I’ve just finished reading Manning Marable’s recently published work, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which was recently sent to me by a friend in the States. Professor Marable passed away just five days before his “magnum opus” was published earlier this year. Manning Marable was the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Professor of African American Studies and a professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University in New York City.
To tell the truth, I would probably not have gone out in search of this book, because the reviews had mentioned that Marable suggested or claimed that Malcolm had a homosexual relationship with a rich, white businessman during his hustler days. About 44 years ago, after I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X while I was a 20 year old university student, Malcolm became a hero of mine, and after all these years I still honor and cherish his memory. I didn’t want to read anything which would tarnish his legacy, but, as I said, the book was sent to me. So, I read.
The thing is, I can’t urge you to read Manning Marable’s book unless you have read Malcolm’s autobiography, written along with Alex Haley and published in late 1965, some months after Malcolm had been murdered in front of his wife and children. Malcolm was gunned down in February of 1965 at a public rally he was holding at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan.
Referring to Malcolm’s autobiography in the new book, Marable describes “the enormous popularity of the Autobiography and its adoption into the curricula in hundreds of colleges and thousands of high schools.” He goes on: “Between 1965 and 1977, the number of copies of the Autobiography sold worldwide exceeded six million.”
Malcolm’s autobiography was the Bible of my generation of black university students. I don’t believe you can be black and consider yourself educated if you have not read it. But, I am willing to wager that the Autobiography has never been included in the curriculum of any Belizean high school or university. I suppose the foreign clerics who control school curricula in Belize would argue that Malcolm was a black American, and therefore not that relevant to Belize. In response, I would ask if Belize is not part of the black world, if Belizeans have not been travelling to and working and living in the United States since the nineteenth century, and if Belize does not have a land bridge to Texas and California. The answers to all these questions are in the affirmative.
As a Malcolmite, I do not appreciate Marable’s attempts to prove how flawed and imperfect Malcolm was. From the academic standpoint, however, Professor Marable has done his research, and enlarged upon and thrown light upon aspects of Malcolm’s life which were not thoroughly covered in Alex Haley’s book.
In the rest of this column, I will give you a sense of how the story of Malcolm X is relevant to Belize and Belizeans. When he was released from prison in 1952, Malcolm Little, who had been converted to Hon. Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI) religion while in jail, immediately became an active member of the NOI. In a few years, he became the Nation’s most sensational proselytizer. The Nation of Islam began growing by leaps and bounds, and Malcolm X acquired a national, and indeed international, reputation.
I believe it was in 1961, before Hurricane Hattie, when Charles X “Justice” Eagan was deported home to British Honduras out of Atlanta State Penitentiary. Justice had been converted to the Nation of Islam while in jail. He began missionary work in Belize in 1962, and his first two converts were George Tucker and Rudolph Trapp, who became known as Ismail Omar Shabazz and Rudolph Farrakhan, respectively. Shabazz and Farrakhan are still alive and still very much Muslims.
Even though Justice was one of the hosts for the July 1965 visit to British Honduras of Cassius Clay, who had become world heavyweight champion in February of 1964 after a stunning upset victory over Sonny Liston, and then just as stunningly announced that he was a follower of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad and a member of the Nation of Islam, Muhammad Ali’s visit, while otherwise of great impact on little Belize, really did nothing to increase interest in Belize’s branch of the Nation of Islam.
Charles X Eagan and Ismail Omar Shabazz, however, began to make the news here when they became founding officers of the United Black Association for Development (UBAD) in February of 1969. By late March of that year, I had become president of UBAD, so that here in Belize we had a disciple of Malcolm X working closely with two disciples of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad. Just four years earlier, a bitter, public dispute between Malcolm and Hon. Elijah’s officials had ended in Malcolm’s bloody assassination in New York City.
This is a long story, a complicated story, but the most important thing is this: Under Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam had unique, unorthodox beliefs which appealed to what we would refer to nowadays as “ghetto” or “street” black people. Malcolm X was, however, such a brilliant thinker and speaker, that he, personally, became a great star on radio, television and university campuses in the United States. Malcolm entered a different world from that of the NOI. Elijah Muhammad did not want his followers to become involved in the mainstream black civil rights struggle. He taught his followers that Allah would deal with everything in His own time. Malcolm, however, became so big that he was drawn to the socio-politics of the civil rights struggle, which was dramatic and turbulent throughout the Sixties. This was a major part of the problem between Elijah and Malcolm, although there were other factors.
After being suspended from the Nation of Islam in November of 1963, Malcolm travelled to Africa and the Middle East, and became an orthodox Muslim. This put him at open odds with Elijah Muhammad’s Islam, which was, to repeat, very much unorthodox.
In 1972, Bert Simon, who had been associated with UBAD in the summer of 1969, returned to Belize as the emissary of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad. Charles X Eagan was in jail at the time. Under Simon, now “Nuri Muhammad,” the Nation of Islam in Belize entered a new phase.
When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, his son and designated successor, Wallace, immediately moved the NOI to orthodox Islam. It is still not clear to me how exactly the Belize NOI reacted. In 1977, Louis Farrakhan, who had become the Hon. Elijah Muhammad’s no. 1 Minster after Malcolm’s death, broke away from Wallace’s orthodoxy and re-established the Nation of Islam according to the Hon. Elijah Muhammad’s precepts.
For me personally, what Malcolm did in his autobiography was bridge the gap between where I was, studying in an Ivy League university, and where I had grown up, at the corner of Regent Street West and West Canal across from a bar and a club sitting on top of one another. I ran out of space before I could elaborate on this, but if you want to understand what happened in my life, you should know that at a certain point shortly after reading Malcolm’s autobiography, I chose to be with the people I knew as my own at the corner of Regent Street West and West Canal. I returned to my roots.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.