February 21, 2024

February 21, 2024 is the 59th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X.  His life, political rhetoric, and death remain a growing source of misunderstanding about Black/White relations in the U.S. and even the global community.  In recent years, much has been made of how two of the men convicted of his murder have been exonerated of the crime.  The struggle to interpret this assassination 59 years later goes to the heart of an ideological battle between afro-pessmist and afro-idealist intellectual forces.  Since the 1970s, afro-pessimist academics that construe Black people as victims have dominated American public discourse.  The original “beloved community” espoused by leaders such as MLK and James Farmer Jr. has largely been pushed aside in favor of a more cynical discourse on race and even economic life in America.

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Thomas Hagan has never denied his role in killing Malcolm X.  He played a role in exonerating the other two men convicted of the killing.  After serving more than 40 years for the murder, Hagan was released from a New York jail in 2010 that was now located on Malcolm X Boulevard.  Malcolm X has come to represent the new pessimist path forward on race relations imagining that his aspirations for a more militant political praxis were the untried solution to anti-Black discrimination.  In reality, Malcolm X was assassinated because of his conscious and deliberate movement away from the violent rhetoric of the Nation of Islam and toward a more moderate view of race struggle comparable to the mainstream movements like those embodied by King and Farmer.  Malcolm X’s longtime friend and debate sparring partner James Farmer Jr. discussed this reality in a 1987 lecture at Mary Washington University. Farmer explains that as a Muslim, X’s pilgrimage to Mecca revealed to him the outrageous falsehoods taught to him by Elijah Muhammad within the confines of the Nation of Islam.  Malcolm X sent two postcards from Mecca to his friend James Farmer Jr., explaining his epiphany at uncovering the false teaching that only Black people worshipped at Mecca. The discovery that this was plainly untrue caused him in 1964 to become more deliberate in divorcing himself from the Nation of Islam.  One week before his assassination and in one of his last public speeches on February 14 in Detroit, Malcolm X explained that he no longer believed in racial segregation and the radical ideology of NOI. Farmer had alerted him in 1962 that the Nation of Islam was activity conspiring with the American Nazi party to encourage racial segregation.  Malcolm X’s effort to construct a moderate Muslim alternative to NOI remains important today.

In January 2022, President Biden deliberately conflated the killing of Capitol police officer Billy Evans on April 2, 2021 with violence at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. The killer of Officer Evans, Noah Green, also went by an alias of Noah X — in deference to the false hagiography of Malcolm X.  Green was profoundly inspired by the ongoing contemporary rhetoric of Nation of Islam under its radical and antisemitic leader, Louis Farrakhan.  In Green’s social media posts mere hours before the killing of the officer, he included videos from Farrakhan titled: “The U.S. Government is the #1 enemy of Black people!” along with other similarly themed videos from NOI. The anniversary of Malcolm X’s death increasingly regurgitates a false story about his assassination being a secret killing conducted by the federal government.  Five years earlier, a killer named Micah Johnson was similarly inspired to kill five Dallas police officers in the summer of 2016.  Studying rhetoric from the New Black Panther party, he came to conclude that assassinations were the best step forward for the Black community. These conspiracy theories are recycled even though Malcolm X’s killer is still alive and freed from prison.  Hagan continues to warn the public about the dangers of groups like the Nation of Islam. The American public is increasingly encouraged to believe that more violent personal confrontations with police and policies of defunding the police will make Black lives matter more.  The history of Black Americans is told with a faulty rhetorical posture of cynicism suggesting that King, Meredith, Farmer, and other conventional civil rights leaders largely failed in their efforts to fight anti-Black discrimination.  On Christmas Eve 1964, Malcolm X confided to his friend, James Farmer Jr., that he was afraid to publicly admit that he was no longer in agreement with the Nation of Islam. He told Farmer that he was confident that members of the NOI were going to kill him soon.  The week before his assassination, his house was burned down and in his speech at Detroit he clarified his separation from the Black Muslim movement.  Those words undoubtedly added to the motive of men like Thomas Hagan to kill him a week later. 

As Americans we need to see beyond the clever political distinctions of Right and Left and recognize the problem obvious to the political rivals of Farmer and X, the opposed extremists of the American Nazi party and the Nation of Islam were cooperating to tear the nation apart in the name of permanently achieving racial segregation for their respective cynical political interests.  The anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination alongside Black history month should be an ongoing opportunity to reinvigorate our commitment to the ethic of love and a repudiation of violence shared by leaders such as James Farmer Jr., James Meredith, MLK, and Malcolm X. We should not imbibe faulty conspiracy theories in order to nurture hateful violent political grudges.  

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Dr. Ben Voth is a professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.  In 2017, Professor Voth wrote a rhetorical history — James Farmer Jr.:   The Great Debater, detailing the relationship between Malcolm X and civil rights leader James Farmer.   

Image: National Archives