Malcolm X

Afro-Americans have produced many remarkable leaders from Crispus Attucks to Frederick Douglas. Malcolm X was the latest and not the least of these revolutionary representatives of the black people. His sensitivity enabled him to establish instant communion with the oppressed millions who impatiently await the emancipation and equality they have been promised. He was faultlessly attuned to their feelings of frustration, indignation and rebellion. “He made it plain, he tells it as it is,” was their spontaneous response to his indictments from the platform, on TV and in the streets of Harlem, of the torments capitalist America inflicts on its Negro citizensвЂ" and to his summons to resist and abolish them by any available means.

Malcolm’s intransigence had the same powerful appeal to the rebel youth, black and white, in the United States as the personalities of Fidel Castro and Hugo Blanco in Latin America. He merited such admiration.

Malcolm’s life of 39 years passed through three distinct periods. In his youth he was the victim of the cruelties and deprivations of the Northern big city ghettos. But he was not an unresisting one. He hit back by resorting to jungle methods in order to survive in the asphalt jungle.

The prison he entered did not further corrupt him but served as a school in which he first learned about the Black Muslims. His conversion to their doctrines and practices regenerated and steeled his character, arming him with a gospel of racial salvation opposed to the hypocritical white man’s Christianity which sanctified the black man’s servitude.

He rose to national prominence as the foremost spokesman and organizer of Elijah Muhammad’s brotherhood. His call for Negro self-reliance, his condemnations of the moderate Negro leaders tied to the established power structure and his outspoken justification