Malcolm X and the American Civil Rights Movement

With the recent screening of the Spike Lee movie dealing with Malcolm X, the life of this controversial figure was again an issue for debate within the American civil rights movement. The complexity of Malcolm X's life, and the transformations he underwent were made apparent in the film. For the most part, however, in the popular mind he remains a one-dimensional figure associated with the Black Muslim movement and intense anti-white sentiments. While this does not represent the final stance of Malcolm's life, it does represent one of the major ways in which he affected the American civil rights movement.

In order to properly consider the role of Malcolm X in the modern civil rights movement, it helps to understand his background. Unlike most of the modern leaders, and a number of earlier leaderism, Malcolm did not come through a middle-class path of education and religion. Although associated with the Black Muslim movement, his is not the route of a Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson. The Black Muslim religion represented a break with those traditional routes and a community for men and women who sometimes had problematic early histories.

For Malcolm, that early history was filled with violence. Violence came in the form of white attacks against his father's siblings before Malcolm was born, then against his own family by the Klu Klux Klan and the Black Legion, and finally fro

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exposure. It is the association with Elijah Muhammad that made him a public figure and his break with Elijah Muhammad that is considered the action that led to his assassination. In his autobiography, Malcolm talked about his gradual exposure to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the way in which his brother Reginald's arguments worked on his mind. He noted that his brother argued that all white men were devils, without exception; when he thought back over his life about all the white people he knew, what was striking was the negative role of whites in his life. He was also impressed by what his brother told him about the civilization of black people, and how white people had hidden that early history from all black Americans. As he put it, his brother told him: You have been cut off by the devil white man from all true knowledge of your own kind. You have been a victim of the evil of the devil white man ever since he murdered and raped and stole you from your native land in the seeds of your forefathers. (1964, p. 1161) For Malcolm, according to his own report, the exposure to the teaching of the Nation of Islam had an impact on him analagous to that of Paul's experience on the road to Damascus. In other words, he
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Approximate Word count = 3907
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)