Malcolm X: The FBI File
520
Malcolm X: The FBI File
520Paperback
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Overview
Shortly after he was released from a Boston prison in 1953, the FBI watched every move Malcolm X made. Their files on him totaled more than 3,600 pages, covering every facet of his life. Viewing the file as a source of information about the ideological development and political significance of Malcolm X, historian Clayborne Carson examines Malcolm’s relationship to other African-American leaders and institutions in order to define more clearly Malcolm’s place in modern history.
With its sobering scrutiny of the FBI and the national policing strategies of the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X: The FBI File is one of a kind: never before has there been so much material on the assassination of Malcolm X in one conclusive volume.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781616083762 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 520 |
| Sales rank: | 447,912 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Spike Lee’s films have won numerous honors, including two Golden Globes and an Academy Award for Do the Right Thing. He also directed the movie biography of Malcolm X.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Part I Malcolm and the American State
Malcolm and the American State
For maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and to prevent wasted effort, long-range goals are being set.
1. Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real "Mau" in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.
2. Prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a "messiah"; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammad is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed "obedience" to "white, liberal doctrines" (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism....
— FBI memorandum, March 4, 1968.
Malcolm X's political and historical significance increased after his assassination. His public statements as a minister and political leader reached mainly a black urban audience while millions of every race read his posthumously published autobiography and speeches. He gained prominence as a caustic critic of civil rights leaders, but by the end of his life his evolving ideas had converged with the militant racial consciousness stimulated by the civil rights protest movement. During his public career, he was affiliated with one of the smaller African-American religious groups and never participated in the major national meetings of black leaders; yet he is remembered as one of the most influential political leaders of modern times. To some admirers he became an icon — a heroic, almost mythological, figure whose arousing orations have become indisputable political wisdom. To detractors he remains a dangerous symbol of black separatism and anti-white demagoguery. One of the most widely discussed and controversial African-American leaders of this century, Malcolm remains insufficiently understood, the subject of remarkably little serious biographical and historical research.
This edition of Malcolm X's FBI surveillance file seeks to retify a particularly serious deficiency in previous writings on Malcolm — that is, the failure to study him within the context of American racial politics during the 1950s and 1960s. The surveillance reports document Malcolm's life from his final years in prison during the early 1950s through the time of his assassination in February 1965. They trace Malcolm's movement from the narrowly religious perspective of the Nation of Islam toward a broader Pan-Africanist worldview. The file illuminates his religious and political world suggesting the extent to which his ideas and activities were perceived as threatening to the American state. When examined in the context of the FBI's overall surveillance of black militancy, Malcolm's FBI file clarifies his role in modern African-American politics.
Although some writings about Malcolm X have referred to the FBI file, most biographical accounts have not placed him within the framework of national or international politics. Instead, Malcolm has usually been portrayed as an exceptional individual whose unique experiences inspired his distinctive ideas, as a person affecting African-American politics rather than being affected by the constantly changing political environment. Even Malcolm's relationships and activities within the Nation of Islam remained shrouded in rumor and mystery, despite the crucial role that organization played in Malcolm's ideological development.
Moreover, research regarding Malcolm remains largely uninformed by the outpouring of scholarly studies of his main ideological competitor, Martin Luther King, Jr. Although King, like Malcolm, was a remarkable orator, recent writings on him have placed King within the wider framework of African-American political and religious history. Similarly broadly focused studies are needed in order to understand Malcolm's evolving role in a multifaceted African-American freedom struggle that shaped his ideas even as he influenced its direction. Malcolm and King were articulate advocates of distinctive philosophies and political strategies, but neither leader's historical significance can be equated solely with the emotive power of his words. Both Malcolm and King sought to provide guidance for a mass struggle that generated its own ideas and leaders. Rather than simply followers of Malcolm or King, the activists, organizers, and community leaders who constituted the grass roots of the freedom struggle magnified both leaders' political impact.
Instead of extensive research based on sources produced at the time, popular and scholarly understanding of Malcolm X derives largely from published texts of his speeches and from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a vivid and enlightening, yet undocumented, narrative prepared by Alex Haley. Haley shaped his subject's recollections into a moving account of Malcolm's transformation from abused child to ward to criminal to religious proselytizer to radical Pan-Africanist. The autobiography is an American literary classic that has enriched the lives of many readers. It elicits empathy, revealing the world through its narrator's eyes, but it is less successful as social and political history. Malcolm's political ideas become conclusions drawn solely from his personal experiences. His changing attitudes toward whites becomes the central focus of the narrative, while his political influences, contacts, and activities are reduced to subthemes. All serious study of Malcolm X must begin with the Autobiography; unfortunately, many works on him do not extend beyond the biographical and historical information provided by Malcolm himself.
1. Social Origins of Malcolm's Nationalism
Like most autobiographies, Malcolm's account of his life was intended to explain how he came to enlightenment and fulfillment, but his narrative is incomplete and misleading. Malcolm's early experiences limited his subsequent political choices but do not explain them. Malcolm's conversion to Elijah Muhammad's doctrines was a rejection rather than a culmination of his previous life. He repudiated the Christian teachings of his childhood and affiliated with a religious organization he had never previously encountered. He insisted that the major national civil rights groups and their middle-class leaders did not represent needs of the black masses, but, before joining the Nation of Islam, he had never been affiliated with any African-American advancement organization. Despite his fervent advocacy of racial unity and institutional development, he was, ironically, an outsider with respect to the most important African-American institutions. His life was spent mainly as an angry, though insightful, critic, hurling challenges from the margins of black institutional life. With some justification, he saw himself as a leader uniquely capable of arousing discontented African Americans that leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., could not reach. During most of his life, however, his status as an outsider prevented him from having the type of impact on the direction of African-American politics that he would achieve as a marbyr.
Malcolm's black nationalism derived, ironically, from his exclusion from the African-American social and cultural mainstream. Although his parents, Louise and Earl Little, were organizers for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), his childhood experiences did not connect him to the enduring institutions of black life. Rather than memories of a nurturing African-American household, Malcolm's autobiography emphasized the white forces that destroyed his family. He remembered racist whites forcing his family to move from Omaha, Nebraska, where he was born in 1925, to Milwaukee, then to Lansing, Michigan, and finally to a home outside East Lansing. Malcolm gives few indications that he was involved as a child in African-American social life. Malcolm remembered his father as an embittered itinerant preacher who, despite his Garveyite sympathies, displayed and infused Malcolm with ambivalent racial attitudes. "I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was," Malcolm surmised, "he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man's brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child." Watching his father deliver sermons, Malcolm was "confused and amazed" by his emotional preaching and acquired "very little respect for most people who represented religion." Taken to UNIA meetings by his father, Malcolm was unmoved by the message of racial pride. "My image of Africa, at that time, was of naked savages, cannibals, monkeys and tigers and steaming jungles." Malcolm felt that his mother treated him more harshly than his siblings because his light complexion stirred memories of her own mixed-race ancestry. Neither of Malcolm's parents were able to shelter him or provide him with dependable resources to deal with the racism of the surrounding world. When Earl Little was killed in 1931, six-year-old Malcolm believed rumors that "the white Black Legion had finally gotten him." Afterwards, Malcolm's family life rapidly deteriorated. His mother resented her dependence on welfare assistance. As she progressively lost her sanity, Malcolm became more and more incorrigible. At the age of thirteen, Malcolm was removed from his family entirely and sent to reform school.
In contrast to Malcolm's experience of a disintegrating family life and social marginalization, Martin Luther King, Jr., his principle ideological adversary, spent his childhood within a stable, nurturing African-American family and community. "My parents have always lived together very intimately, and I can hardly remember a time that they ever argued," King once recalled. Growing up in the house his grandfather, A. D. Williams, had purchased two decades before King's birth in 1929, the family's roots in the Atlanta black community extended to the 1890s, when Williams had become pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church. After Williams's death in 1931, Martin Luther King, Sr. became Ebenezer's Pastor. The church became King, Jr.'s "second home"; Sunday School was where he met his best friends and developed "the capacity for getting along with people." Although he, like Malcolm, came to dislike the emotionalism of black religious practice, he developed a lifelong attachment to the black Baptist church and an enduring admiration for his father's "noble example." King and his family developed strong ties to Atlanta's black institutions, including businesses, civil rights organizations, and colleges such as Morehouse and Spelman. While Malcolm's family experienced economic hardship during the Depression years, King "never experienced the feeling of not having the basic necessities of life." Both Malcolm and King acquired antielitist attitudes during their childhoods, but the former resented middle-class blacks while the latter acquired a sense of noblesse oblige. As a teenager, Malcolm ended his schooling after the eighth grade when he was discouraged from aspiring to be a professional. King completed doctoral studies and saw education as a route to personal success and a career of service to the black community.
Both Malcolm and King recalled having anti-white attitudes during their formative years, but white people occupied a much more central place for Malcolm as a young man than for King, who had little contact with whites as a youth. Malcolm's evolving attitudes toward whites were complex and volatile, serving as the underlying theme of his autobiography. As a child, his mother took him to meetings of white Seventh Day Adventists, whom Malcolm recalled as "the friendliest white people I had ever seen." His account of his youth includes both descriptions of encounters with white racism and indications of his own ambivalent feelings toward whites. Often the only black in his class, he refrained from participating in school social life. He admitted nevertheless that he secretly "went for some of the white girls, and some of them went for me, too." Elected president of his eighth grade school class, he concedes that he was proud: "In fact, by then, I didn't really have much feeling about being a Negro, because I was trying so hard, in every way I could, to be white." After moving to Boston in 1941, Malcolm soon straightened his hair in order to look more "white," and brushed off a black, middle-class woman named Laura in order to pursue his white lover. King, for his part, reacted to a childhood rejection by a white friend by determining to "hate every white person" and thereafter had little social contact with whites until his college years. Spending his formative years as part of an African-American elite, he resented white racial prejudice but was rarely personally affected by it. His racial identity most often brought him rewards rather than punishments.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Malcolm's conversion to the Islamic teachings of Elijah Muhammad involved a rejection of his past that would have been inconceivable for King. While in prison for robbery, Malcolm repudiated his earlier life and symbolized his rebirth in the Nation of Islam by abandoning his surname. He joined an organization that had not been part of his environment as a youth and acquired a new past through the racial mythology of the Nation. Malcolm's acceptance of the idea that he was a member of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in North America made his previous life — and indeed all the postenslavement experiences of African-Americans — only a negative reference point for his new identity. For Malcolm, black adherence to Christianity simply reflected the fact that African-Americans had been brainwashed and separated from their true history. During his adult life, Malcolm would increase his knowledge of the African-American historical literature, but he also popularized the historical myths of Elijah Muhammad, which replaced the complexities of African-American history with tales of the "Asian Black Nation" and "the tribe of Shabazz." Unlike the main African-American Christian churches, the Nation of Islam did not have deep historical roots in the African-American experience, and its development was largely isolated from that of other black religious institutions. Malcolm learned from Elijah Muhammad that African-American history was not a long struggle toward freedom but simply the final stage of the decline of the "Black Man," who had once ruled the earth. The Nation's version of the past was not based on historical research, but it appealed to blacks such as Malcolm who did not identify with the black Christian churches that were more rooted in African-American history.
In contrast to Malcolm's negation of his past, King placed great importance on his family's deep roots in the Baptist church and the Atlanta black community. King's great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had been Baptist ministers. He saw African-American history and the history of his own family as a successful climb from enslavement to freedom and from poverty to affluence. King's adult life as a religious leader was built upon the foundation of his childhood experiences and his ties to the African-American Baptist church and to black leadership networks. While Malcolm became a critical outsider urging blacks to reject mainstream institutions, King became a critical insider seeking to transform those institutions.
Malcolm's and King's strengths and limitations as leaders were related to their ability to mobilize African-American institutions on behalf of the racial goals they sought. Malcolm's political evolution demonstrates the extent to which black nationalism had become marginalized since its nineteenth-century heyday. While nineteenth-century nationalists Martin Delany and Alexander Crummell were products of mainstream black institutions, Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad were outsiders — the former an alien who came to the United States only as an adult, the latter a Muslim in a Christian-dominated culture. Garvey was able to gain a massive following and build an institutional base in the United States despite the opposition of mainstream leaders, but he could never supplant them or their institutions. Elijah Muhammad similarly attacked the "so-called Negro" leaders and attracted a sizable following; yet he could never effectively challenge the dominance of the national civil rights groups.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Malcolm X The FBI File"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Clayborne Carson.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
Part I: Malcolm and the American State,
Social Origins of Malcolm's Nationalism,
Malcolm and the FBI,
Politicization of Nationalism,
Malcolm's Ambiguous Political Legacy,
Part II: Chronology,
Part III: The FBI File,
Index,