the government files on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, which will remain sealed for several more decades if the government has its way, should be opened immediately so that the truth can be made available to the public.

The meeting featured Minister Don Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. Roland Sheppard, a member of Socialist Action’s Political Committee, who was an eyewitness to the assassination of Malcolm X, was the other speaker.

Unfortunately, Minister Don’s talk showed that, 35 years after his death, the NOI still fears the example and influence of Malcolm X. The meeting was blemished by a kind of untruthful attempt at silencing as Minister Don Muhammad tried to distort the record of Malcolm X’s life and work after his break from the Nation of Islam. The Minister also gave a highly selective and prettified explanation of the Nation’s role in Malcolm’s assassination. What follows is a sampling of Minister Don Muhammad’s half-truths and myths as recollected from the meeting:

• “Malcolm X wanted to rejoin the Nation of Islam. We told him, ‘Brother, first you must go around and put out the fires you have started.’”

The truth is that Elijah Muhammad suspended Malcolm from the Nation of Islam for 90 days and ordered him to make no public statements following Malcom’s chickens-come-home-to-roost remarks about the Kennedy assassination in November 1963. Malcolm abided by that suspension. Nonetheless, the suspension was extended and became indefinite. Malcolm did indeed write the NOI leader for reinstatement. But in February 1964 Malcolm broke his silence, left the Nation of Islam, and started out on his own course. Once he did this, he did not turn back. It was only after this break that he spoke out in public against the NOI. Until that time he kept his criticisms behind closed doors.

Anyone who has read what Malcolm X actually said toward the end of his life (see the collection, February 1965: The Final Speeches) will know that Malcolm was harshly critical of his former mentor, Elijah Muhammad, and the leaders of the Nation of Islam. A week before his death Malcolm wrote that Elijah Muhammad, “who had become almost insane with jealousy,” had “given the order to have me killed because he feared I would expose to his followers the secret of his extreme immorality” (p. 250). Malcolm X’s apprehensions have been confirmed in Karl Evanzz’s new book on Elijah Muhammad, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (1999). (Evanzz has also documented the fact that the U.S. government had a top-level informer, an agent who had infiltrated the NOI, and therefore knew of the plan to kill Malcolm – and may even have initiated that plan – and certainly did nothing to prevent it.)

Minister Don Muhammad blurs the time period involved in order to give the false impression that the last year of Malcolm X’s life was largely a failed attempt to reintegrate himself into the Nation of Islam.

• “Malcolm X, on his own, never drew an audience of more than 240 people.”

Here Minister Muhammad is insinuating that Malcolm could draw a large audience only as a spokesman for Elijah Muhammad. It is a false insinuation. According to the editors of The Final Speeches, Malcolm X’s last completed public speech was at Barnard College to an audience of “1,500 students and faculty members.” Many other of Malcolm X’s public appearances in the last year of his life were to large audiences, especially to his own supporters at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, sponsored by the Organization of Afro-American Unity and usually drawing a thousand or more. It was before an audience of that size that he was assassinated.

• “Minister Louis Farrakhan loved Malcolm X like a brother.”

It is true that the two men were very close, and Farrakhan was the godfather of Malcolm’s children. But Louis Farrakhan chose to remain with Elijah Muhammad after Malcolm was expelled. Farrahan became one of Malcolm’s fiercest critics, denouncing him in the NOI’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, as a hypocrite who deserved death. Farrakhan has since admitted that he helped create the atmosphere that allowed Malcolm to be killed.

• “I was angry with Malcolm, but not angry enough to kill him.”

The truth is that Minister Don Muhammad was willing in 1964 to join an armed attack on a vehicle that he thought was carrying Malcolm X. In Boston’s two-lane Callahan Tunnel three carloads of NOI members cut off the front and rear of a car full of Malcolm’s supporters. Minister Don Muhammad, then known as Don X Straughter, drove one of the NOI vehicles. With the targeted car pinned in, four NOI members came toward it. At least one NOI member had “pulled out a nickel-plated revolver” (Evanzz, p. 298). The leader of the NOI gang reportedly told Malcolm’s supporters that they would not be getting out alive.

Both Rodnell Collins and Benjamin Karim, who were in the car that was attacked, have written accounts of the incident. Karl Evanzz, in his recent book, gives the fullest description: “As Straughter came within three steps of the rear door, Busby [a former Muslim] turned the gun around and jammed the butt into Straughter’s chest. When Straughter bent over in pain, Busby reversed the gun again” (p.298). That created a sufficient diversion for Rodnell Collins to ram the vehicle in front of him, knock it aside, and allow Malcolm’s supporters to escape.

Perhaps Minister Don was not angry enough to kill anyone. Or maybe he felt it was “nothing personal, just business.”

• “Malcolm X’s assistant minister, Benjamin Karim, said the NOI did not assassinate Malcolm X.”

In his book Remembering Malcolm, Benjamin Karim says the opposite of what Minister Don Muhammad claims. According to Karim, “Neither the FBI nor any other federal agency or criminal organization had to contrive Malcolm’s assassination. The NOI did it for them” (p. 187).

• “At the Audubon Ballroom the crowd was not subjected to security checks or frisking. This order was given by someone in Malcolm’s security force without his knowledge.”

Again, according to Karim, the opposite is true. “Malcolm had also instructed us not to check the person of anyone attending the rally for weapons or alcohol. ‘Anyone who comes, let them in,’ he had told us. Anyone who came that aroused the suspicions of the MMI [Muslim Mosque, Inc.] brothers, however, would have been checked, despite our instructions, so as to ensure Malcolm’s well-being” (pp. 187–188).

Malcolm’s nephew, Rodnell Collins, made a similar point in comments to the Boston Globe: “My uncle never wanted security. He never wanted protection” (December 28, 1998). Collins himself, at the insistence of his mother, Malcolm’s half-sister, Ella Collins, once phoned a false death threat to the FBI in the hope of increasing security for Malcolm during a speech in Boston. Collins explains his reasons for this unusual step in his book, Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X (1998).

The Nation of Islam and its ministers make very poor guides for understanding Malcolm X. What George Breitman wrote about the Rev. Cleage in 1967 is equally true about Minister Don Muhammad: “His basic mistake, I think, is to present Malcolm the Black Muslim as the real Malcolm, the only one worth remembering, the only one worth building on and continuing from — and to dismiss as unimportant, inconsistent or irrelevant the last year of Malcolm’s life, when Malcolm himself began to build on and continue from his previous positions. This, I submit, is not the way to see or understand the whole Malcolm.”

The best way to see and understand Malcolm X at the end of his life is to read his speeches of 1964–65, which are in print. For commentary on him in this period, the best place to begin is George Breitman’s short book The Last Year of Malcolm X.