Aug 9, 2024
Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, & Louis Farrakhan. Harlem, 1963
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Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, & Louis Farrakhan. Harlem, 1963
Religious fervor is mirrored on the face of a Muslim woman listening to Elijah Muhammad's Savior's Day Message in Chicago, March 1974. John H. White/NARA
Sometimes when I talk about Malcolm X and about how more people should be more educated on him and the things he says I will get this comment that basically says "yes but do so critically and he was a raging misogynist"
And yes. True. This was often talked about and in fact the Combahee River Collective spoke about that in the statement they provided, you know, the statement that has since become the backbone and founding work of intersectional Black feminism? They did mention that even among groups such as the Black Panthers there lacked a focus on women's rights. This to say the misogyny of these movements is well known and recorded if you simply learn of them beyond the surface (and take the time to learn from the voices of Black feminists at the time of course).
And on that note I was looking for a source today about a quote from Malcolm X regarding Nazis and instead stumbled into this information thanks to a piece from 2015 that Vice wrote:
A look at the strange alliance between the Nation of Islam and the American Nazi Party.
The night’s keynote speaker, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad, canceled his appearance because of illness. According to historian William Schmaltz, Malcolm X delivered a speech, followed by an appeal for donations that singled out the few Caucasians in the audience. Rockwell contributed $20. When Life photographer Eve Arnold raised her camera to capture the Nazis, Rockwell—presumably alerted to her Jewish ancestry by the Muslims—allegedly rasped, “I’ll make a bar of soap out of you.” (She replied, “As long as it isn’t a lampshade.”)
[...]
Division of the races was another mutual bugbear. Malcolm X’s speech that night was titled “Separation or Death.” Inside the arena, Rockwell told reporters, “I am fully in concert with their program, and I have the highest respect for Elijah Muhammad.” The question of where to send America’s blacks—the NOI wanted a chunk of the US, while the ANP wanted a full deportation to Africa—was, he said, his only quarrel with the Muslims.
[...]
Remarkably, the NOI had a history of such partnerships. Six months earlier, Muhammad had sent Malcolm X to a top-secret meeting with the Atlanta Ku Klux Klan. In a throwback to Marcus Garvey’s 1922 Klan summit, the two groups brokered a bizarre truce: local mosque safety in return for NOI support on racial separation.
[...]
Overt anti-Semitism, it turned out, was something the two groups could bond over. The Washington summit would have provided a bitter contrast to Rockwell’s normal, meager gatherings. An audience of 8,000 was something he could have only dreamed of. Even the building’s imposing vaulted ceiling hinted at the fascist architecture he saw as his inalienable destiny (throughout his career, he made repeated references to controlling the United States by 1972). For the Nazi leader, the alliance served a fantasy rooted in grandiose absurdism. “Can you imagine a rally of the American Nazis in Union Square,” Rockwell later wrote his followers, “protected from Jewish hecklers by a solid phalanx of Elijah Muhammad’s stalwart black stormtroopers?”
Why would the famously disciplined NOI ally itself with such caricatures?
[...]
A possible answer came eight months later. On February 25, 1962, the ANP was invited to a second rally, this time the NOI’s Saviours’ Day convention in Chicago. Rockwell addressed the crowd after Muhammad. Facing an estimated 12,000 African Americans, the Nazi leader pulled no punches.
“I am not afraid to stand here and tell you I hate race-mixing and will fight it to the death,” Rockwell continued. “But at the same time, I will do everything in my power to help the Honorable Elijah Muhammad carry out his inspired plan for land of your own in Africa. Elijah Muhammad is right. Separation or death!” The audience teetered between polite applause and boos. Two months later, Muhammad, writing in the NOI newspaper, admonished his flock for their frosty reception: “If they are speaking the truth for us, what do we care? We’ll stand on our heads and applaud!”
[...]
After leaving the NOI in 1964, Malcolm X used the movement’s alliance with the Klan as a charge against Muhammad. The following year, he sent a telegram to George Lincoln Rockwell:
This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation… Within three years, both men were dead, allegedly assassinated by former allies. But the ghost of the alliance lives on today. The Nation of Islam, under the auspices of Louis Farrakhan, maintains an open partnership with white supremacist Tom Metzger. And in the last decade, the American Nazi Party website established a “Non-Aryan Sympathizer Page,” offering “a means for non-whites to aid in our struggle” with mail-in contributions. Malcolm X’s posthumous alliance was stranger still: mainstream acceptance by the white-supremacist society he fought against in life. The US government eventually awarded him a postage stamp.
And anyway I feel like this is just another reason to more critically educate ourselves in a time where knowledge and fact arent rewarded when they don't serve to further a specific agenda or bias. Heroes, idols, and even leaders of racial freedom can be and often are just as flawed and contradictive as anyone else is capable of being.
People who sought racial freedom and equality were also misogynist and antisemitic, often failing to see the ways they degraded others in the same way they were degraded.
This is why we do not idolize. Through idolization you idealize and through idealization you lose the ability critically engage, especially with facts that may remove your idol from the pedestal on which you've placed them.
Some other sources and further reading:
Some American Black Muslims are making common cause with domestic neo-Nazis and foreign Muslim extremists.
The NOI definitely wasn't perfect and I don't think anyone would really judge you for saying so because of the scandals that took place within it, Malcolm x even outed it's leaders dirty laundry several times But I never would've thought he'd be part of the NOI during its alliances with Nazis.
The more you know, I guess. I only even share this because it seems like this is much less common knowledge than these men just being misogynists because nobody has ever told me this as a criticism of Malcolm or the NOI.