Let’s start with a quote from Malcolm X, from his famous
“Ballot or the Bullet” speech delivered in April 1964.
When we begin to get in this area,
we need new friends, we need new allies. We need to expand the civil-rights
struggle to a higher level -- to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in
a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself
to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the outside world can speak out
in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle. Civil
rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. All of our African
brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open
their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States. And as
long as it's civil rights, this comes under the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam.
But the United Nations has what's
known as the charter of human rights; it has a committee that deals in human
rights. You may wonder why all of the atrocities that have been committed in
Africa and in Hungary and in Asia, and in Latin America are brought before the
UN, and the Negro problem is never brought before the UN. (“The Ballot or the
Bullet”; Malcolm X Speaks 34)
As is well known, towards the end of his life, Malcolm X’s approach to talking
about racism and inequality underwent a series of changes. Some of those
changes had to do with theology -- his departure from the Nation of Islam and his
embrace of orthodox Sunni Islam. Others have to do with his changing attitude towards ideas about segregation, black nationalism, and the mainstream civil rights movement.
What has been less talked about is that in these
last years he also radically increased his understanding of and engagement with
parallel questions related to race, nationalism, and political sovereignty in
the post-colonial world. In his final years, Malcolm X was in the
process of transforming from a black nationalist intellectual whose ideas about
resistance and liberation were firmly rooted on American soil into a more
global figure with strong ideas about third world revolutions, the nature of
the cold war, and the prospects for international socialism. In speeches like
“The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X highlights the potential importance of the United Nations
and the International Declaration of Human Rights as a path of redress for African Americans on the receiving end of American racism. Malcolm X strongly
suggests that the pattern of civil rights abuses and discrimination in the
United States needs to be seen and judged by international bodies -- the same
as human rights abuses anywhere.
In the early 1960s, the UN was one of the most important vehicles
for legitimizing a large number of new nations in Africa, Asia, and the
Caribbean that became independent from European colonial powers in the decade between 1955 and 1965. More than thirty new nations gained independence in this period in
Africa alone, and all immediately joined the UN, impacting the culture
of that organization.
Importantly for our purposes today, this process of
decolonization was occurring effectively simultaneously with the Civil Rights
movement within the United States. Within the United States, those were the
years when Black Americans successfully fought for and won rights that had been
denied to them. Elsewhere in the world, millions of Black and brown people who
had formerly been under the rule of European colonial authority fought for and
won the right to self-determination. What Malcolm X came to realize through his
travels in Africa and the Middle East in the last years of his life was that the civil rights struggle in the U.S. and the struggles for human rights and
democracy in the third world were in effect mirror images of one another. And, as per the quote we started with above, if the attempt to achieve justice and a degree of redress for a history of
violence and subjugation within the parameters of the U.S. were not likely to
succeed, Malcolm X felt that the best hopes for the Black community in the U.S.
would be to take the demand for justice to the broader international community.
The starting point for Malcolm X’s internationalism is his strong
sense that as a Black American in 1964 he is not considered a true American. By
denying him his dignity and equal enfranchisement under the law, the country
has in effect indicated to him that he doesn’t belong. He’s been, in effect, denationalized.
Here’s “The Ballot of the Bullet” again:
I'm not a politician, not even a
student of politics; in fact, I'm not a student of much of anything. I'm not a
Democrat. I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American.
If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. Those Honkies that just got
off the boat, they're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the
Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every
blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been
over here, we aren't Americans yet.
No, I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million black people who
are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the
victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing
here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a
flag-waver -- no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And
I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I
see an American nightmare. (“The Ballot or the Bullet”; Malcolm X Speaks 26)
On the one hand being denationalized as a Black man in
America is an extremely painful experience. In that feeling of being excluded
lie the roots of Malcolm’s anger – that bitterness that seems to reverberate in
so many of the speeches he gave, and that terrified many white Americans and led to his being watched by numerous law enforcement agencies (the FBI, the NYPD, and the CIA while he was abroad all had files on him). If a nation refuses to recognize you on the basis of your race, an obvious solution is to use that logic to construct an alternate nationalism. For Malcolm X, that meant Black nationalism as articulated by the Nation of Islam (NOI). As he describes
in his Autobiography, Malcolm X came
to join the NOI while in prison and stayed with the organization through 1963.
But while the NOI had many empowering and beneficial effects on Malcolm X’s intellectual
and ideological development, it operated as a closed community articulating a
concept of Black nationalism through self-segregation rather than as a frontal
challenge to an unjust system. It was only when he left the NOI that Malcolm
X really began to broaden his vision in the directions I have been describing
here.
While Malcolm always remained focused first and foremost on
the sufferings of and denial of rights to African Americans, over the course of
1964 his speeches reflected his moving away from an American-focused Black
nationalism in favor of a broad and inclusive human rights advocacy. Immediately
after he delivered “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X embarked on a series
of international travels that would intensify his convictions in the arguments
he introduced in that speech. While in Saudi Arabia, participating in the Hajj,
Malcolm had the famous epiphany that Islam has the potential to be a truly racially
egalitarian faith – an epiphany that would cause him to rethink, in the last weeks of his life, the terms of
his long-held views about the irrelevance of sympathetic whites to the Black struggle.
But as importantly during that period abroad, Malcolm met
with intellectuals and allies in many different national contexts, including
Lebanon, Egypt, Nigeria, and Ghana. His experiences in Nigeria and Ghana are
particularly noteworthy; here Malcolm began to seriously embrace a
Pan-Africanist ideology that rhymed with that espoused by major political
figures in African politics, including especially Kwame Nkrumah, with whom he
met privately towards the end of his trip.
In speeches and public statements made after the trip,
Malcolm increasingly referred to events transpiring in Africa – he expressed
outrage over the 1961 killing of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and made
frequent references to revolutionary uprisings in places like Algeria and Cuba. Here
is a key moment from one such speech, given at a Militant Labor
Forum event in May 1964, shortly after Malcolm’s return from his first trip
abroad that year and prior to his second:
They [Algerian freedom fighters]
lived in a police state; Algeria was a police state. Any occupied territory is
a police state; and this is what Harlem is. Harlem is a police state; the
police in Harlem, their presence is like occupation forces, like an occupying
army. (Malcolm X Speaks p. 66; also see Marable 335-336)
And then a bit later:
‘The
people of China grew tired of their oppressors and… rose up. They didn’t rise
up nonviolently. When Castro was up in the mountains in Cuba, they told him the
odds were against him. Today he’s sitting in Havana and all the power this
country has can’t remove him.’ (Malcolm X
Speaks 68; Marable 336)
In June 1964, Malcolm met with Japanese writers visiting
Harlem who were survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of
World War II (Hibakusha). In his remarks at that meeting he said:
‘You have been scarred by the atom
bomb…. We have also been scarred. The bomb that hit us was racism.’ Several
Japanese journalists also attended the event, giving Malcolm a platform. He
praised the leadership of Mao Zedong and the government of the People’s
Republic of China, noting that Mao had been correct to pursue policies favoring
the peasantry over the working class, because the peasants were responsible for
feeding the whole country. He also expressed his opposition to the growing U.S.
military engagement in Asia, saying, ‘The struggle of Vietnam is the struggle
of the whole Third World – the struggle against colonialism, neocolonialism,
and imperialism.” (cited in Marable 340. Marable’s source is Yuri Kochiyama’s 2004
memoir, Passing it On)
Also in June 1964, Malcolm created a new, secular
organization called the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which dedicated
itself ‘to unifying the Americans of African descent in their fight for Human
Rights and Dignity.’ The OAAU’s “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives,” which
Malcolm presented at an event at the Audobon Ballroom on June 28, 1964, puts
forth an agenda that seems closely aligned with the human rights emphasis
Malcolm first articulated in “The Ballot or the Bullet”:
The Organization of Afro-American
Unity will develop in the Afro-American people a keen awareness of our
relationship with the world at large and clarify our roles, rights, and
responsibilities as human beings. We can accomplish this goal by becoming
well-informed concerning world affairs and understanding that our struggle is
part of a larger world struggle of oppressed peoples against all forms of
oppression. (OAAU, “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives.” Online at:
http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/gen_oaau.htm
Malcolm’s second trip to the Middle East and Africa in 1964
would last five months. On that trip he would first attend the meeting of the
Organization of African Unity (OAU), the new political structure created by
African nations and the antecedent for the African Union. He then spent several
weeks in Egypt, working with Islamic scholars at Al-Azhar University.
Malcolm also spent time in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana,
Liberia, Senegal, Guinea, and Ethiopia on this trip, and met with many African
leaders and writers, including several heads of state: Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo
Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, and Sekou Toure. After he addressed the Kenyan
Parliament, it passed a “resolution of support for our human rights struggle.” Nearly
everywhere he went, Malcolm X was received as a heroic and admired figure – he
had no trouble arranging meetings with heads of state such as President Sekou
Toure of Guinea, who spoke to him approvingly about his work.
After returning to the U.S., Malcolm elaborated on his
newfound Pan-Africanist and Third Worldist consciousness. In an event again at
the Audubon Ballroom in New York on December 13, 1964, he made comments along these lines:
The purpose of our meeting tonight
… was to show the relationship between the struggle that is going on on the
African continent and the struggle that’s going on among the Afro-Americans
here in this country. […] As long as we think—as one of my good brothers
mentioned out of the side of his mouth here a couple of Sundays ago—that we
should get the Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll
never get Mississippi straightened out. Not until you start realizing your
connection with the Congo.’ (Malcolm X
Speaks 90; see Marable 395)
What is the real import of the distinction Malcolm X draws
between “civil rights” and “human rights”? I can think of two answers, one that
might be more pragmatic and one more philosophical. As a Black man who felt
himself to be denationalized, Malcolm didn’t believe that a struggle focused
entirely on civil rights could ever achieve its ends. He didn’t trust that the
American system could ever reform itself from within, that it could ever truly
deliver justice for its African American population. So a turn to international
bodies, to third wordlist ideology, and to Pan-Africanism provided a practical
recourse.
But I tend to think that it’s not just a pragmatic or
political strategy that led Malcolm X to turn to human rights. As he
increasingly became aware of what was happening in places like the Congo in the
early 1960s, and as he came to understand the significance of the Cuban
revolution and the misguided nature of the American military involvement in
Vietnam, I believe that Malcolm X truly felt that the richest and most
effective ethical framework he could adopt was one that would point outwards,
beyond American borders. From the speeches he gave in 1964, it’s clear that as
Malcolm X visited countries like Egypt, Kenya, and Nigeria, he recognized that
the lives of African people were as much deserving of recognition and dignity
as much as were those of Black Americans – that he saw (to return to a phrase I
used earlier) these parallel struggles as mirror images of one another. If he
had lived longer, and been able to visit other parts of the world, the tenor of
his ideological evolution in late 1964 leads me to think that Malcolm X would
have soon come to expand beyond the pan-Africanism he espoused in the last year
of his life towards a kind of global human rights advocacy.
For me this part of Malcolm X’s legacy has particular
relevancy and urgency today, as we think about the issues of our day. We see
the continued failures of our own government to observe basic human rights
protections; under the Bush administration we allowed torture of an unknown
number of individuals – which was deemed legal as long as the individuals were
not U.S. citizens and the actions were performed off of U.S. soil – in
Guantanamo Bay and in various CIA Black sites around the world. And while those
practices have ended, no one responsible for those policies has been called to
justice. Under Obama we’ve had a policy of extrajudicial execution
using drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The best course of
redress for these wrongs isn’t civil rights – the framework of rights within a
single national context under a legal framework designed to apply mainly to
citizens. With the U.S. military engaged in an effectively globalized field of
operations, we need a strong global framework for protecting the rights and
protections of individuals across national borders and irrespective of
citizenship status.
In the U.S. fifty years later we still have reasons to doubt that the civil
rights of African American citizens are protected under law. The deaths of
numerous unarmed Black men at the hands of police last year, followed by
non-indictment of police officers responsible for those deaths, makes that only
too clear. But the strong sense of international solidarity with protestors on
the streets of places like Ferguson and New York City that followed those
events was echoed and embraced by activists in other parts of the world. In
Malcolm X’s day, the challenge was to present the grievances of American Blacks
to the world stage. Often through Twitter (i.e., #blacklivesmatter), images of those grievances can now
be seen and known by people elsewhere. We see them; they see us. This is a
fulfillment -- though a very partial and limited one -- of an idea of the hope for justice and international solidarity that Malcolm X articulated in
the last year of his life.