Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Aug 1, 2019 Chuka Ejeckam joins Breht to discuss the one and only Malcolm X. In this episode, we honor the life, legacy, and radical clarity of Malcolm X, one of the most fearless and honorable figures in the struggle for Black liberation. From his early years shaped by systemic racism and incarceration, to his rise as a powerful voice within the Nation of Islam, and finally to his global awakening and revolutionary vision in the last years of his life—we trace the evolution of a profoundly courageous man who refused to be silenced. We dive into his speeches, his politics, his personal life, and the enduring impact of his message: one of dignity, self-determination, and uncompromising truth. Find Chuka and his work here: http://www.chukaejeckam.com/ If you liked this episode, check out our other episode on Fred Hampton featuring Chuka here:  http://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/fred-hampton ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat or a Republican nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy. All we've seen is hypocrisy. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare. And the generation that's coming up now can see it and are not afraid to say it. If you go to jail, so what? If you blank, you were born in jail.

If you black, you were born in jail. If you black, you were born in jail. In the north as well as the south. Stop talking about the south. Long as you south of the, long as you south of the Canadian border, you're sound. This is why I say it's the ballot or the bullet. It's liberty or it's death. It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.

America today finds herself in a unique situation. Historically, revolutions are bloody. Oh yes, they are. They have never had a bloodless revolution. Or a non-violent revolution. That don't happen even in Hollywood. You don't have a revolution in which you love your enemy. to me. And you don't have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation

to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolution destroy systems. A revolution is bloody. But America is in a unique position. She's the only country in history, in a position actually to become involved in a bloodless revolution. All she's got to do is give the black man in this country everything is doing. Everything. I hope that the white man can see this. Because if you don't see it, you're finished.

If you don't see it, you're going to become involved in some action in which you don't have a chance. We don't care anything about your atomic bomb if useless because other countries have atomic bombs. When two or three different countries have atomic bombs, nobody can use it. So it means that the white man today is without a weapon. If you want some action, you've got to come on down to earth. And there's more black people on earth than there are white people on. it'll be it'll be the ballot or it'll be the bullet it'll be liberty it'll be liberty

or it'll be death and if you're not ready to pay that price don't use the word freedom in your vocabulary hello everybody and welcome back to revolutionary left radio this is one of my favorite episodes of all time as far as working on it and getting the word out and sort of helping preserve Malcolm X's legacy. So we really hope that all our hard work pays off and this can stand as like a really humble and loving testament to the life and legacy of Malcolm X. I also wanted to say that we put a little Easter egg at the very, very end after the outro song. The Easter egg is an interview with somebody who you'll figure out once you get to the end, who is very influenced by Malcolm X and represent.

this straight line from Malcolm X through the Black Panther Party onto hip hop. And so I thought that would be a cool little interview to throw at the very end. So if you stick around past the outro song, you will hear that. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, if you like this episode, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio or learn more about us at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. Okay, let's jump into this episode on the life and legacy of Malcolm X. My name is Chuka Jekham.

I work in the labor movement in British Columbia and Canada. I'm also a graduate student in political science at the University of British Columbia. I study drug policy and political and economic inequality in their interactions with race, specifically drug prohibition reparations is my focus. And the last time I was here, we talked about Fred Hampton, which was a really, really great discussion. So I'm happy to be back. And we're happy to have you back. I know that Fred Hampton episode was very well received.

It's one of my personal favorite episodes. I have this deep love and this longstanding love for Fred Hampton, and I have that similar longstanding love for Malcolm X. And so it's really cool to have you back and have that continuity continue. Because in a lot of ways, you know, Fred Hampton and the entire Black Panther Party were really shaped by Malcolm X. Malcolm X can be seen as the sort of forefather or the founding father of what eventually would evolve into the Black Panther Party.

And so those connections are extremely, you know, tight and real. And I couldn't think of a better guest to have on to talk about X. So thank you so much for coming back on. This is going to be interesting, yeah. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, man. And I think there's a lot of truth to that, especially since the politics and views that Malcolm X came to towards the end of his life, you can definitely see them taken up by Fred Hampton in his push for the Rainbow Coalition and whatnot. But we'll get more into that later on.

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, let's go ahead and just dive in. The big thing that we used to prep for this episode is obviously the autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. It is sort of a foundational text on the left, one of the best autobiographies ever written, and just like a really inspirational, fascinating deep dive into the mind and life of Malcolm X. We also watch documentaries. You'll be hearing clips from the documentary Make It Plain throughout this episode, a lot of firsthand narrative accounts of Malcolm X in his life.

So having laid all that out and really encouraging people to check out that documentary and read the book, let's go ahead and dive into it. One thing I wanted to do, and I told Chuka this as we were prepping for this episode, is not to be overly concerned with the technical details of the specific events in Malcolm X's life. I wanted this more to be a sort of reflective episode. thinking about different aspects of his life, why he was effective, and obviously we're going to be touching on a lot of his family and personal history alongside that.

But I think a lot of people on the left especially are sort of generally aware of the trajectory of Malcolm X's life, and those are sort of well-known, so I didn't really want to be redundant in that way. So just starting off and starting off the sort of reflective approach we're taking to this entire episode, what single thing did you find most interesting or compelling or surprising about Malcolm X in his life when you were reading his autobiography? You know, there's a couple of things, actually, I think I would mention. The first is, and both of them are reflective of what you mentioned, and that I had a,

there was a certain amount of things that I knew about his life already. Like, I knew that he had gone to prison, that prior to his, his involvement in Black liberation, he was, like, a street-level hustler, and so I knew that he had been involved in somewhat in, like, selling drugs and running numbers and things like that. but there was one aspect of that part of his life that I didn't realize, or I didn't have knowledge of before, and specifically that he was kind of a facilitator for Madams, so he would connect white, wealthy clients with black sex workers when he was working on a train, traveling between Boston and New York, and particularly this in Harlem. And I thought that that was, I guess you could say surprising, because it seems so divorced from the politics he would come to later, both during his time in the nation of Islam, when he was ardently critiquing the way in which black people had been, you know, consumed and corrupted and abused by white society. And then in that role early in his life, he had kind of been a mechanism that would have been seen to be an operative part of that exact interaction or that, like, consumption and an abuse.

And so I thought that that was quite surprising. And I didn't know of it before. Yeah, totally agree with that. It's really interesting to hear about his, like, basically his crime days, you know. his time being a lump in proletariat, basically. One thing that stood out to me that I found really interesting, sort of taking a bird's eye view, is that it became very clear to me that his life ended kind of as it started, right?

The book opens with him recalling how he was born here in Omaha, Nebraska, and that when his mom was pregnant with him, the Ku Klux Klan came to their house, harassed them. When his mom answered the door pregnant with Malcolm X in her stomach, the KKK were looking for his father, saying that he's causing trouble and corrupting the quote unquote good Negroes of Omaha, etc. And she said he was gone. He was in Michigan preaching. And so what they did is on their horses went around the house and just smashed out every single window pane. And then they left, you know, hooting and hollering. And at the end of his life, you know,

he was being hounded and terrorized by the organization that he left and that ultimately assassinated him, the nation of Islam. So really, like, book ended all. his life is this tragic harassment and organized political campaign to attack him and his family and, you know, prevent them from living a full, happy, healthy life. It's also interesting that he was betrayed like Thomas Sankara. In our Thomas Sankara episode, we talked about how Sankara's closest comrades were the ones that eventually were his end and they were the ones that put him down. And in the same way, Malcolm X, you know, he was at one time seen to be like the heart and soul, of the nation of Islam and it was you know those very people that ended up

taking his life and then the last thing I would say just the way he talked about and treated his wife like in the autobiography when he was talking about his attraction to his wife and how he eventually you know asked her to go out with him or whatever he's so shy and sort of like cute and timid about it and would try to talk himself out of it or like rationalize it I don't know he felt uncomfortable with it in a sort of endearing way I don't know I thought that was kind of cute yeah no I found that as well. I thought it was incredibly endearing the way that even in his autobiography, he's sort of trying to convince himself that he hadn't developed affection for Betty.

He was like, oh, you know, I just sort of noticed her and just spent a year just noticing her. But I didn't think of her in any sort of romantic context. I wasn't thinking about marriage at all. And it's, and it's sort of, it's quite funny, I thought, because he even says in the autobiography that he would be telling himself these things. But in the autobiography, he's still telling himself these things. Yeah, I thought that that was like, incredibly. incredibly charming, really. And I don't know, it's just, especially as you mentioned, I mean, like, in the Fred Hampton episode, we discussed how the Hampton's family had moved north because as part of this broader sort of movement of black people out of the south who were fleeing harassment

and violence from the KKK, which is exactly what happened to Malcolm X's family, right, to the little family. And even, of course, the place that they landed in Lansing, they faced that same sort of harassment. There was the neighbors that they moved when they moved into Lansing, the neighbors brought mobilized to legal action against them to say that the farmland that they'd settled on

was for whites only. And then they had that house, like their house in Omaha was burnt down. Their house in Lansing was burnt down. And I mean, it's it's sort of, I mean, I remember saying that it was that the case of the Hampton family was part of this American story that it's very familiar. And so it's, it's

really is, I mean, there's this through line for all of the people throughout the 20th century who were involved in, either involved in this struggle or just black in the U.S., you know, and it's this overarching system of oppression that is inescapable, really. Definitely. And, you know, we'll probably be drawing a lot of parallels between Malcolm X and other figures that we've covered on this show, including Sankara, Che, and Fred Hampton, because interesting parallels exist, and in some ways they're engaged in the same struggle, and

so to see how these lives have these parallels is really interesting. And then it's also worth noting that, of course, Malcolm X's father was ultimately killed by the KKK under weird circumstances, and it wasn't admitted publicly that it was the KKK. It was made to seem like a suicide. I think they dragged his father's body over the train tracks and let the train do the rest of the damage to his father to make it seem like it was a suicide of some sort, but it was, you know, without a doubt, a racist murder of his father. And so this is the context in which Malcolm X is born into and shaped by. So let's go ahead and talk about an anecdote from the book. So what was your favorite, like, story or anecdote from his autobiography? Well, I was going to mention that his meeting, Betty, and the way that he described,

like specifically described not having an interest in her other, and then, you know, later on just sort of beginning to think about marriage and then proposing it. But there was something else that I found was interesting that a story that he related to the reporter at Gordon Parks after his, his pilgrimage, after his Hajj pilgrimage, and after traveling through Africa and North Africa in the Middle East. And the passage goes, recalling the incident of a young white college girl who had come to the black Muslim restaurant and asked, what can I do? And he told her nothing, and she left in tears. Malcolm X told Gordon Parks, well, I've lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent, I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I mean, I thought it was interesting because his saying nothing when that,

when that young woman went into the restaurant and then her leaving in tears. And I imagine those tears would have felt like a vindication of some sort. And well, perhaps I'm speaking beyond my capacity. But I understand that like the sort of humiliation that comes that one can imagine was experienced incessantly in the circumstances that Malcolm was born into and lived through in the rage that is attached by that humiliation, the rejection of offers to help, right? of someone who is of the community of oppressors who seems to be taking on this pain that they're exerting and then offering to help, I can understand for the rage that is connected to the

humiliation that is born of those circumstances. I can certainly understand wanting to deny that help and turn them away, right? And I mean, without claiming to have experienced anything like he has, I can certainly, I can understand it. And there's times in which I experience that urge to reject any kind of ally. ship, I guess you could call it. But I think the fact that he thought about that interaction years later and reflected on it and regretted it demonstrates how much his politics changed throughout his life and especially at the end of his life. I mean, the experiences that he had

over the pilgrimage, it's really quite powerful, I guess, although maybe that's too trite of a way to communicate it. But I think it's the sort of allegiance that he sought, right? That sort of cross-racial allegiance that kinship that he saw the possibility for without assuing any notion of black solidarity and international black solidarity but his eventual belief that you could establish a kinship between whites and non-whites i think is something that is not wholly recognized i guess in popular you know conceptions of his of malcolm x's life and the things that he argued for and also it's not the most comfortable thing right i mean he would have he in that in relating that he recognized flaw within himself that he'd carried for years, that he viewed, what he viewed

as flaw within himself, that he'd carried for years, that had animated his politics, the politics which, you know, brought him to the forefront of a movement for black liberation. And so I think that ability to recognize that is really a testament to his character, because it's not, it's a self-critique that is really a very fundamental self-critique, and he relates it freely. And so I thought that that was quite, quite powerful as well. he was always a very reflective person he was always constantly sort of checking in on his own development on his own ideas testing them against his own conscience and that plays out throughout his entire life one of the things that stood out in one of the documentaries was somebody was talking about malcolm x towards the end of his life when he was giving a lot of speeches and stuff and he would be sort of taken aback by by how seemingly interested and inspired that young white college students or activists people on the left were and how much they respected and and loved Malcolm X, even though a lot of the shit he was saying, especially in his Nation of Islam days, was very, like, explicitly like, fuck all white people

sort of stuff. I mean, and we'll get into the Nation of Islam's ideas, but the core idea was that the white people are literally the devil. These little seeds were planted in his head, and then as he developed politically, as he had more life experiences, as the nation of Islam betrayed him, you started to see that blossom. I think a similar thing happened towards the end of Fred Hampton's life and towards the end of MLK's life, which again, we'll get into, But circling back around to favorite anecdotes, one of mine was the story he told early in the book about rabbit hunting, how, you know, rabbit hunting was like a little thing that him and, you know, like older black folks in the community, like older black men would teach the younger black kids to rabbit hunt. And, you know, they would chase these rabbits and they would get away a lot of times. And one of the things that Malcolm did, and he was very young, is he took this strategic approach.

And he saw that when they chased the rabbits, the rabbits ran through a specific little, like, thicket. or area. And instead of running behind him, he just left the group, went around the front, and when the rabbits came his way, he just picked them all off. And, you know, the older folks were really impressed by him. And, you know, he was sort of like proud of his accomplishment and him figuring it out. But I really think it speaks to this broader strategic mindset that he had. And as he grew and developed, he brought that strategy into drug dealing, which was incredibly precarious, especially as a black man. I mean, he had to really be on the top of the of his game at all times to not get, you know, killed or locked up.

And then when it came to draft dodging, the sort of strategy he developed with regards to talking in front of the draft board and saying he was going to organize a bunch of black soldiers to overthrow their commanders and shit. And so they were like, yeah, this guy's not fit for the draft, go ahead and keep him out. And then ultimately, he took that strategic mind and put it into effect as an organizer and one of the best organizers, if not the best, that the nation of Islam certainly has ever had. And then the last thing I would, I would mention is, it's actually out of the documentary, but he was giving a speech or he was part of this big speech happening after I think somebody

was, you know, a black man was unjustly killed by police. And he ramped up the crowd so much that they started rioting. And Malcolm X jumped up on a car and just sort of using his commanding presence, you know, brought an end to it. It was just he raised his hand and said basically stop. And somebody commented, you know, Malcolm X was the only man that could, either stop or start a race riot on command. And that really speaks to his presence. Yeah, and he mentions during his time in incarceration, he relates to a story of meeting a man named Bambi.

And he says that he was the first person he'd ever met who could command an audience with words alone. And he doesn't reflect too much on that specific descriptor, but I thought it was really indicative of what he drew from that interaction, that relationship. And he does talk about their relationship more, but specifically describing him that way, I mean, it really does open a world of possibility because another anecdote from the autobiography or something that I found compelling, but I knew about his life before doing research for this discussion is the conversation he had with his English teacher in grade eight, the English teacher

who he viewed as a friend really and as someone whom he could go to for advice. And he told this English teacher, and this is an instance when he was at the top of his class academically, he'd been elected president of his seventh grade class. and his English teacher asked him what he thought of for a career and Malcolm said that he wanted to be a lawyer and then his English teacher said

that's no realistic goal for a nigger you're good with your hands why don't you plan on carpentry and so I mean that's another one of those another one of those just seemingly small not small but like very quick interactions that either opens or closes

a world of possibility right because he also does in the autobiography also discusses having a history teacher who was prone to making racist anti-black jokes in Malcolm's presence, specifically, which is clearly an attempt to humiliate him, right? It's expressing this, like, discontent and contempt he has for black people and just, really just abusing this student, racially abusing this student,

humiliating him as a way to kind of exercise and enjoy that contempt, I guess. And so his having those negative relationships with teachers in his school would make this one positive relationship. with his English teacher, all the more impactful. And so then to hear that comment from his English teacher, I mean, you can just imagine how it had affected what he thought was possible in his own life. And that's, of course, that of course precedes the years that he spent on, you know, as a sort of street hustler and dealing drugs and whatnot.

And I think that those two things that comment he heard from his English teacher and then his interaction with Bemby, and his describing his being able to command a crowd with words alone, you can just kind of see the way that they kind of, hit like the the rail switch in his life right and just like send it send the trajectory in a new direction definitely and one thing that arises out of everything you read about malcolm x is just how sensitive right how sensitive he was like he was such a brilliant sensitive mind put in such a horrifying context into such disgusting depraved conditions and to see that mind and to see that intensity and that sensitivity operate you know through the course of one human

being's life and the development that it took, I mean, it's profoundly impactful on me and profoundly inspirational, I think. And that's why he has such a legacy, which again, we'll get to. I don't believe in any form of unjustified extremism, but I believe that when a man is exercising extremism, a human being, is exercising extremism in defense of liberty for human. beings it's no vice and when one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings I say he's a sinner and I might add in my conclusion in fact America is one of the best examples when you read this history about extremism old Patrick Henry said liberty or death that's extreme very

I read once passingly about a man named Chase there. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think it was, who said, to be or not to be. He was in doubt about something. Whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, moderation or to take up arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing end them and I go for that if you take up arms you'll end it but if you sit around and wait for the one who's who's in power to make up his mind that he should end it you'll be waiting a long

time and in my opinion the young generation of whites blacks brown whatever else there is you're living at a time of extremism a time of revolution a time when there's got to be a change People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change, and a better world has to be built, and the only way it's going to be built is with extreme methods, and I, for one, will join in with anyone. Don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth. Thank you. Let's get into some of the details of his life, especially the first half of Malcolm's life. Can you summarize some of the major events of his life all the way up to how he ended up into prison?

yeah well so you described we've talked a bit about um his birth in omaha that is moving to lansing already uh and then his father's death so maybe i'll pick it up there so after his father did suffer this this you know violent death at the hands of the kKK and it's extremely violent and again just like a contemptuous killing right like a killing that expresses just deep deep hatred that is incomprehensible the the family's economic conditions got steadily worse his mother louise after their father's death, took up domestic and sewing work for white families in the area, but they, you know, after a short time, they were on welfare, and then even then, their conditions kept getting worse and worse. In the 1930s, and at this time his oldest brother, Wilfred,

left school permanently to work and help the family attain income. And then during the 1930s, and during the Great Depression, everything was sort of really, really tough for the family. And so Malcolm began stealing food as a way, of course, of, you know, stating his hunger. And he was eventually caught for this. And the welfare workers at that time started seeking to remove Louise's children, all the little children, from Louise's care, from their family home and placed them in foster care. And so Malcolm was ultimately taken and placed with the Gohannis family, which was a family that he had visited sometimes during this period. And they had a boy, they were raising, I think, a nephew who was about Malcolm's age. And so he ended up placed with them permanently.

And the rest of the children were also distributed among other foster families. And ultimately, their mother suffered a significant breakdown and was institutionalized in a state hospital that was miles outside of Lansing in Kalamazoo. And she remained there for the remainder of her life. So for 26 years after she was first institutionalized. I mean, Malcolm describes in the autobiography having dominion over these black children, right? And he says that it was exactly like slavery, really, that the children were at the behest of a white power structure and their lives were to be determined by its choices. And while he was staying with the Gowanus family, he played a small prank on a teacher when he was 13 years old.

He put a tack on the teacher's seat and he just sat on the tack. And this resulted in him being removed from the Gowanus family and sent to a little. a detention home. And while at this detention home, he was, he, he didn't go to reform school. He was the only, you know, kid in the detention home who attended a more standard school. He attended Mason Jr. High. This is when he had that interaction with his English teacher that I mentioned before. And after that interaction, he began to withdraw socially and especially from interactions with, with white people. And after finishing the eighth grade in which he had that conversation with his teacher, he left Lansing and he left Michigan and he went to Boston to live with his

half-sister Ella, and who resided in a community of black professionals in Boston. It was the largest black neighborhood in the city in a neighborhood called Roxbury. And this was when he was first introduced to like proper city life. And so he became enamored with the pool halls and whatnot. And he would, he describes, his sister was expecting him to kind of get a sense of the city and then find, find a, you know, sort of standard job. But he describes himself as being enamored with the city life and especially the nightlife. And so spending nights sort of just, you know, traveling around and visiting the pool halls and the jazz clubs and whatnot. And so he got, he did get a job then shining shoes. And while doing this job, he set up a number

of side hustles, including selling weed and then connecting clients with sex workers, as we discussed before. And succeeding that, he got a job on a train that traveled between, Boston and New York. And so this was the job in which he first came to Harlem. And he says, he describes that as soon as he arrived, he knew he belonged there. And he also increased his kind of penetration to the world of hustling. So he met people who were long in the game, you know, numbers runners and people who would sell, sell weed to like prominent jazz musicians and to their patrons and whatnot. And so that was kind of how he developed into the kind of the street life significantly and sincerely and it became like his main his main practice i guess or his

main occupation you can say at this point as you described he was he did become pretty pretty apt at avoiding arrest despite selling drugs he said he describes that he knew there were laws that said that you couldn't be charged with an offense for selling drugs if the drugs weren't on your person when you were arrested and so he would he had practices of carrying carrying the drugs he was that he had in a very specific way. So if he ever believed he was being pursued, he could just kind of shift the way he was holding his arm and what he had in his coat would fall.

And then he would move away and then sort of watch if he had been being tailed. If he didn't see anyone tailing him, he would move back and then pick up what he left. But at this time, he also began using drugs. And later on he describes himself as using alcohol, cannabis, opium, and cocaine. And that's also something that I didn't know,

the degree to which that had been a part of his life, I guess. And during this period, he describes his use as steadily increasing in frequency and potency. And I think also reflective of how he came to look at this period in his life, he describes himself as a vulture of the ghetto. And I think that sort of the picture of that image of carrion, right? Like, of course, carrion feed on carcasses. And so, I mean, it is a pretty stark and one could say kind of cruel image based on the people that he was interacting with, right? but I don't I mean I would argue against the notion that he's depicting them as carcasses more just that it's it's kind of a self devouring you know like the way he was navigating these communities and what he was doing to provide for himself is kind of praying upon the people around him who are he came to view it as praying upon the people around him and I think that is what he's describing as being a vulture as opposed to saying that they were you know lifeless or whatnot and that probably impacted the way that he thought about the entire situation and maybe even his own drug abuse, right? If you grant that

this is a very sensitive person and you grant that he's reflective enough to see, at least to some degree, the negative impact that he is having and perpetuating in his own communities, then it stands to reason that abusing alcohol and drugs may be a way to numb yourself and your conscience, you know, sort of detach yourself from what you're actually doing to get by and not have to face up to the consequences of being a perpetrator of the worst sort of decay and rot in your own community. You know, I don't know, that's speculation, but I think with such a sensitive person, it's not surprising he turned so hard to drugs in that context. No, I don't think it is surprising. And I mean, it's not as if he didn't have an acute understanding of the way in which black people

were treated in the U.S. or how, you know, historically embedded structures of power threaten their lives in a million intimate ways. And then if they ever did seek to upset those structures or even simply speak out against them explicitly, then, you know, men with guns and fire would come to your home at night and try to kill you, right? So it isn't, it isn't that there was ever a moment in his life in which he didn't recognize the structures that he inhabited and the structures that, you know, propped up the society that he lived in. And so even when, even if it was the case that he was seeking a kind of, that there was a sort of escapist urge in his, um, seeking out the sort of nightlife in Boston and then in Harlem. And then even if he was reveling in

black communities, certainly I would imagine that the, the kind of structural general generational disenfranchisement that is that was that would be so evident in a lot of those communities and especially given the fact that I mean a lot of the or some of the the clients that he was connecting to sex workers would be wealthy white people that sort of consumption of black people right is I imagine that it would be like intensely harmful even if he didn't have as acute a way of describing and communicating that harm as he came to have later on in his life so yeah so he had this this job on the rail and he was selling weed and whatnot and then after

a dispute on a train in which he pulled a gun on another man he was he reports like quitting selling weed because it was like the train was essential to the way he was conducting his business and so he turned to armed robbery at this point as well as placing bets on the

numbers lottery frequently and specifically he placed bets with someone who he knew quite well a Harlem hustler named West Indian Archie and This relationship ultimately deteriorated after a few robbery attempts went poorly, and he kind of, his drug use increased, and his betting became more erratic. And then ultimately, he ran a foul of West Indian Archie. They had a dispute over a bet that was either placed or not placed.

It's discussed in the autobiography, Malcolm maintains it was a mistake, but Archie took it as a slight to his honor, which was more important than whatever payment was owed or was not owed. and so so he left he left uh harlem but and returned to boston where he continued in arm robbery with some of the connections that he'd made when he first went to boston to live with his half-sister ella when he left lansing uh again as you mentioned he was sort of quite strategic and was uh never caught in the act in any of his in any of his criminal endeavors and it's the same in this instance that he was never caught in the act uh however he was arrested when he went into a watch repair shop where he turned in a watch for repair that he had stolen. And after this arrest, he spent seven years in prison in Charleston. This is where he met the man named Bemby that I

described before, who was quite religious and who made Malcolm Reethink his own opposition to religion. I think it's also interesting. And this definitely, I think, aligns with what you were saying before in that he says that he didn't just view himself as an atheist. He referred to himself as Satan. to himself as Satan to the point that other people in the prison knew him as Satan and so he clearly thought of himself as as evil I mean he he self reflect in reflection he describes

this period of him of his life as him being evil but I mean to refer to yourself as Satan even in that time it's clear that you're that you have a sort of like a structural analysis of the systems that you're operating in

and the harms that what he's describing is the harms that his actions are imparting upon other people. And so, yeah, that kind of internal dissonance, of course, for someone who's that sensitive and that reflective, that would be anguish. It would be perpetual anguish. Yeah. And he talked about his rage in prison and, you know, one of the things that got him that nicknamed Satan was the fact that he would just rail and rant in his prison sale at night, often against like Christianity or and stuff like that. And, you know, that made people call him Satan, but it was really this fucking rage, you know, and it was

bottled up in a fucking cage. Everything had been taken from him, and yeah, and he kind of erupted in these, these rants, and that would get him that moniker, you know, over time. But before we move on to the talk about Nation of Islam, I do want to sort of reiterate something you said and then expand on, and I actually want to read from his autobiography. You mentioned his mother, and you mentioned his mother's, you know, sort of mental illness that got her institutionalized for the last two decades, two and a half decades of her life. And I think we have to understand the sort of trauma

that she went through. I mean, you know, we told you about the KKK, you know, attacking her house when she was pregnant. We talked about the KKK killing her husband and, you know, in that time, the breadwinner of a family. Like if if you were a single mom with multiple children and no man in your life, you are

fucked in ways that, you know, we're all fucked today in this society if that's your situation. But even back then, if you were black and poor, you were doubly, triply fucked. And, you know, all of these things, that's trauma. And so it's no surprise that, you know, at some point his poor mother, you know, mentally collapsed under the strain and trauma of just institutional and unrelenting white supremacy. And Malcolm talks beautifully about this early on in the book.

And I want to read, it's kind of a long passage. But when I read this the first time, I set the book down and sort of like cried. Because it's so, it's such a testament to his sensitivity and it's just trying to put yourself in his shoes and imagine this happening to you in the broader context of your mother's life. I mean, it just breaks your heart. So Malcolm X says in his autobiography on page 26, my last visit to his mom when I knew I would never come to see her again was in 1952. I was 27. My brother Philbert had told me that on his last visit she had recognized him somewhat in spots, he said, but she didn't recognize me at all. She stared at me. She didn't know who I was. Her mind, when I

to talk, to reach her was somewhere else. I asked Mama, do you know what day it is? She said, staring, all the people have gone. I can't describe how I felt. The woman who had brought me into the world and nursed me and advised me and chastised me and loved me didn't know me. It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers. I looked at her. I listened to her, quote, unquote, talk, but there was nothing I could do. I knew I wouldn't be back to see my mother again because it could make me a very vicious and dangerous person. Knowing how they had looked at us as numbers and as a case in their book, not as human beings, and knowing that my mother in there was a statistic that didn't have to be,

that existed because of a society's failure, hypocrisy, greed, and a lack of mercy and compassion. Hence, I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight. I have rarely talked to anyone about my mother, for I believe that I am capable of killing a person, and without hesitation, who happened to make the wrong kind of remark about my mom. So I purposely don't make any opening for some fool to step into. And that's just, I mean, that is a pages being set aflame by the just visceral hurt that he felt in the face of that absolutely traumatic event with his mother.

And yeah, so I mean, I don't know. Just every time I read it, I can't help but get choked up to some extent. No, I'm glad that you came back to that passage because, yeah, I mean, it is. Like, you can imagine after her, because she was quite young, then she was, I mean, I met, I don't know her exact, I don't recall her exact date of birth, but like she was in her 20s when she started having children, like early 20s. And so after her husband dies, when she is, she has to provide for this family, you can imagine like the constant perpetual dread that you would feel, right? Knowing that if there's any opportunity, then yes, they absolutely will take your children from you, right? and knowing that, that they want that to happen, that the, you know, welfare workers and the people in your neighborhood, are the white people that you're, that she was working for, the

police, that they want to deprive you of the, of the family that you have, right? I mean, it's, it is really, it's difficult, I mean, it's nearly impossible to conceive of the kind of, the kind of perpetual dread that that would, that would create in someone. And I think also, he describes that his fair complexion, like, he says, his mother that she was um she her father had been white uh because her mother had been raped and so he says like she looked like a white woman and then his fair complexion he attributes to that that crime right against his grandmother and so every time he looked at himself he saw the harm that was done to his grandmother that through which his mother was conceived and then born so there wasn't

ever a time i mean he says that that was the last time he saw her but there wasn't ever a time you imagine that where he looked where he saw his reflection or his complexion was remarked upon or he considered his complexion and he did not think of his mother and he did not think of everything that she'd gone through and so yeah i mean i i i can't uh yeah i mean that that sort of that rage as you describe it it's it must have been it must be indescribable yeah exactly so yeah even even though he does such a great an incredible job of communicating it here yeah and and one of the things with his complexion was that he got red hair and specifically he talks about that red hair coming from the white rapist. And he says that, you know, it was a reminder of that constantly and that he hated the parts of himself that that sort of manifested the traits of the rapist who, you know, traumatized and fucked with his family. And so that internal tension was always there. And in that passage, we're talking about rage. You can see that rage coming out. When he's saying, like, I don't even talk to people about it because I don't even want to create an opening where somebody just out of the side of their mouth just says the

wrong syllable to me about my mom. And he said, I knew that was the last time I could ever see her because it was going to make me a vicious and dangerous human being to go back and have to see that. And so, yeah, that rage is just fucking seething. And in lieu of a constructive outlet, you know, he turns to crime and escapism in the form of substance abuse. And I mean, in that time period, you can imagine the way that she was treated in that, in that quote unquote hospital. Like the amounts of, like the treatment. Well, I mean, I think it's errant to call it treatment, but the abuse that she was subjected to, the drugs that would have been forced upon her, the procedures that would have been forced upon her. I mean, it's, yeah, it's horrific.

Definitely. Louise Little struggled to raise her seven children through the years of the Great Depression. She's reduced to where she has no income. She tried to get jobs. She was a proud lady. She had a lot of pride. She sewed, she crocheted gloves for people, she did a lot of things, not to be dependent solely on welfare.

She didn't like them telling her what she could do and what she couldn't do. And this is one of the main things that devastated her more than anything else. As time went by, you could see she was wearing down. For seven years, As Malcolm grew into adolescence, his mother slowly withdrew from her family. Two days before Christmas, 1938, Louise Little was diagnosed as paranoid and was sent to Kalamazoo State Hospital. I came home from school one day, and she wasn't there. I can remember being empty because my mother had never laughed up.

And I felt, you know, the pain of her being gone every day. And it was only going to be a couple weeks. You know, she was going to get better and come right back home. And it turned into years. Louise Little would remain at Kalamazoo for the next 26 years. The 13-year-old Malcolm watched as the courts split up his family, assigning the younger children to foster her. to foster homes in Lansing and sending him to a white community 10 miles away.

In the past, the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. If I take my hand and slap you, you don't even feel it. It might sting you because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together. Okay, let's go ahead and move on and talk a little bit about the nation of Islam, because while Malcolm was in prison, he started getting letters from his brother who had become a member of the nation of Islam and started being introduced to it and eventually started writing Elijah

Muhammad, the leader of Nation of Islam personally, etc. So what is the nation of Islam? And can you talk a little bit about how Malcolm got involved with him? Yes, we'll start with the second, the second part. So yeah, as you mentioned, he started receiving letters from his siblings while he was in prison about the nation of Islam. The first one, he received a letter from his brother, Philbert, who said that Philbert said that he had joined the nation of Islam, and he advised Malcolm to pray to Allah for forgiveness, which is, I imagine the first time that Malcolm had heard either term, first time he heard of Allah, and

first time he heard the termination of Islam. And then he received a letter from his brother Reginald telling him not to eat pork or to smoke cigarettes. And he says that he didn't connect the two. He didn't recognize, perhaps he didn't recognize that those were two tenets of the nation of Islam. But upon receiving these letters, that second letter, he immediately stopped eating pork and smoking cigarettes. Or he said he finished the pack of cigarettes that he had, and then he never smoked again

for the rest of his life. And he said the news spread through his cell block. And I mean, it's sort of funny the way he describes it. But he said that people would mutter, you know, Satan. doesn't eat pork. And then through the efforts of his half-sister Ella, the one who he'd gone to live with in Boston, he was transferred to Norfolk Prison, which I guess you could say it had a lower grade of quote-unquote security than the prison in Charleston. Each person incarcerated there had their own room, and there were open discussions and debates among the people kept

there. Academics would come from Harvard and other schools in the area to give talks and things that and there was also notably there was a massive library which had been bequeathed to the prison by a wealthy collector who had focused on history and religion and of course that would be extremely sort of relevant to to what Malcolm would ultimately begin learning of so at Norfolk his brother Reginald came to visit him and this was the first in-person conversation he ever had about Allah about the nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad and so the teachings of Elijah, Reginald told Malcolm that, you know, white people were devils

and that through generations of slavery and rape and oppression and active and intentional brainwashing, they'd separated black people in the U.S. from their history and from their homeland, from their culture and language, and they created, and he described them as having created a new race, which, you know, white people called Negroes. And that is indicative of, like, the main thrust of the nation of Islam's argument that the what had happened to to black people in the speaking specifically in this point in the US was not a sort of you know accident of history it was not an interaction between um European scientific racism and colonial ambitions and just an absolute disregard for what they deemed to be lesser beings it was more than those

things, it was kind of a concerted effort to eradicate the history and traditions and culture and language that the people that they captured bore by being people, of course, and to remake them as a kind of subservient class and race and really just a permanently enslaved people and a permanently kind of corrupted people. And so ultimately Malcolm wrote to Elijah Muhammad, who wrote back. And Malcolm, he describes having apologized for his poor grammar and diction in his initial letter to Elijah. And he says that he lost his school teachings through his years in the street life. And so, wishing to improve upon his use of English, he copied out a dictionary by hand from beginning to end and then began reading voraciously in the Norfolk prison.

And so from then on, he began writing letters daily to Elijah Muhammad and to his siblings. In August of 1952, he Malcolm was released from prison into that care of his eldest brother, Wilfred, who lived in Detroit. And he, at the end, he was released on condition of attaining employment, which he

did before he was released. By this time, most of his siblings were members of the nation of Islam, as was all of Wilfred's family. And so when he moved in with them, he describes being sort of enamored by the order and discipline, and effectively the sanctity,

of life in his brother's household he describes the the washing process in the morning first of all the fact that there was kind of a specific order in which people would bathe so there was never i know you know in other recollections or autobiographies people will describe but kind of chaos in their household right where there's like you know people fighting for the washroom in the morning or whatnot and he says that there was this was this never occurred because there was a specific order in which people would bathe and so sort of from their first waking moment everyone was gentle and calm and kind of like reflective and considerate in their interactions with one another that they would each would get like a full Muslim greeting to even their siblings even the children would greet the other children like that in the mornings and they had a specific process for bathing in which they'd wash their right hand then wash their left hand and then thoroughly brush their teeth and rinse it out three times then rinse out their nostrils three times and then rinse out their nostrils three times and then then they would shower and there was and it really is a kind of I think it's that I think contrasting that experience which is the the first and the first experience that he had after um leaving prison

save visiting a Turkish bath which is also sort of in this vein right this kind of cleansing that he's that he certainly was seeking contrasting that with the experiences that he had prior to enter in prison it's easy to see why he would be so taken with it you know why it would be something that you would throw yourself wholeheartedly into. And so while living with his brother Wilfred in Detroit, this is the first time that he started attending the Nation of Islam gatherings. So there was a mosque in Detroit, what he refers to it as a temple, and he attended with his brother, and he is immediately taken with the remarks of Elijah Muhammad, which they

have been, I mean, the ideas have been communicated to him, but of course presented by their progenitor that he's more he's incredibly captivated by them he's also recognized that one of his very first uh attendances elijah mohammed asked him to stand up and identifies him uh as he says brother malcolm and he's like brother malcolm uh has been was in prison and before he was in prison he was he was sort of living this this hair harrowing life but he had been he said he'd been writing he's written me every day and uh and i've been responding whenever i could and so now that he's out of prison and sort of open to all the all the temptations of the world you know it will now is the test if his resolve will hold and clearly that recognition was also incredibly impactful uh for malcolm and he became he quickly was taken under elijah mohammed's wing uh he is like they would speak they would speak privately and uh malcolm would took it upon himself to kind of increase the attendance of the temple specifically he would go into to inner city communities and he would kind of use his grasp of like street

street colloquialisms and whatnot and manners of speaking and specifically manners of engagement i mean he he says he he uh relates the line like brother let me pull on your coat for a minute you know and so like the way to entreat people and really a sort of an effective organizing tactic of meeting people where they are right speaking to them in languages familiar and placing yourself as part of their community in a way and then kind of trying to extend the teachings of Elijah Muhammad in the nation of Islam. And he was, I mean, it was, you know, it's obviously organizing is incredibly difficult, but he was, but through his tireless efforts, he was able to increase the number of people

who were attending and who were interested, and overall, and over time, he became more empowered by Elijah to be kind of outreach, an outreach coordinator or outreach organizer for the nation of Islam. Ultimately, you would travel to other cities to try to organize chapters there. And in the long run, he was tasked with leading a temple in New York City, which at the time had more than a million black residents. Yeah, so a couple of things I want to say before moving on to some more about the nation of Islam and their views on race and Malcolm's views on race. I want to talk about a few things that you covered, which is the fact that he was an autodidact, meaning he was self-taught, you know, given his sort of embarrassment about his lack of grammar and lack of. lack of broader understanding. He really, like you mentioned, he copied the dictionary word for

word and to learn how to write and to say words and to speak them and to really ingrain that in his head. And then he studied Latin because he wanted to understand the roots of words and where words come from. So he's like very fascinated with how words evolve over time and how they can be used. And then he said one of the big things, which I thought was interesting because you might take this for granted, but it makes a lot of sense. He says, you know, when I started reading, I would just read with no direction. You put any book in front of me, I'll read it. He's like, and then I think it was Bebe, his sort of mentor, who helped him focus his reading.

And he's like, you know, then I started reading with direction. I started reading with intention. I read to learn the answers to specific questions. And that's when he got more into history and philosophy and economics, et cetera. And then you talked about how he entered his brother's home and it was a good Muslim home. And he talked about how much, you know, he loved it in some senses. it was an oasis from the chaos and instability of the life that he had led up to that point, right? What is ritual, if not a grounding act, an act by which you ground yourself and give yourself

stability in the here and now? And then you also have that in the context of a real community, which is also something that, you know, you might have had in the crime world to some extent, but, you know, it's always precarious and you're always getting backstabbing betrayed by somebody. And this is actually a community of love and stability and mutual respect for one another. And you could see that that's the context in which he really wanted to develop. And lastly, you know, throughout his autobiography and hearing you talk now, you really get this sense that Malcolm X was on a search in some regard for a father figure. And then he eventually had to become that father figure for the black community and in some ways for himself, right? You had Shorty when he was in the crime world.

You had Bebe when he was in prison. And then Elijah Muhammad, as he was coming out of prison, giving him direction, and that fatherly figure that he felt that he was robbed of. I mean, even before his father died, his father was sort of, you know, kind of mean, very punitive, sort of intimidating figure that he could never really get close to. And his father died before he could see Malcolm X, you know, blossom. And then we'll talk about how Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X fell apart. And then, you know, there was no more father figures for. Malcolm X at that point he had to become his own father figure and in the process became a father figure for for millions of black Americans specifically well I mean he also describes

an interaction that he has during his pilgrimage as having a kind of fatherly fatherly aspect to it but yeah and I mean I think the other the other side of it is because he also describes how he lived by his watch right and he always dressed very not professionally but he his his attire was always very well composed, right? Like the sort of, you know, slim tie and suits and simple suit and hat and glasses and whatnot. And I think there's an aspect of control, too, that is sought by both the ritual that he experienced in his brother's home

and the way in which he conducted his life. He says, you know, I was always more concerned with time than with distance, which I think is interesting, especially in arguments regarding reparations and things like that. But it's easy to see how a sense of powerlessness could urge someone toward control, right? Or motivate someone toward pursuing control over themselves, control over their body, control over their circumstances in a way. That also, of course,

imbues movements for self-determination, which is ultimately expressing a lack of control and then assailing that lack of control. So I think there's another sort of alignment there that's interesting. Yeah, fascinating insight. Completely agree. Never thought about that. You're absolutely correct. I'm kind of blown away kind of thinking. about that because I am so fascinated with his psychology. I didn't quite know what to make of his obsession with time and how much he made of it, but that's exactly

correct and, yeah, fascinating. He had a beautiful sense of humor especially when he was kidding me about pork and whack him back and saying that you're a decent human being, smart historian, I'm going to give you 99 as a human

bean and you stop eating pork I'm going to give you a hundred had a beautiful sense of humor plus the fact that when you got to know him he was kind of shy Malcolm was now in the nation of Islam's inner circle Elijah Muhammad's most visible representative he had the messenger's confidence and the loyalty of thousands of Muslims. In a sense, Malcolm had found a father. Elijah Muhammad had found another son. On an April night in 1957, a Muslim brother was beaten by New York City Police.

His skull fractured, Johnson Hinton lay in a back room of a Harlem police station. When word spread that Hinton was dying, Malcolm ordered the Muslims into the streets. Other Harlem residents joined them. The community had endured a long history of police brutality. Many considered the police an occupying force. 28 precinct was notorious for the prejudice. Naturally, when the people saw us come out there, that was the first time that anyone had marched on the 28 precincts and protested to something that they felt it wasn't right. I don't know what would have happened in Harlem that night because the atmosphere was not, it was, as I think the word they used is charged, well, this atmosphere was explosive.

Malcolm demanded medical treatment for Hinton After a long negotiation Police agreed to send the prisoner to Harlem Hospital But even then, the Muslims refused to disperse This sergeant, he came out and tried to chase The Muslims who were standing across the street And Malcolm came out and told him, you can't do that He said, they're not going to move for you

Malcolm said, I'll get rid of it, I'll send them He went out to the front of the station on the first step and just waved his hand and the people walked away. A police commissioner on the scene remarked, That's too much power for one man to have. Malcolm would later take New York City to court and win the largest police brutality settlement in the city's history. And they realized that any time a person could do that a person could wave his hand and have a large number of people automatically move away without any conversation that by the same token that same man could wave his hand and cause those people to create some kind of disturbance if he wanted to.

I believe from that point on, the police department and the political people in New York City began to realize they had a significant force in the city to deal with. But let's talk a little bit more about the nation of Islam. We've talked about it as a sort of black supremacist theology, right? It's Muslim in that it has this theistic worldview with a single God at the head of it. And then it's quote unquote black supremacist in that it's not even, they're not arguing that black people are equal to white people. They're saying that black people are inherently superior and white people are literally the devil. But can you talk about more some of the other beliefs of the nation of Islam, including maybe some very problematic ones because in some ways they were a very reactionary organization and they've become you know and they are still to this day in some ways and how how those beliefs sort of shaped malcolm's understanding of the world and specifically of racism yeah so um i mean you're definitely correct that they argued that black people were superior to to white people and um you know maybe this isn't worth this is necessary to indicate but like

none of this discussion is is me like making apologies for their views or what have you right But certainly the notion that, you know, it's easy to see how someone could be influenced by the notion that, well, like, black people and white people would have been equal, but we didn't do this to them, right? And Elijah Muhammad talks about that whites had killed 100 million black people in their effort to enslave 15 million in the U.S. And he describes, you know, countless black people that had died in that journey who had been thrown overboard either if they'd been, you know, like beaten or whipped to death by the slavers. or if they had, you know, just been too much trouble, or if they'd grown ill, if a woman had become pregnant, even if she'd become pregnant through rape, then, you know, thrown overboard and things like that. So these are, you know, really kind of captivating to someone who, again, feels this complete, this endless humiliation and this rage at the lack of control and the lack of

self-determination that they experienced. They also argued that the white world was to come to an end. one one critique that malcolm made at the time of other civil rights leaders a critique that he later sort of reconsidered is that he said there was no sense in boarding a sinking ship so they advocated a separate black society and that was undergirded by the notion that white society was kind of cannibalistic like it was eating itself that it wasn't it couldn't really produce anything that it's it's all of its auspices all of its wealth and comforts and whatnot had been predicated upon unpaid labor that the that it wasn't it wasn't it couldn't really produce anything that it's it's all of its auspices all of its you know wealth and comforts and whatnot had been predicated upon unpaid labor that the unacknowledged and unpaid labor of slaves. And so itself, it wasn't a productive society or a society that really had any kind of culture or art or generative capacity of its own. And so if in separating from that society, they sought to separate themselves from the decline of white society. He also describes, and, you know, Malcolm, I think, as a reflection of the way in which these arguments can be perceived, Malcolm describes when he first encountered them, he thought about the white people that he'd encountered through his

life. And he says, uh, the, he thought of the KKK and the Black Legion members that harassed his family and burned down multiple homes of theirs of the police officers who harassed them and did nothing to stop the white racist that threatened them regularly. The, you know, the fire department that didn't show up when their house was on fire, but then the cops that showed up the next day to look for the gun that, that, uh, Earl Little had used to, to shoot at the, the KKK members as they were fleeing. Uh, you thought of the welfare workers. who humiliated his mother and who would say she was crazy to her face and in front of her children, as if none of them existed, as if they weren't people, if they couldn't hear, as if they didn't weren't there.

Of the white men in the inner city, who would come seeking black sex workers, the wealthy white men would come to the inner city seeking black women sex workers and the white women who sought black men. And so all of these things, they kind of connected. they were not they they they became something more than the individual inculcations of countless people embedded in a in a sort of socially pathologizing structure right it became more than just millions of individuals who had inculcated all these beliefs and practices and behaviors and then reproduced them over and over in ways that were experienced by individuals i think that the teachings of the nation of islam made or pushed malcolm to view racism as a single endeavor, like a single structure and project that had begun centuries before in the extraction, the kidnapping and extraction and enslavement of black people from Africa, bringing them to the U.S., the intentional eradication of their history and of their culture or the connection to their history and culture and land.

I mean, he talked often of the ex representing the fact that he didn't know his name. that he he he he there was no way for him to know his name because his name had been erased and he was given and he and his family had been given the names of their of their slave masters of their ancestors slave masters as all black people in the u.s had and i mean it is it's something that you really don't think about all that often right but i mean it's like i am i am black but my parents uh traveled my parents came to canada from nigeria so i have a direct connection in that regard to my uh to my ancestral homeland And there's, I mean, there's, you know, a lot to talk about, obviously, Nigeria is a British colony within my parents' lifetime. And then there's a civil war and all that. But for so many black people in the U.S., there isn't that method of connection. There isn't any, and there aren't any ways in which it can be found. I mean, this is maybe a sort of trite observation, but I remember seeing a commercial for Ancestry.com, one of the few commercials that depicted a black person. and like three generations before the person who was like the actor or whatever the surname of the person depicted was Freeman and it's like well that's not an original surname right like all of those those all those the things in which you're meant to be able to find your history and your family's history in the U.S. context so many of them are specifically just enshrining whiteness as historical and and legitimate and long lived in ways that are denied non-white people in the U.S.

I've forcibly taken to the U.S. in many ways. Yeah. That's definitely the genocidal aspect of slavery. You know, we talk about genocide sometimes explicitly as the physical eradication of an ethnic minority of some sort. But, you know, a big part of genocide, both in the indigenous context as well as in, you know, black slavery context, is this sort of complete erasing of the history and culture that you come out of in this black box that you eventually hit when you do try to find out who you are and where you came from. And so you can't really overstate the negative traumatic impact of literally not being able to know who you are on some level because of that historical fact of slavery. No, absolutely.

And the kind of dislocation that that creates is not really, I mean, it's indescribable, you know, for your history to have been taken from you in the most violent of means, intentionally so. and then and I mean the times in which he'd go onto interviews and people would say well what's your what's your surname right and he says well I don't know and they're like well what's your legal name and he's like I don't know I don't recognize it it's not I mean and the fact that they think that that's a retort that what's you asking what's your legal name is saying well what's your real name right as opposed to this sort of fanciful moniker that you've adopted and he's saying my real name was taken from me my real name was shorn from my family from our ancestors by by the ultimate And for them to ask him, what is your legal name? They're saying that that violent act is enshrined by the law, right? It is accepted and it is made doctrine through the law. But they don't recognize that they're asking that, which I always found quite interesting. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, so, you know, talking about the nation of Islam, you know, they do have, like I mentioned earlier, some reactionary components, certainly. There is a sort of religious conservatism that results in a sort of institutional sexism in the organization. There's certainly an anti-Semitic components, a virulently anti-Semitic components. These were things that Malcolm X himself never emphasized, really in his speeches and talks, at least not of the countless hours of speeches and talks that I've listened to. And it wasn't something that he put into practice in his personal life. He was always very kind and courteous to, honestly, everybody that approached him kindly and courteously.

And what he really emphasized was the black nationalism, was this sort of this idea that, you know, that black people were a nation, that they had nationhood and they need to engage in a national liberation struggle against the broader U.S. state that they've been, you know, dragged here against their will. And, you know, that tension between Marxism and black nationalism would later play out in the founding and development of the Black Panther Party, as those two strains kind of came to a head as that contradiction in the black community came to a head through the Black Panther Party, which I think is interesting. So it's worth note. some of these reactionary aspects of the nation of Islam, but it's also worth noting the role that Malcolm X played in the things that he emphasized coming out of that tradition and the things that you pretty much never hear him really talking about or, you know, pursuing these really terrible reactionary elements that are to be found inside the NOI. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, no, I mean, definitely, it is true. Like, he describes saying, he describes hearing from Elijah Muhammad and initially believing that, you know, to, you know, you were meant to respect Muslim sisters, but, in respecting them, you were also meant to control them, and that was the only way that they would respect you. I think one thing that speaks to the reflectiveness that you described earlier is that when women who are members of the nation came to him, or in discussions, they said, well, I mean, you're, you're denigrating women, or those comments denigrate women. He never just wiped them

away. He never ignored them. He always sort of, he always reflected on the substance of both the critique and then the substance of the initial claim and reevaluated it. But yeah, the nation of Islam itself absolutely advocated ardently anti-Semitic views which I mean there's like it's it you know it goes without saying that they can't be defended that and there's there's no there's no justification for them and then the institutional sexism that relegates women to domestic um domestic affairs and you know um concentrated spending their time in the home and as as domestic homemakers and things like that also I think kind of reflective of uh the specific views of of Elijah Muhammad and that are sort of revealed later through events that that precipitate his

Malcolm's falling out with the with the movement overall. So kind of bouncing off some of that and now that we've addressed sort of, you know, this idea of black supremacy and a lot of Malcolm X's incredibly, you know, intense statements about white people and them literally being a Satan, you know, the big criticism that you often hear today from centrist, reactionaries, you know, people that don't like Malcolm X or that want to knock him down a peg and, you know, deprived the left of him being really somebody that we can look up to and love. It was that they always talk about this, him being basically reverse racist, right? That he hated white people and that, you know, this is a reason to not like Malcolm X or to knock him down a peg. And I'll

just give my thoughts on it first. And you can jump in and tell me what you think because I'm really interested how you would respond to that critique. But from my position, at least, his anti-whiteness and his virulent anti-whiteness was totally understandable given his entire life and all the experiences that he's had in every aspect of his life and when he was getting some of these ideas

from the nation of Islam about white people one of the things he did was he would go and he would read history he would test these ideas because he wanted not to just accept things because somebody else told him he wanted to go investigate those things and make sure that he had a position that he understood fully and so he went and he studied history

You know, the history of imperialism, the history of colonialism, and studying that history certainly would seem to vindicate Nation of Islam's perspective on white people, and especially if it's married to a theistic understanding of God and the devil, you know, you could see how Malcolm X would genuinely be engaged in an empirical analysis of history to figure out this position and really coming to agree with Nation of Islam their line on that issue based on the horrific history that's just real and present everywhere. You know, to him and countless black people like him, white people are more specifically the institutional white supremacy that they created, were the devil, right? It was a primary, if not the primary force of brutality and terror and instability in their lives. And so from my perspective, I don't think we should give any ground to this criticism, no apologies at all. Like, fuck the cry babies. Malcolm X said what he believed based on life experiences, which attest to that belief. and, you know, I'm certainly not going to shed any tears over anybody's, you know, any white people's feelings that might have been hurt when Malcolm X was going off. I understand where he was coming from.

I respect it and I even admire it, especially in the context of brutal white supremacy to come out and say, like, we're not even equal with you. Fuck you. You know, you're less than us. And, you know, it is too much in some ways. Obviously, I don't believe that any one race is superior to any other race and none of us do. But I can totally understand it in the context of his life. And, you know, I'll defend it, honestly. But what, yeah, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's well put.

I mean, it is, it is certainly kind of clearly like a revolutionary urge, right? To say that to aspire to equality with people who have created systems of unbelievable brutality over centuries and continue to uphold those systems and reinforce them with violence whenever necessary is it's, it boggles, right? like why it's something that that defies any kind of moral sensibility so of course you would say well no we are better than that we are better than those who who seek into do us infinite unimaginable harm also i think what makes evident the fact that this was something that was based in historical analysis for him is uh as we'll see you later during his pilgrimage he really fundamentally re-evaluates that view because he has experiences that he never had in the u.s and that is the thing is that his life was defined by white supremacist violence. It determined it was within, you know, while he was still in the womb, there was that first kind of indicative interaction where his mother, at home alone with her children, was confronted by a group of white racists who said leave, effectively leave or we will kill you, right?

And even when they did leave, it happened again. At every point, his English teacher who he thought as someone who, Was a friend who he could trust who said to aspire to any kind of achievement, cognitive achievement, any achievement of profession of the mind is not your role as the race you are, right? It is above you and you are meant to work with your hands. All of the people who sought out black sex workers and whatnot. I mean, Bell Hooks has written about the consumptive aspect of white people devouring black people in intimate and sexual interactions and whatnot. all of those things, it's easy to see why they would create that kind of really just like fundamental discontent, right? That extreme rejection of all of those systems.

And so then certainly, and as well, I mean, this is, I think this aligns with his criticism at the time of other civil rights leaders who went in, in that he said, you can't integrate into white society because white society was created to oppress us. that is its purpose really that is how it functions that is how it props itself up he talked about the unpaid wages of all those who had been enslaved and he says so how do you think the u.s became this wealthy a country that that through its wealth is now treating all the other countries in the world the way it has treated us for centuries so it isn't i mean if you have a fundamental structural critique of white supremacy in the u.s and as a world-besriding structure of power and accumulation and you reject all of the sort of the identities and and auspices and philosophies that undergird and prop up that system, then certainly to consider yourself equal to the people

who animate that system and who profit from it and prosper within it, it just, it's fundamentally at odds with all of the beliefs that you would hold. It doesn't really make sense. So yeah, I agree that it's not really, I mean, it's certainly not a good faith criticism to say, oh, how come black people in the late 1800s, early 1900s, weren't nicer to white people. Like, it's ridiculous. Exactly right. And that's sort of same, like, little crocodile tier bullshit exists today in various forms. And, you know, in integration, even after Malcolm's life with all the civil rights and all the things that people fought hard for, I mean, nobody would say that the U.S. is integrated in any real meaningful way, you know, outside of, like, technical policies and laws, like on the books.

but in reality, the de facto reality is, you know, one of segregation and one of ongoing oppression and ongoing, you know, brutality on the part of the white supremacist capitalist state against its black population. So those things haven't ended by any means. But I do want to switch gears here now and get more back. You know, we covered a lot of the technical details and sort of, you know, let's dive back into some of the more reflective parts of this interview and of Malcolm's life. So what do you think it was about Malcolm as a human being that made him such a loved, revered, and ultimately feared figure because, I mean, he was feared. People, like, people would talk about white people in the audience during some of his interviews on, like, public platforms, like, you know, physically through their body language, showing fear just by Malcolm X talking the way he talked. So, so, yeah, what are your thoughts on what made him such an impactful human being?

I mean, I think it really was just the insistence of his argument. You know, he wasn't, because he, so he was also very critical of the notion that black people would judge themselves by the measures of white society, whether it be through appearance or through achievement. And so his rejection of that, I think, was incredibly powerful. And his fearlessness, you know, he would look, basically, he would look white-dominated society in the face. He would actively call it the oppressor, right?

He would castigate it for its centuries of crimes. And without fear, he would say, we are owed more than you can imagine, you know? And I think that not softening the argument when you're making it, I think, is really something that does not happen very often. It doesn't happen very often today, right? There's always the notion that if you want to get somewhere with someone that you're either advancing a critique of or you're arguing against their position or whatnot, you kind of have to soften it. so that they'll be receptive to it. And it's something I think that people do inherently, both in just recognizing, in many cases, overly graciously,

that the person that they're speaking to is also a person, and so connecting to their humanity, or whether it's based on considerations of practicality or... Or sometimes it genuinely is cowardice, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it isn't... I mean, I think that there is the notion that the retort will be violent, And so I'm a bit, not reluctant, I guess, but I want to, you know, recognize that there is, that some fears are well-founded.

Definitely. But certainly there are people who don't have much to fear who are unwilling to make the argument as strongly as he did. And he, you know, always knew, as you mentioned, or he always expected that his life would have inviolently. So he clearly believed that there was, and rightfully so, he believed that there were, or he knew that there was much to fear. And that, and that his experiences as a child with his parents, and with his uncles, he knew that the response from white society is frequently violent and that murder is a means of upholding white supremacy and actively used, frequently and actively used means of upholding white supremacy. And so I think that his fearlessness in making the argument

blatantly and repeatedly and to go to, you know, go on these national platforms, speak in front of bank of reporters and say adamantly, you know, this is the truth, right? This is, this is what has happened. This is what has been done to my people, to our people. And this is the, and our rejection of that will only strengthen today and tomorrow and each day after. I think that that is part of why he's been so, he was so venerated. Because, you know, people described in that, in that documentary and, and, uh, in interviews, you see, he's, he's see people describing him as speaking for the sort of millions of black people

in the U.S. who didn't have the opportunities to speak that he did. And he describes a connection to people who were engaged in street life or the ghetto communities. I mean, it's not a term I love to use, but being a member of those communities and so able to speak to that experience

without leaving those people behind and without leaving the communities behind. And I think, you know, there would be people who crossed him on the street who had seen him on TV if you, few nights before making those arguments as adamantly as you always did and I think that that really is powerful because to not depart from the people who you claim to represent to not shield yourself from the life that you're trying to erad from the from the horrifically threatening conditions in many ways that you're trying to eradicate from society that is not that's a choice and it's I still

think I mean it's a revolutionary choice to say because that is the fundamental solidarity right that is like all of us or none of us. That is, I will not be free of this and I will not be protected from this until all of us are free of it and protected from it. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I mean, he was so well known in Harlem. And you're right, he lived in the community. So he would go on these big shows. And then the next day, you just see him walking down the street to the store or something. So he was very much of the community. He was not anything separate from it. And in that way, he was very much like a Fred Hampton, a figure. If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog.

dog. Whether the dog is a police dog, a hound dog, or any kind of dog. If a dog is fixed on a black man, when that black man is doing nothing but trying to take advantage of what the government says it's supposed to be his, then that black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who fixed the dog on him. When Malcolm talks, one of the mother-iners' talk, they articulate for all the Negro people who he. hear them, who listen to them. They articulate their suffering. The suffering which has been in this country is so long denied. That's Malcolm's great authority over any of his audiences. He corroborates their reality. I was probably about 14 years old, and I was involved in demonstrations at this

construction site. The community was demanding. integration of the workforce. We realized that Malcolm had come to watch the demonstration. When my shift changed, I went across the street to talk to Malcolm. We had quite an argument that morning. And he tried to explain to me what was wrong with my laying down on the ground in front of a cement truck. And Malcolm said, said if these are people who could lynch black people, murder black children, enslave people,

why couldn't they run over somebody with a truck? And he said, oh, they'd say it was an accident. He'd say, oops, my foot slipped, but you'd be just as dead. And when he left, and I turned around to go back across the street, I went back and I got on the picket line, but I didn't never laid down in the street in front of a truck again. We were sitting across the table at the Shabazz Frosty Cream and talking about race relations in America and Malcolm at one point said, okay, what's your solution? And I don't, he was not asking me for advice. He was, he just wanted to sort of put me on the spot for a moment, I think. And I was at the time under the spell of Dr. King and his notion of the beloved society, which would be colorblind, in which color would not be a disability for anybody.

It wouldn't disappear, but it wouldn't be a disability. And Malcolm just kind of looked back at me and said, you're dreaming. I haven't got time for dreams. The goal of Dr. King is full equality. and full rights of citizenship for Negro. The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance of sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who has brutalized them for 400 years.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to get Negroes to forgive the people who have brutalized them for 400 years by lulling them to sleep and making them forgetting what those whites have done to them. But the masses of black people in America today don't go for what Martin Luther King is putting down. As you said in one of your articles, It's psychologically insecure or something of that, so I forget how you put it.

But you didn't endorse what Martin Luther King was doing yourself. I do not reject his goals of full integration and full equality rights for American citizens. Do you reject these goals? If you don't think that he's walking on the right road, I'm quite sure you don't agree that he'll get to the right place. We were aware or felt that it was somewhat dangerous to be too closely associated to Malcolm. He was saying some pretty rough things, particularly about whites. And those of us who wanted to keep peace with the white world, some of us had our jobs out in the white community, we didn't really want to get too close to Malcolm. It has been suggested also that this movement preaches the gospel of violence.

No, the black people in this country have been the victims of violence at the hands of the white man for 400 years. And following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was God-like to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutal. idolalizing us. And today the honorable Elijah Muhammad is showing black people in this country that just as the white man and every other person on this earth has God-given rights, natural rights, civil rights, any kind of rights that you can think of when it comes to defending himself, black people should have, we should have the right to defend ourselves also. In August 1963, 250,000 Americans gathered for the March on Washington. Malcolm came to us. He told us the story about the March on Washington. One thing I can say about Malcolm,

any time he told us something, he could back it up. He had an article, and he brought the, he said, I'm going to tell you, I know what I'm talking about. It says, who pays the bills for civil rights? And it said, the angels are white. And what he went on to say was, you have to fight your battles. And it started in the street. But once you let them become integrated, it gets cool. And then he relates it to a cup of coffee that is hot.

And as soon as you water it, put the milk in it, it cools down. And these analogies Malcolm used sometimes were funny, but they've got home. They hit home. Most of the people that we were organizing, had heard also of Malcolm X. and that, uh, and respected him and listened to him and, you know, anytime that he was going to be on, uh, they made an effort to hear those, to hear those speeches and felt that he indeed understood what their problems were and, uh, and that they needed to be fought against.

And I suppose not all ways non-violently. 19 days after the march on Washington, a bomb blew apart the Sunday school of the 16th, 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. 20 people were injured. Four little girls were killed. Here you're talking about bombing a church and killing four little girls. And the feeling of anger and not being able to do something or not doing something was, I remember, was tremendous. A lot of us sort of became dissatisfied because, and Malcolm really became somewhat dissatisfied.

He never spoke of it, that we weren't doing anything to help our people who were being brutalized by the whites and the police during the civil rights movement. We felt that we should have gotten involved. One white man named Lincoln supposedly fought the civil war to solve the race problem and the problem is still here. Then another white man named Kennedy came along running for president and told Negroes what all he was going to do for them. if they voted for him and they voted for him, 80%. He's been in office now for three years, and the problem is still here. When the police dogs were biting black women and black children and black babies in Birmingham, Alabama, that Kennedy talked about what he couldn't do because no federal law had been violated,

and as soon as the Negroes exploded and began to protect themselves and got the best of the crackers in Birmingham, then Kennedy sent for the troops. And there was no, he didn't have any new law. When he sent for the troops, when the Negroes erupted, then he, head at the time when whites were erupting. So we are within our rights and with justice, with justification, when we express doubt concerning the ability of the white man to solve our problem, and also when we express doubt concerning his integrity, concerning his sincerity, because you will have to confess that the problem has been around here for a long time,

and whites have been saying the same thing about it for the past hundred years, and there's no near a solution to date than it was a hundred years ago. Also, the things that dismissal, character traits about him. I know we've touched on some of these, but I just want to reemphasize. I mean, this is one of the most authentic, sincere, and genuinely humble, even shy human beings that I've ever seen such a popular figure throughout history. He was so humble and so courteous to everybody, even the most disingenuous and interlocutors, that you couldn't help but respect him. And there was one white guy who was in one of these debates. And on the documentary, he talked about, you know, listening to Malcolm X just rail unapologetically about the white man and history

and lay out his whole argument. And the white guy was saying, like, I knew that I have blonde, you know, hair and blue eyes. I knew that I was among the, the indicted group that Malcolm X was was pilloring. But at the same time, when Malcolm X talked to you, you felt like, like, it was a, it was a man-to-man conversation that there was something human about him, that even though he was directly telling you to your face exactly what the white race has done to the black people that he was still in that moment an endearing and an admirable figure even for somebody that was on the wrong end of one of his attacks. And I thought that that's really a testament to to who Malcolm X was because this isn't somebody that felt that they were on his side. This is somebody who was

debating him and had that level of respect for him, which I think says a lot. And as you said, people truly felt that he represented them and that he would never betray them. That credibility with his own people was so essential. They talked about him as our living black manhood or our own black shining prince, right? This notion that the black community, he is of us and he is ours. And that's a beautiful thing that you can't fake. That has to be authentic. And then the last thing I'll say comparing him to some other figures we've covered on this show, he was an organic intellectual, like in the Gromshian sense, like a Fred Hampton was, of the community speaking against the dominant paradigm of his time with the credibility that it can

only come from somebody within a community. And then he had the sort of ethical austerity and discipline of a Thomas Sankara. He really, really believed in this idea that, you know, you have to practice what you're preached. There should be no contradiction or hypocrisy between how you conduct yourself in your personal life when nobody's watching and how you conduct yourself in the public sphere in your professional life. And that integrity and that consistency and that authenticity, you know, goes a long way to explaining why he was so revered and respected and why, you know, he never had a sort of disgraceful thing that people found out about him

or some, you know, scandal uncovered about Malcolm X. I'm sure his enemies, especially in the government, were trying as hard as they could to dig something up on him. But, you know, he really was this beautifully innocent sort of person in that way. Yeah. I mean, he makes the joke about people who are, there's some rumors spreading in the nation of Islam as he was, as Elijah Muhammad took ill. And then he was sort of rising prominence. People were saying, oh, he's using the nation to enrich himself. And he was like, enrich myself. You know, the FBI and the CIA and the IRS can't bring up anything on me. Like, what do you think I'm doing, right? And I think that that what you mentioned about his, his sort of candor in humanity and interviews, it does kind of speak to something that's, I think, true, a little bit heartbreaking. in that despite all of this like the the sort of violent childhood that he had and he's incredibly alienating and like sort of racially humiliating interactions that he had and then his time in his years in crime and then in prison and then and then joining the black liberation movement initially through the nation of Islam and then after I mean in all of that right which is a hard life he maintained that fundamental humanity that like sort of warmth and ability to reach someone else even when diagnosing this incredibly conflictual issue and so it just you just it makes you wonder sometimes were it not for all of that harm what more could he have done right not to say that what he did with

his life is not valuable because of course it's it's incomprehensibly valuable but but what more was there if it if it wasn't if he didn't if he didn't have to take up this movement for black liberation you know all of the other things that that humanity could have created and would have created. Of course, what he did with his life is immensely empowering, but it's also robbing a kind of willful self-actualization from you, right? Because it's self-actualization through obligation, through a need to see the bettering of one's people. And it's not, of course, you know, he didn't make the world. He was born into it. And so that world robbed him in many ways of a choice, of the choice of what he wished to be or what he wished to do, because there

was that fundamental obligation that he felt towards black people. And so I don't know, it's just frustrating. Yeah, no, it's a profound insight. It's a profound implication. You know, what could that genius do in a totally, you know, different context and in a more liberated

context? We'll never know. But you're right. You know, we're all historical figures were born into an historical epoch. We do not choose, and we operate within those conditions. And so you get to see the blossoming of that genius occur in, you know, some of the most depraved conditions on earth in a lot of ways.

So, yeah, yeah, it's a lot. When and how, because this is sort of getting towards the end of his life here, and this is actually the instigating event, when and how did Malcolm X come to leave the nation of Islam and leave behind Elijah Muhammad? So it was the confluence of a few different things that caused his departure from the nation of Islam. First, he learned through rumors.

And then ultimately, it was sort of confirmed in a paternity lawsuit that Elijah Muhammad had fathered multiple children outside of his marriage. And he didn't, Malcolm didn't initially believe the rumors, but ultimately came to sort of accept the fact that they were true. And I think that that somewhat diminished his sort of venerating view of Elijah Muhammad, as you mentioned, viewing him as a father figure and one who had taken special interest in him. He also learned that Elijah Muhammad had begun speaking negatively about Malcolm behind his back, despite the fact that even in their interactions, even at this point, he would speak as glowingly as he had before and counsel him against people who would attempt to deceive him or spread rumors about him or whatnot. And then at the same time, due to Elijah's poor health and Malcolm's increasing prominence of the movement and as a representative of the movement in broader society, the movement there being the nation of Islam, not the black liberation. movement overall, but specifically as a representative of the nation of Islam, there were rumors that Malcolm was seeking to usurp Elijah Muhammad. And there was no, you know, basis in reality

for those rumors, but, you know, you can sort of, you can, you know, it's possible that they influenced Elijah Muhammad's view of Malcolm X, and that's, and certainly they could have influenced the people who were counseling him, Elijah Muhammad, about what to do for Malcolm X. But this was sort of finally crystallized and became corporeal after JFK's assassination because Elijah Muhammad instructed all of his ministers to not comment on the assassination and not sort of denigrate JFK. But Malcolm infamously remarked that the Kennedy assassination was the chickens coming home to roost. He was saying that the, you know, so the violence that the U.S. government and structures of power and white society had imparted upon black people for generations. they were no longer just relegated to abuses of black people, but they were now, they now had even reached the president. And so Elijah used this remark specifically as a reason to silence him and

then ultimately banish him from the nation of Islam. And, you know, the big thing for me, and this is a testament to everything we've been saying about Malcolm X and his integrity, you know, when he wouldn't believe that Elijah was not only, you know, doing adulterous stuff and having, you know, children out of wedlock, but with very, very young women. And he said that if somebody had came to him with that accusation, pretty much anybody else, he wouldn't have believed it. He wouldn't even have looked into it. But when that accusation was brought to him, a lot of other things that he had witnessed in the past, all of a sudden clicked and made sense. And it was brought to him by a very reliable source. And he's like,

in that context, he's like, you know, that's the sort of, the integrity of X is that, you know, faced with this accusation against somebody who was almost deified, especially in the early days in Malcolm X's life. He was willing to turn his back on him when he realized that Elijah was not practicing what he preached. He was being a predator behind the scenes. And that, you know, that could not stand in Malcolm X's world and it could not stand in Malcolm X's worldview. That was antithetical to who Malcolm was. And so, you know, he made the courageous decision to turn away. And, you know, when he said that stuff about JFK, he knew goddamn well what he was doing. You know, I mean, he knew, it was more of a reply to the nation of Islam than it had to do with, you know, who JFK was, you know.

He was doing it as an act of defiance in the face of these revelations. And he did it, he did it courageously. And he knew what the consequences would be, which we'll get into in a little bit. Yeah. And I mean, he described really both through this, this sort of departure and then the consequences that incurred that you mentioned we'll discuss. He kind of described like another like psychological dislocation because this. really had been, like he had recreated himself through connection with Elijah Muhammad and the nation of Islam. And it had been like his resurgence in the world, right? His leaving prison

and whatnot, all of that was, all of that came after his, his kind of conversion. And so this would really, like this was the first time that he was in the world out of prison, but without the outside of that community and outside of that organization. I think, this also goes to what you mentioned before about the sort of views about women being in the nation of Islam conflicting with what Malcolm X took from and advocated within the sort of doctrine of the nation of Islam in that, you know, it could be, it would have been easy for someone who is an ardent follower of Elijah Muhammad regardless of everything else, right? It would have been easy for them to make excuses for that behavior or to say, well, you know,

he's the leader and the leader deserves special consideration or whatnot. And even Malcolm X sort of, you know, and for a moment or what have you, he entertained that, you know, the teachings of someone or the product of their work in the world exceeds and outweighs their personal indiscretions. But then I think because they were, because it was such predatory, they were such predatory acts and because they were so in conflict with everything that he had come to believe was, was a correct and defensible and value. about their views and about the you know solidarity and love they were meant to foster among black people the way that you would treat that he would treat other black people like this right that you would treat young women like this it does show that malcolm x was more than just you know imbued with the teachings of nation of islam it was that through that kind of avenue he had become he had made himself a leader in in the broader black liberation movement that

initially was in the context of the nation of Islam, but then grew beyond that and sort of necessarily kind of departed from that organization. Yeah. Yeah, Malcolm X sort of transcended the limitations of that organization and its leadership. But after leaving the nation of Islam, you know, Malcolm visited Mecca on his on his pilgrimage to the Middle East. And this was a huge point in his life. And it also speaks to, you know, the implications of what could have been if he wasn't in a different context, but also if he wasn't cut. down so early in his life, like you can really see when he comes out of this situation, his political and social views changing. So can you talk about this holy pilgrimage that X took

and sort of how it affected his politics coming out of it? Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's even underselling it to say that he had a profound experience. He initially flew to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, and from there he met with members of the Saudi government. And he describes that he was treated as a traveling dignitary. And he went before the Hodge commission and then they sanctioned his travel and then they granted him like a hotel room, a guide, access to a car and a driver. So he traveled to Mecca and then he traveled to a few other locations. And he describes encountering a colorblind society. He says that he, he sort of had experiences in which every person that he met treated him as an equal. And he saw like a cross racial sharing of

of food and care that was that he had never counted before in his life and he says for the specific quote is for the past week I've been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see all around me by people of all colors and it's sort of I mean it's incredibly sad that that he really didn't believe this was possible right he had never had an experience that would have that from which he could have believed that that kind of just humanity that fundamental humanity was possible because, of course, the U.S. is so steeped in seemingly insurmountable racial animus. And so he describes the spirit of unity and brotherhood, which he'd, yeah, again, which he'd been led to believe could never be established between whites and non-whites because

of the experiences that he'd had in the U.S. And this isn't to say, though, that his politics completely changed. It's, I would say more so that they grew, right? Like, they developed further because he also, on this trip, traveled to Egypt and Ghana and Nigeria and a couple other countries. And he seemed to develop like a deeper sense of pan-Africanism and a deeper sense of justice. Like on his return to the U.S., he spoke of taking to the U.S. government to court at the U.N. on charges of denial of human rights. And he spoke of developing a black solidarity throughout all of the Americas and throughout Africa and the Middle East and no longer merely in the U.S. as well, his comments sort of demonstrate that where he once felt that black people in the U.S. who had again been deprived of their names and their language and their history,

and he seemed to feel earlier in his life that none of that could be restored, I think he had experiences when traveling through Africa in which he saw solidarity there that was already active in communities in Africa that he didn't expect. He expressed people expressing interest in the civil rights movement and support for the civil rights movement in Nigeria and Ghana and throughout West Africa, and that he sort of saw an active potential for international black solidarity that I think gave him a new energy and a conviction and ultimately made him significantly more optimistic than he had been prior. Yeah. And as you said, you know, this sort of represented his first experience of race and race. race relations outside the context of the United States and the white supremacist system. For him, it was, you know, revelatory in the extreme to be able to get outside of that cage

of, you know, just intoxicating and suffocating white supremacy and to see how people, you know, unfettered from that, at least in some contexts, could flourish. And so that really sort of, he'd already left the nation of Islam, is on the way out, re-questioning a lot of the stuff that he had carried over from the nation of Islam. And then he has this profound, a racial experience with regards to seeing, like, he talks about, you know, like blue-eyed, blonde-haired Muslims marching right next to, you know, dark-skinned African Muslims, and the sort of sense of religious ecstasy that he got just observing that. So, you know, it was incredibly important. And you're right, it didn't, you wasn't changed, right? He didn't, like, come back with a whole new ideology.

But he grew and developed and matured and fascinating and sort of tragic ways because he was cut down so soon after. that we never got to see what direction would that have would that development had have gone in if you were allowed to live another 10 20 30 years we'll never know but it was certainly a fascinating development in his own psychology and he had enough time to come back and talk about that and sort of you know put forward some of his his new altered views on some of these court subjects and topics yeah and i think um i mean he definitely also describes something that that you know i would both recognize that the u.s has a kind of incredible fervent racial politics that is like especially uh has a special uh a special level of animosity that is like especially um kind of ingrained in its political culture and that is extremely conflictual um and as well as in the case of fred hampton as in the case of martin luther king junior anyone who preaches cross racial solidarity in the u.s gets killed right like there's like that is the most threatening uh movement in u.s politics is a movement that seeks to build solidarity among people racially and economically oppressed,

oppressed bond regards to their gender identification, in regards to their sexual orientation, all people who are trod upon by the system, any movement that seeks to develop that kind of broad, all-inclusive solidarity is it's not just that it's a threat, it's that it's inexcusable, right? It cannot, it cannot be abided. Like, it ultimately and immediately has be put down and so you know it's not that i mean i don't know that i've no evidence or really reason to suspect that the u.s government assisted the nation of islam and murdering malcolm x but i'm quite certain that if the nation of islam hadn't murdered malcolm x the u.s government would have tried to yeah i could not agree more and you know you mentioned mokk and and fred hampton

yeah mok had at the very end of his life the poor people's movement this attempt to organize people across race and focused on class and then march on Washington. And that was a line too far. And he was killed soon thereafter. He announced that possibility. And then Fred Hampton was putting together the Rainbow Coalition with indigenous, with white people, with brown folks and with black folks trying to unify across race. And, you know, the Chicago PD put him down. And then after this, you see Malcolm X sort of groping for a way to unify across race or at least seeing the possibility of that. happening. And, you know, I don't know the exact involvement of the FBI behind the scenes with

regards to Malcolm X's life. We know for a fact they were watching and monitoring him and were concerned about him. But, you know, it very well could be the case that they understood the nation of Islam enough to know that Malcolm X was pretty much, you know, walking dead at that point and that they didn't really have to do anything that this sort of this process was going to play out and not going to be in Malcolm X's favor ultimately. And so they could just sort of sit back and watch, you know. Yeah. And I mean, certainly, right, with that knowledge, they made no efforts to protect him, right? So that is also an active, evidence of their sort of active participation in a sense. Yep, yep, exactly. Okay, so we've gestured towards this a few times in this conversation,

but Malcolm seemed to have a very keen sense that he was going to suffer an untimely death. He spoke frankly about this in his biography, explicitly stating that he believed he was going to die and that he was going to die violently. There is a background sense of urgency to tell his own story that sort of permeates the entire autobiography, and in fact, he died before the book was published at the very end of the book, Alex Haley, writes about Malcolm X's assassination. So how did Malcolm X die? And what do you make of his sort of premonition concerning his own mortality? So, yeah, to speak of his death first, I mean, I think it's as evidence of the degree to which people identified with him and saw him as legitimate and truthful and as a representative. Malcolm learned that the nation of Islam wish to kill him from a member of the nation of Islam. One member, one brother who had been instructed to wire his car to explode when he tried to start it,

told Malcolm about those instructions instead. And so from that, he sort of knew that he was going to be targeted. And this, of course, brought great kind of psychological anguish to him, because this is a movement that had represented an immensely powerful period of self-actualization within his life and was now seeking to end his life. And so on February 27th, in 1965, this is after his pilgrimage, he was speaking with a panel, a few other speakers to the organization for Afro-American Unity in New York City. A few weeks before this, he'd been giving talks since returning to the U.S., and a few weeks before this,

he had instructed his bodyguards and the people who were kind of administering the facilities that he'd be speaking in, not to pat people down when they entered. He said that it was, he could see that it was frustrating people and sort of alienating them and he didn't want that. He also said it made him feel like Elijah Muhammad and he really didn't want that. And so, I mean, again, it's just expression of the degree to which he made himself accessible and that he didn't want to have any kind of these barriers of hierarchy between himself and the people who he was speaking to and who come to see him. And so, but so a few, there were a few other speakers and he wasn't, he was maybe third or fourth. I can't recall exactly. but as you as you went up to speak there was a scuffle uh in the crowd and someone yelled get get your hand out of my pocket and then when people turned to look three men who were sitting in the front row stood up two had pistols one had a shotgun and they all they started firing uh at malcolm and they struck him several times and uh and he you know sort fell backward in the stage and that's when he when he died he was taken to the hospital but his life was not able to he was not able to be saved and uh he was not able to be saved and he was not able to be saved and he was

And I think, I mean, in regards to the premonition, he, I mean, he spoke of his mother having these premonitions. He said that his mother, when the night that his father died, his mother and father had gotten into an argument, and then he left the house, and she ran out, distressed and called after him. And he turned back, and Malcolm said that despite that they had been an argument, he waved, and then he turned and kept walking. And throughout the entire night, his mother was distressed and felt that things were not okay. And so then eventually the children went to sleep, and then they were awoken by her cries of anguish, and they, you know, ran out to see her and knew immediately what had happened. And so the idea being that she knew that this would be the last time that she saw her husband. And so I think that, I mean, I think that when so much of your early life is defined by the violence and the threat of violence and so much of your formative years spent in circumstances that are kind of governed by violence in a way, right? in, you know, in the illicit drug trade and things like that, that it's, you kind of, it's a sort of

Paul that's hanging over your entire life. And then, you know, beside that, the fact that he was a black man who spoke, he discussed earlier that the places that when they moved to Lansing, the, you know, neighbors would say, and the Black Legion said that these are smart Negroes, right? Which means that they speak, right? They understand they're intelligent, and that means that they're trouble. And so I imagine that he recognized that he was and always intended to be smart, and which meant that he would be viewed as being trouble, whether it's by, you know, white society or any kind of structure of power that he attempted to upend. And so to me, it just sort of means that he expected his life to end violently because he knew he would never,

he would never turn over for power. You know what I mean? He would never, he would never relent in his pursuit of justice and liberation and ultimately those who pursue justice and liberation are often met with a violent end. And so I think that that was kind of a statement about his conviction and the depth of his conviction, but also a reflection of the experiences he had as a kid in regards to his father and his uncles, four of his father's six brothers were killed by white men and his father was killed by white men. And so I think that he just kind of saw no other way. Yeah, exactly. And this wasn't, you know, the first attempt on his life by the nation of Islam. They had previously a few weeks earlier, fire bombed his house with all of his children and his wife in the house, which is just fucking devastating. And then his wife and kids were actually in the audience when he was killed. And so can you imagine that trauma, you know, seeing your husband or your father gun down in such a brutal way? yeah and i mean part of the reason that they were there is is because he had sort of vowed uh to to betty

that he wouldn't go on any long trips without her anymore and he he sort of he didn't want to to leave his family at length anymore he wanted to be with them and he wanted to kind of build this sort of you know go forward and build a life together can continue the life that they were building together but you know more closely and it's again just incredibly tragic that of course immediately after they make that recommitment to each other, then he's taken from them. Yeah, exactly. I do want to make a quick parallel in connection to some other figures here. I think this is really interesting. I've always sort of been obsessed, especially in my late teens and late 20s with my own mortality and death has always been something that I've wrestled

with philosophically and, you know, existentially in various ways. But, you know, I really can't help but draw this connection between Malcolm X and the way he died and people like Che, Fred Hampton, and Thomas Sankara, right? They all had a sense that they would die, right? If Fred Hampton said, you know, I'm not going to slip on ice. I'm not going to go down in an airplane accident, right? If I die, it's going to be at the hands of my enemies because I'm fighting for my people. Sancarra, when he was sort of bombarded by this coup and cornered in his office,

he walked out to what he had to know would be his death and left his staff inside to try to protect them. He was basically going out and taking the bullets so that people didn't have to bust in and kill the innocent people that were with him, and so he walked into his own death. And then Che, you know, he lived in an aggressively militant life, even when he had plenty of opportunities to stop. After the Cuban Revolution was successful, Che could have easily had a fairly comfortable life as an administrator in the government of the Cuban government, but he was too restless. He couldn't stop.

He had to go out and keep fighting for other people in other parts of the world, and eventually he was, you know, taken down by CIA-backed forces. and even at his death, when the guns rained at him and he knew that he was entering his death, he said to tell a message to his wife that she can move on and be happy without him, and then he looked at his executor in the eye and said, shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man. And that level of courage and that willingness to sacrifice your life for the benefit of your people and the movement that you're spearheading, I think is perhaps one of the most courageous acts that a human being can do. and all four of these figures did that one way or another.

And there was three people sitting on the first row. They were sitting there reading newspapers. Nobody's paying him any mind. And Malcolm was still in the back. Benjamin Goodman came out, and he opened up the meeting. I opened up for him. And he had sat down behind me, and he said, make it claim. Make it plain is the code word that he used for us to bring him forward.

So anyway I did, I brought Minister Malcolm forward. He didn't like a lot of ice and, you know, here's Minister Malcolm the Great and all that. He didn't like that. Just plain, you know. Then I heard a lot of shots. And I looked up and these three that was sitting across the front. across the front, I now working away from Malcolm's right to Malcolm's left, shooting at him. I saw my husband falling, falling back. He didn't bend, he just fell straight. And then I tried to I forgot my children. I tried to get to him.

I was facing the assassins, so I saw them stand up and take my father's life. An image that I wondered if I could have prevented it. I was going to the Audubon that day, had gotten lazy. and had said simply, ah, I'll go next week. And so proceeded to go into the kitchen, put some coffee on, turn on the radio. In my little apartment there, I had a little black and white kitchen table with these little black chairs,

and I had this little black radio on that table, and I clicked the radio on as I stood there thinking about what had happened the night before, turned towards the stove to pick up my coffee, And the flash came through on this station and said, Malcolm had been assassinated. And I froze. I remember turning in that kitchen. and screaming. I was in the home of Jewish family.

And they said very casually that Malcolm X has been assassinated. Then someone said, after all, he was anti-Semitic, and I took exception to this, knowing full well he was not. Then I excused myself and I went into that bathroom and cried in about 15 minutes. There's nothing on earth will make me accept Malcolm's assassination.

Nothing. Despite I'm concerned, it may sound a bit weird, but he's alive. Very much. And one day I'll get even. That's the way I go to bed every night. Three members of the nation of Islam were arrested and convicted of the murder. But question of a larger conspiracy to silence Malcolm X was never explored. of all the leaders that I knew and loved and admired and I walked with and walked behind. This one, as I said before, had been closest to me.

I felt I was losing a son. So I thought that I would like my children and generations to come to know this most important aspect of Malcolm X. That he was indeed our manhood, you know, our shining. black prince who didn't hesitate to die because he loved us so. I thought that in honoring him we honored the best in ourselves. When the funeral was over and then the Muslims came and dressed him for proper proper Muslim burial. And after that, we went out to the cemetery.

When we got there, you know, the professional grave diggers were standing there with their shovels, but some of the black brothers said, no. We can't let you do that. We dig this grave. We cover this brother with dirt. And I was proud of that. moment to be black yeah and i mean i don't think that you can i mean it's it's sort of it's fundamentally at odds with what we're made to aspire to in this society right which is personal

enrichment and individual prosperity that is completely divorced from your circumstances and your social and and political circumstances right the notion that you have any attachment to or obligation to people around you, especially, and let alone people in other parts of the world or anyone that exists or will exist, that's just fundamentally rejected by everything that our society venerates. And so, yeah, it is, I think it is incredibly, like, it is the most, you know, courageous and human thing I think that one can do is to be willing to sacrifice comforts and well-being and ultimately their safety in life for the benefit of others. And to come to that in this world, to choose it and to pursue it, it really can't be the

the enormity of it can't be overstated. And you're exactly right. You know, the hyper individualism of our society erases any sense of, or at least dramatically weakens in most people, any sense of duty or obligation or responsibility to others. You know, we're told, you know, to make the best out of our life, to consume things, to make ourselves happy in a hedonistic fashion, and that, you know, politics and collective struggle is nothing that we should focus our energies on and we should just be individual consumers consuming our way towards the grave so in that society anybody who raises up and really has a sense

of discipline and a sense of duty and obligation to others and moreover is willing to lay down their own life for that bigger cause i mean that's just that says a lot not only the courage of the individual at hand but the the amount of indoctrination and sort of conditioned individualism that you have to overcome to be willing to put yourself in that position yeah it just it speaks it speaks volumes about these people and their minds and their brilliance and their sense of self-sacrifice. No, I think it also shows

the lengths of the systems of power will go to reinforce themselves, right? It's at all instances, it's that these movements must be stopped in the most horrifically violent means necessary or possible because anything that assails those structures of power

is an existential threat and those threats have to be extinguished. Exactly. what is malcolm x's ultimate legacy in your opinion what did he leave behind in the world after he left that continues to live on today uh so i mean one i can say what i what i draw i think as one of the most powerful things i draw from his legacy and that is his critique of evaluating oneself and he and he speaks often of evaluating your appearance or accomplishments or ultimately your existence by the measures of white society um and i think you can see a

potential thread connected to his parents participation in Marcus Garvey's movement there and that they were rejecting white society. But what I take from it is a sort of world-spanning revolutionary claim in that yourself and myself and all the people who listen to this episode are of course, you know, ardently opposed to capitalism. And that is itself a rejection of sort of Euro-colonial society. But and capitalism is of course inextricably connected to, you know, European colonization and racism and imperialism and the notions it carries that we

were just discussing of individual enrichment and prosperity because those two are European notions right like the Locke and Proviso of you know take as much as long as there is left for others but then once money's created he's like well money doesn't rot so you can have as much as you want

and then how he contorts his own argument to somehow permit slavery despite that property supposedly made through things are the property of those who put labor into them and all that, right? Like the contortions that European philosophies made

to justify European philosophers and liberalism made to justify their own imperialism and colonialism and whatnot. And I think that it's rejecting those notions gives us access to really fundamental movements and arguments because even

the conception of time as explicitly and exclusively linear, that is a European notion that has been positive upon the rest of the world. I often think of the phrase the sun never sets on the British Empire. And we might have even talked about this in our last discussion, but I think of that phrase a lot because, of course, at the time, it meant that the British Empire spanned so much of the world that it's always a day somewhere, right? It is so geographically broad. But I have an English first name, as does everyone in my family. When my father was born, Nigeria was a

British colony, you know, there are 500 languages in Nigeria, and the official language of the country is English. All of those things, in my view, are evidence of the fact that the sun never sets on the British Empire and that what was done is never erased, right? It is always present and it is reproduced in the present. I mean, Nigeria itself, it was formed from three British protectorates that they just determined it would be easier to rule if it was one country, right? So Britain drew the, determine the borders of the country that is now Nigeria. And Britain, you know, there was a civil war in which the Ebo's, which is the cultural group that I'm from, sought to create their own nation. And Britain supported the Nigerian government in defeating that, that would be nation, and then supported the famine that was imposed upon the Ebo's after it, in which two million Eboes died.

And, of course, I was born in Canada, you know, which is also part of the British dominion. And that influenced my family coming here or my parents. And so, and I think of, you know, in just reading, I've encountered African political theories that construct time as multi-layered and multi-present in that the past exists concurrently with the present. And so the present reproduces and either simply reproduces or reproduces and reinterprets the past. And so I think of, you know, when people argue again, arguments for like reparations for for European colonialism reparations for slavery and whatnot

and they say things like well it was such a long time ago they're reproducing that notion of linearity of time which is again a European colonial notion and so I think when the argument to reject the auspices of white society and self-evaluation

I think is also to reject the construction of our world that is born by European colonialism And the breadth of that rejection, I don't think it's like, I think it's difficult to fully conceive of, but I don't think that the limits are properly grasped because it's everything. It's individual prosperity. It's standards of beauty. But it's also how we understand the past, how we understand the present, how we understand really what's possible and what can be done, what is meant to be answered for by our politics, the things that our politics are intended to contend with. It's everything about our world and the way we think about it that is created by these structures. So for me, that's one of the most empowering parts of his legacy, and that the world that we inhabit is created by particular systems of power. And in rejecting those systems of power, we recreate the world. God damn. Yeah. I mean, you gave me so much to think about there. I just want to like turn off the mic and just sit and ponder for a bit. But yeah, profound insights. Absolutely fascinating concept of like the sun never setting on the British Empire, even when it's like technical, formal colonies have, you know, shaken off the shackles of formal occupation.

that cultural legacy, that genocidal really legacy continues to live on in a myriad of ways. And in that sense, the sun still is not setting on that empire, which I think is a fascinating way to look at it. So when I'm thinking about Malcolm X's ultimate legacy, I've made this argument in the past, and it's something that I bring up every opportunity I can. And that is that I think, and I think it's really inarguable, that you can draw a straight line from Malcolm X to the Black Panther Party to the development and creation of hip-hop as an art form. The jump from Malcolm X to Black Panthers is pretty obvious, right?

This was an intellectual forbear. The Black Panther members explicitly referenced a Malcolm X as a huge inspiration. Malcolm X is just fiery anti-cop rhetoric, you know, leads directly to the first program the Black Panthers really did, which was their cop watch program. you know the black panthers really coming into existence only a couple years after after malcolm x was assassinated and then on top of all of that you know you also have the aesthetic so in the nation of islam i was watching one of their one of their presentations uh you know some some archival footage

and they were all dressed including malcolm x in all black with black sunglasses on black ties uh black suits and that that aesthetic that style um was obviously passed down to the black panther party, they were a little younger and they did things a little differently. They had the 60s fashion and the 70s fashion kicking in. So, you know, those suits and those sunglasses changed to black leather jackets and berets, but there's still that sort of stylistic novelty that was passed directly down. And then the line from all of that to hip hop, you know, Malcolm X really, you know, expressed in an unprecedented way self-love, right? An unapologetic militancy, a swaggering sense of self-worth in the face.

of brutal white supremacy that wants to make the black, you know, person feel less than in every way. You know, the idea of using the entirety of your life, or in the case of hip-hop, your art, to express the reality of as well as challenge the social conditions that you were born into and that destroy black communities and black lives. At one point, Malcolm X says, you know, I'm only a mirror held up to the face of this society, meaning I'm just a product of the environment that you, you know, created. And you see that explicit argument articulated in interviews and music by figures in hip-hop like Tupac, Kendrick Lamar, certainly dead Perez. I mean, I can go down the list forever to talk about that.

I mean, even just the explicit mentions of Malcolm X and hip-hop are probably in the tens of thousands at this point. So that line from Malcolm X through the Black Panther Party to hip-hop, which is now a global force, which is an unprecedented creative explosion that's really rooted in. the brutal oppression of black people in the United States specifically and it emanates out from that and you still see to this very day oppressed peoples whether in Palestine in Asia and Latin America using hip hop as a sort of universal language through which to express their resistance and their fight against their own unique form of oppression and in that sense that legacy is something that we should emphasize and that is truly profound and beautiful and I think Malcolm X would would really be smiling to know that that that sort of happened as a result of just his existence,

you know? Yeah, I mean, I think like on your first point, the connection between Malcolm X and the Black Panthers is like absolutely direct. I mean, he argued for self-defense in the way that they took up, right? The movement, the Black Panther Party is an animation of the arguments that he made and specifically the critique, some of the critiques that he made about the nonviolence of rights movement or the sort of decidedly or you know self-described as pacifist often civil rights leaders but and then the connection to hip-hop i think is also very apt i mean it was it fundamentally was

in its initial years and still is at its core a political economic critique right it is a critique of society as depriving particular communities creating uh inherently threatening circumstances and abandoning people uh within them and there is this this fundamental revolutionary impulse in it. I mean, as someone who's listening to hip-hop for their whole life, I mean, I imagine that's why it's so empowering, internally empowering in ways that I can say I've never experienced with any other kind of music, you know? And, you know, even as it's today when it's taken up to

the sort of capitalist heights and we're meant to celebrate billionaire rappers and whatnot, it's still, it is never, there's never a time in which there are not hip-hop artists who are making those same political economic critiques of society. And even the ones who become popular and wealthy, so much of their, of their core message is about society is an active means of deprivation, an active means of oppression, and intentionally so, right? And then structuring its own, the prosperity that it distributes to particular chosen people on that deprivation and that abuse. And I think that's a well, a well-drawn connection. It's incredibly profound.

And you're right. even the quote unquote mainstream rap that some people like to like to shit on or whatever I mean there's still all of this present right even if it is sort of turned on its head and made opposite right if you have a very braggadocious hip hop song talking about how much money they have you might initially look at the surface of that and say oh that's you know that's just capitalism consumers and that's gross turn away from it but really you know what is braggadocia in the face of a society meant to make you feel like your shit you know what is celebration of some level of wealth in a society meant to make sure you and your family stay impoverished.

And in that sense, you can see even in the most seemingly shallow hip-hop songs, even if it's unconscious in the head of the artist performing the song, it's still an inexorable reflection of those conditions and still says something about them. Yeah, no, I think that that's absolutely true. And I mean, also, I meant to mention this earlier, but of course, X was an incredibly rhythmic speaker. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And that's, you know, that's part of why he was so captivating is that there's like a timbre to the way that he made his arguments and the confidence in his elocution and that he was never grasping for the next word. He always knew what it was. He always knew exactly where it was going to be placed and how it would flow into the next sentence. And that's, I mean, that power as a speaker is, I think part of how he rose so quickly within the nation of Islam and then within the Black Liberation Movement. And that honestly, I would say that there is that connection to kind of the rhythmic aspect.

of many African cultures, right? Like, there are West African cultures that use drums to speak between villages and things like that. And so there is a kind of, maybe this is a bit optimistic of my own, but there is a kind of connection there in that this fundamental rhythmic communication

seemingly that is pan black. And whether or not that can be drawn from evidence, I think that there is something comforting in the thought, that there's something fundamental to this, experience in the world that is so maligned in many ways, as you mentioned, right, that I don't think it's unfair to say that black people sat at the bottom of the world for centuries. And so anything that you can find, I think, in that that is empowering, is valuable. Yeah, I'm so glad he brought

up the rhythmic nature of the way he talked. At some points in rants, it would almost, you could almost break down speeches into like bars, you know? And he would even like unintentionally, he would unintentionally rhyme often if you listen to enough of his stuff. He won't even be trying to, but he'll just start rhyming and that combined with that rhythmic nature of his cadence. I mean, yeah, it's just all there. And plus, of course, you know, in his autobiography, he talks about just being totally inside the jazz community, right? He would be like the weed man for a bunch of jazz artists.

He had a personal relationship with Billy Holiday, for example. And, you know, there's a straight line from jazz to hip-hop as well. So it's all connected in various ways. And I just find that to be profound in something that doesn't get talked about, you know, enough, I think. Yeah. So going to the last question, this is a good way to wrap it up before the conclusion in parting words, which is what do you personally find most inspiring about Malcolm X? And if you had to choose your favorite Malcolm X quote or two, which ones would they be? It ties back to something that I was mentioning before about unpaid wages. This is a speech he gave toward the end of his life.

He says, if I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing. But collectively, all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I'd be rich beyond dreams. Now, when you see this, and then you stop and consider the wages that were kept back from millions of black people, not for one year before 310 years you'll see how this country got so rich so fast and what made the economy as strong as it is today and all that slave labor that was amassed in unpaid wages is due someone today and you're not giving us anything when we say it's time to collect i think that like that's because that's just a reparations argument but it's not a reparations argument that is that says you know this should be offered it's saying this is what is owed and every day that reparations are not paid is a continued day of theft, right? And, you know, that, that amount gathers interest. So more is owed

every day. And I think that just the U.S. self-conception is so, so aggrandizing. And we often talk of it, or it is, you know, accurately described as the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, and wealthiest country in the history of the world. But all of that

is theft, right? All that the U.S. is based on its two, you know, to generating crimes of slavery and genocide. And I think that I like that quote just because it's a fundamental reminder of that. And it's really that, you know, what black people built the U.S. in many ways. Yeah, exactly. So I'll give a few of my quotes. So the first two quotes are kind of related.

One is I do not pretend to be a divine man, but I do believe in divine guidance, divine power, and in the fulfillment of divine prophecy. I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any person. particular field, but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credentials. And then a related quote is, I want to be remembered as someone who was sincere. Even if I made mistakes, they were made in sincerity. If I was wrong, I was wrong in sincerity. And that to me says so much about who he is and speaks to me on such a deep level because, you know, I think we can all sort of pick that up, you know, as long as your heart is in the right place and you're trying your best, you know, that level

of sincerity and that dogged dedication to your cause will eventually play out and hopefully a positive direction. And that sincerity is really the means by which you gain credibility in your community and to the people that you speak to and talk to. And so especially when we're looking at parts of Malcolm's life where he was making mistakes or maybe saying something that wasn't quite true, that underlying strain of sincerity is always present. And that makes me like endlessly, it should make all of us endlessly forgiving of whatever errors he made because I can deeply respect somebody who makes errors in that context. And that's what a Malcolm X did. Another one that I like is be courteous, be respectful, obey the law, respect

everyone, but if someone puts their hand on you, send him to the cemetery. This is a pretty powerful quote, and it's perfectly synthesizes the dichotomy of who Malcolm X was as a human being, because even to the most, you know, buffoonish white centrist or the most, you know, vociferous disagreeers with what he said, he was this peaceful, courteous human being. He was nice to everybody, you know, and everybody who talked about meeting him in real life, talked about him being just so generous and kind in the way that he treated them but he was also this militant and this is a quote that i that i like tell my kids and stuff is like you know dad wisdom um you know talking to my daughter about standing up to bullies and protecting other people who are

being bullied and and tell her like you know always treat everybody go out of your way really go out of your way to be as kind and nice and courteous and loving to every human being um as much as you can but that moment that somebody turns on you and wants to harm you or the people you love or even innocent people you don't know that's when you fight back and you fight back with extreme you know intensity yeah and there's one more quote that i'd like to mention but i wanted to say that that reminds me a lot of something that my parents told me growing up um which was uh you know respect your elders and respect those who earn it but never bow and never kneel and that's i think that fundamental assertion right that even though even those who you respect no one is ever

better than you are and to look at them as to look at anyone as better than you is to commit a crime against yourself and i i think that it's you know we all sort of have to be reminded that we have to see ourselves as infinitely valuable first and even as we see others is infinitely valuable that to for anyone to speak against you or to do you harm is to is to commit an infinitely large evil yeah and then just being able to that concept of self-defense and and the emphasis he put on it because you know his whole life was being hounded by organized enemies. He took this concept of self-defense with his babies in the house, getting firebombed and

stuff, you know, you got to take that seriously, and that's something I admire in him. But you have another quote. Yeah, and I mean, you can almost make this broader than America, but he's, of course, speaking specifically about the U.S., but he says, I'm no politician. I'm not even a student of politics. I'm not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and it got sense enough to know it. I'm one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism. And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat or a Republican or an American.

I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy. All we've seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. we see through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare. We haven't benefited from America's democracy.

We've only suffered from America's hypocrisy. And the generation that's coming up now can see it and are not afraid to say it. And I think that last bit speaks to a lot of, you know, hopefully speaks to a lot of the sort of rising, ardently critiquing capitalism, social movements today. in that, you know, the generation that's coming up now can see it and are not afraid to say it. And, you know, I hope that we do live in a moment that is pursuing great structural change. Of course, with the, yeah, well, I mean, I don't have to tell you all the things that make any kind of movement towards social change have a very, very short clock in which to work. Yep. But, yeah, I hope that.

I believe that's true, you know. I really do. Sort of the absurdity and the oppression and the brutality and the violence that this system gives rise. too. It can't help but create the very own sort of movements that will fight back against it. And the worst that system becomes, the more vigorous those fights against it happen. And that's just, you know, dialectics. I do want to say one more quote really quick. I know I'm kind of indulging a little bit, but oh, well, we're already over two hours and I think people really enjoy this stuff. I know I do. He has two quotes that are related. One quote is, power takes a backstep only in the

face of more power. And his other quote is, you can't have racism without capitalism. If you find anti-racists, usually they're socialists or their political philosophy is that of socialism. And here, these quotes were from, you know, towards the end of his life. I mean, this is somebody who had met with Fidel Castro in Harlem, stuff like that. And he was starting to have this class dynamic to his worldview and his consciousness that, again, would have been fascinating to see how it pursued in. Insofar as the Black Panther Party was a manifestation of Malcolm X's life and legacy, you know, they were the most advanced communist Marxist movement. In my opinion, in my opinion, opinion in U.S. history. And they were at that time the vanguard of the North American

communist movement, in my opinion. And so having that sort of connection between racism and capitalism and just his own lived experiences of the people that he would meet that were genuinely anti-racist, were always on the far left. That says a lot. And then this whole idea that power only backs down in the face of more power, this really speaks to what he was all about. He was about building up a base of power. in his community one way or another that could challenge the, you know, extreme power of the organized bourgeois U.S. state. And so those sort of power dynamics and that politic and that blossoming class consciousness

towards the end of his life is something really interesting, really beautiful, and something that, you know, tragically, I would have loved to seem to seem blossom further. But, you know, we get what we get and we have to run with it. And his whole life is just a complete inspiration to everybody and especially me. yeah i mean i think that that's i think that's well said and yeah absolutely i mean that connection between capitalism and racism it's anytime that you find it it's it's empowering and invigorating and that he maintains it right that you can't have capitalism without racism if only you know if only more dem or if only the democratic party believe that you're right exactly all right well

this has been amazing uh you know malcolm x is is high on my list probably top two or three of who I consider to be deep sources of inspiration and, you know, ongoing encouragement and, you know, really close to basically a hero of mine. And, you know, I have pictures of them in my house. I teach my kids about him. My daughter is writing her school project last year was on Malcolm X. It was like a year-long project that she worked on. And, you know, so we continue to be inspired by him and have him around. And having you come on and talk to me about him and having this over two-hour conversation, I hope it's a sincere, you know, sort of contribution to the love of Malcolm X in his life. And I hope people find it extremely valuable.

So thank you so much for coming on. We're definitely going to work again. At the end of every conversation I have with you, Chuka, I'm just thinking about the next thing we can do together because I enjoy it so much. And I genuinely learn from you. There were plenty of times throughout this conversation where you sort of blew my mind with some of your insight and the way that you took some of these questions in ways that I never could have anticipated or thought about. And so I deeply, deeply value and appreciate that. And I know that our listeners do as well. So thank you so much for coming on.

Well, thank you for having me. I mean that, you know, if this being a man who means so much to you in your life that you teach your children about, that you would be willing to have this conversation with me, I'm deeply honored by that. Every conversation I have with you is sort of a turning point in many ways. And I'm grateful for the opportunity. I would, of course, love to speak with you again about anything. And just, you know, I'm happy to have you as a comrade, my friend. Thank you for listening.

Rev Left Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio or make a one-time donation at BuyMea Coffee.com. forward slash rev left radio links will be in the show notes this world is such a um and when i say this world i mean it i don't mean in an ideal sense i mean in everyday every little thing you do it's such a Give me, give me, give me. Everybody back off. You know, everybody's like,

you taught that from school everywhere. Big business. You want to be successful. You want to be like Trump. Give me, give me, give me. Push, push, push, push. Step, step, step. Crush, crush.

That's how it all is. And it's like, nobody ever stopped. You know, I feel like, instead of us just being like, slavery's bad, slavery's there, bad whitey, bad whitey. I mean, all right, let's stop that. And everybody's smart enough to know that, I mean, we've been slighted,

and we want hours. And I don't mean by like an hour's 40, acres and a mule because we passed that. But we need help. I mean, for us to be on our own two feet, us meaning youth or us meaning black people, whatever you want to take it for. For us to be on our own two feet, we do need help because we have been here. We have been a good friend. If you want to make it a relationship type thing, we have been there, and now we deserve our payback. It's like, you got a friend that you don't never look out for. You know, you dressed up in jewels. Now America's got jewels and they got paid and everything and they lending money to everybody

except us and it's like you know everybody need a little help on their way to being you know self-reliant you know what I'm saying that's the whole thing about the album about the special Olympics everybody need a little something and they to be independent no independent person just grew up and was born independent you worked and you learned teamwork and you learned cooperation and unity and struggle and then you became independent and we have to teach that and it's still that why is it that they want to do that I mean if this is truly a melting part in the country where we care about and lady liberty got a hand like this she really love us then we really need to be like that and it needs to be the black kids if there's a a white person who got

money then you need to help him he need to help black kids Mexican kids Korean kids whatever but it need to be real and it need to be before we all die and then you say oh I made a mistake we should have gave them some money we really should have helped these folks it's going to be too late you know what I'm saying and then that's when you got to pay your own karma and that's what God make you punish when God punishes you because I feel like you know it's too much money here. I mean, nobody should be hitting a lot of for $36 million and we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic. That's just real. That is just stupid. There's no way Michael Jackson should have, or whoever Jackson should have a million thousand droop a billion

dollars and there that's people starving. There's no way. There's no way that these people should own planes and their people don't have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants. We say to people And say, well, they earned it Now you go out and you're earning it If they earned it Then I think that that's good I think that they deserve it

But even if you earned it You still owe Because look at me I don't have that mega money But I feel guilty Walking by somebody I gotta give them some mail And if I know I got

$3,000 in my pocket I feel like It's wrong to get that person A quarter Or a dollar It's wrong Only you know what you got In your pocket

And that's wrong No matter what they do If they take it and drink it They take it and drink it But, I mean, you got, you understand, we all know how hard it is, and it's not about if you're good or you bad. So since it's not about if you're good or you bad, we know that because he don't got, don't mean he was bad. Or don't mean he's a criminal, or don't mean he's crazy, or a drug addict, or none of that. It just means he don't got.

And ain't it bad that you got? I mean, can you imagine somebody having $32 million? $32 million. And this person has nothing, and you can sleep? But you can still go to the movies about, I mean, I mean, and these are the type of people that get humanitarian awards, millionaires. How can they be humanitarians by the fact that they're millionaires, and there's so many poor people, shows how unhumane they are. You know what I'm saying? And that bugs me.

Not saying that when I'm never going to be rich, and I'm there, you know what I'm saying? But I'm saying, it's a struggle. And I think everybody deserves. And I think there's a way to pay these people. I think there is a way. It just takes to be revolutionary. and it takes to do something out of the ordinary. You know what I'm saying?

Like, I think that if we just said, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, I got an idea. No more porno buildings, you know what I'm saying? Let's build houses. Or no more polo games. Let's build houses for poor people. You know what I'm saying? Or, look, okay, I know you're rich. I know you got $40 billion, but can you just keep it to one house?

You only need one house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it to two rooms? I mean, well, I have 52 rooms, and you know, to somebody with no room. It just don't make sense to me. It don't. And then these people celebrate Christmas. They got big trees, huge trees,

all the little trimmings, everybody got gifts, and then somebody's starving. And they're having a white Christmas. They're having a great Christmas, eggnog and a whole knot. That's not fair to them.