Seven Oaks Magazine.

Malcolm & Martin: Implications of Their Legacies for the Future (New Islamic Directions/Z)

It would be difficult to assemble any narrative of America during the 1960s without mentioning both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; crucial figures for their pivotal roles in the black freedom struggle. Today even, they often seem larger than life - especially after having reached the mythical status of martyrdom following their ominous assassinations.

At the same time, it is easy to divorce Malcolm and King from the much larger movements that they were a part of and the social realities they fought to change. It was with hesitation, then, that Imam Zaid Shakir - an accomplished Muslim scholar from the Zaytuna Institute of California - began a recent discussion of the two at a public talk in Oakland last December. The talk, given with Dr. Cornel West, has been recorded, and is currently being sold in DVD format as Malcolm & Martin: Implications of Their Legacies for the Future, distributed by New Islamic Directions.

Shakir prefaced his remarks by avoiding a “definitive talk” on the subject of these two, deferring to others more “qualified” than he to handle their historical significance. Instead he tried to focus on the impact of the two figures from an ecumenical (and quite present-minded) point of view focusing on what lessons could be understood from the internationalist legacies they left behind for Christians and Muslims alike. Shakir mentioned how each “did not see their religion outside of the context of the struggle against racism,” and more poignantly, how each “found the strength to transcend what America made him.”

Shakir touched on the remarkable political transformations that both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. underwent near the end of their lives. He emphasized the way in which each figure put the knowledge they had gained through their political and intellectual experiences to “the service of others.” In their personal lives, it is certainly no small feat to have gone, as Malcom did, from a pimp and thief to a revered Muslim minister who spoke back to the white power structure and inspired millions of African American youth. Nor was it necessary for Martin Luther King to abandon his comfortable career trajectory as a well-healed middle-class minister in Atlanta to become a major national figure and advocate of the downtrodden. Moreover, such transcendence was a lifelong endeavor for these figures: as Malcolm X shifted to a Third World internationalism by 1965 so did King come to oppose the war in Vietnam as much as he did poverty in America, inextricably linking the two issues as central concerns for the freedom struggle at the end of the 1960s.

Not all of the imam’s remarks were as well thought out. Perhaps as a Canadian who has cringed at the Conservative backlash against immigration rights and influence in this country, I found it irksome to listen to Shakir’s disdainful treatment of the role that immigrants had played during the 1960s in the U.S. Shakir’s implicit claim that the 1965 immigrant rights bill “built on the back of American and latino” freedom fighters appears to ignore the complex and diverse history of mid-late twentieth century North American migrant experiences and particularly the common ground that many Asian American freedom fighters found with the black struggle throughout the 20th Century. Shakir brought up the scapegoat stereotype of the Jewish-turned-Korean shopkeeper selling liquor to underage minors and unfairly characterized the immigrant struggle in America as one that is unconnected to the generations-old struggle of African Americans. As such, he stood against the transcendent internationalism that he had earlier praised in the legacies of Malcolm and King.

The distinguished Princeton professor of philosophy Cornel West was the second keynote and took a slightly different tact with the discussion. While West may have been over-the-top when he indicated that he leaves the country every January (effectively belittling the important work that the now late Coretta Scott King did to have her husband memorialized for a National holiday in that month), he did hit on something when he expressed his desire to “de-Santa-Clausify” both Malcolm and King. Speaking in light of a trip to South Africa he had made to meet Mandela, West bemoaned how the popular legacies of many major Black figures have been too easily depoliticized and stripped of their radical political trajectories and made into digestible sound bites more suitable for G-rated, short attention span audiences. Thus, today we have the preponderance of Malcolm X t-shirts and paraphernalia at the shopping mall, jet plane salutes on Martin Luther King Day, and liberal political leaders posing for photo-ops with Mandela and U2’s Bono. West wanted to set Malcolm and King apart from the liberal mythology that has encapsulated them in a past that purportedly left racism back in the 1960s. In great philosophical fashion, West suggested that the two were “Socratic to the core,” never quenching their lifelong critique of themselves or their society and that they were not “bearers of optimism” but “prisoners of hope” for a future that had not yet arrived.

Overall, the discussion between West and Shakir was insightful and uplifting. Nonetheless the panel - which was male in both topic and presentation - may have been more effective had there been even one female speaker. Perhaps someone should consider two female giants of the 20th Century and produce a DVD about them – numerous candidates come to mind: Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Shirley Chisholm to name only a small handful. The discussion sponsored by the Zaytuna institute would have certainly benefited from some balance in this regard. A notable women’s perspective (better yet, several perspectives) on the historical legacy of King and Malcolm would have likely been well received.