Remembering the Politically Inconvenient Malcolm X

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

This year isn’t just the golden anniversary of Selma. It is as well marks the 50th anniversary of the murder of Malcolm X.

 

Malcolm X has been mythologized. According to the myth, there are, essentially, two Malcolms: the “pre-Mecca” Malcolm and the “post-Mecca” Malcolm X. The former, a national minister for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, preached black separatism. The latter, in glaring contrast, rejected the Nation and promoted interracial unity.

 

That this is revisionism at its best (or worst) is gotten easily enough from the inconvenient facts that it omits:

 

(1) Malcolm X taught that the white race was the creation of an evil black scientist named Yacub.

 

(2) Malcolm as well taught that history would culminate in a racial Armageddon in which God would enable blacks to bring about the extermination of the white race. And how would this occur? According to Malcolm X biographer Bruce Perry, Malcolm, following Elijah Muhammad, informed his congregants of “the mother ship,” a “wheel-shaped flying saucer that contained hundreds of ‘baby planes.’ Each baby plane carried bombs filled with two tons of a powerful explosive. Piloting the planes, he said, were men who had been trained to fly since the age of six—men who had never smiled.”