By Patrick N. Allitt, Emory University
During the Civil Right Movement, an alternative route to black self-expression and dignity was offered by the black Muslim movement. Elijah Muhammad was its leader, and Malcolm X was its most famous spokesman. It became a very effective movement in restoring dignity to African Americans who were living in a degraded way.
Elijah Muhammad’s Idea of ‘White People’
The Nation of Islam, beginning obscurely in the 1930s, offered a kind of mirror image of white racism. According to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, the reason white people had ever come into existence in the first place was because they were the outcome of a strange genetic experiment by a mad scientist called Doctor Jacob. He selectively bred people to get the pigmentation out of their skin until he perfected a race of ‘white devils’, whom he’d created to be a torment to black people.
Thus, for many of the strange racial arguments that were made for white supremacy by white racists, their antithesis was made by some of the black Muslims.
It was very effective in recruiting prisoners. If one joined the black Muslims, they had to abandon drugs and stimulants of all kinds. They had to live a clean and dignified life, dress respectably, work hard, and demonstrate by their deportment that they stood up for themselves and believed in black assertion, rather than the conciliatory message of Christian love, which Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasized so strongly.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Malcolm X
Malcolm X became the most influential advocate of black separatism. He criticized Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, version of racial integration, which he thought was misguided. This is what Malcolm X said, at one point in a TV interview, in about 1962 or 1963: “Well, the Civil Rights movement is like coffee. At first it was black, and it woke everybody up, but as it’s becoming more and more integrated, it’s like adding too much milk to the coffee. It’s becoming whiter and whiter.”
When the interviewer asked him if he was an extremist, as many people alleged, Malcolm X answered: “Yes, I’m an extremist. The black race here in North America is in an extremely bad condition. You show me a black man who isn’t an extremist, and I’ll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.”
The Greatness of Malcolm X
He was a brilliantly articulate speaker, himself a man of great dignity of bearing, whose uncompromising speeches, so much at variance with King’s, sent a wave of fear through American white communities, and certainly made King seem, by comparison, a mild and mainstream advocate of reform, whom the community could easily reach out to accept.
Unfortunately, Malcolm X was assassinated after abandoning Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and moving towards a version of mainstream Islam, from which until then it had been very different.
There’s some evidence that his own ideas were changing, and that he would have been a little bit less uncompromising had he lived longer. Regrettably, however, there was no chance for these ideas to be worked out because of his premature death.
This was just after he’d collaborated with Alex Haley to write The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a great African American classic.
Collapse of Legally Sanctioned Racial Segregation
Meanwhile, as far as African American rights were concerned, legally sanctioned racial segregation disappeared quickly, but efforts to destroy de facto segregation proved far more difficult to eliminate.
The only place where it was really put into effect for long was in Prince Edward County, Virginia. There, the public school system was closed down altogether in 1958, rather than be racially integrated. Instead, white parents started to build their own private schools for their kids to go to instead.
It wasn’t a policy that lasted very long, however. In the end, the absurdity of such of policy forced itself on the citizens’ attentions, and they decided to abandon it. What most school districts did instead, especially those that were reluctantly accepting the logic of integration, was to do token racial integration.
In classes that were still overwhelmingly white in composition, they’d permit one or two black students to enter, usually the ones who were the very best intellectually, academically, or the very best athletically. By this, they hoped that they could postpone rigorous enforcement of the law to make them do more than that.
In fact, that’s a policy that continued right through the 1960s in some deep southern districts.
Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts
Yet, two important acts of Congress changed the legal situation. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 completely abolished racial categories. In 1965, the Immigration Reform Act was passed, ending the racial discrimination that was practiced in immigration policy, so that from 1965 to the present, a much greater migration of non-northern European peoples could come into the country as well.
These were, then, very, very important years in the early stages of the Johnson administration. In ‘Freedom Summer’, the summer of 1964, black and white students together went to Mississippi to register large numbers of black voters, whose families hadn’t had the right to vote for 60 or 70 years.
Unfortunately, though, in the 1960s, a series of inner-city riots broke out in the black communities and these race riots did immense harm in destroying the good feeling and the high-mindedness that had accompanied the Civil Rights movement up until then.
Common Questions about Malcolm X and Black Nationalism
According to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, the reason white people had ever come into existence in the first place was because they were the outcome of a strange genetic experiment by a mad scientist called Doctor Jacob. He selectively bred people to get the pigmentation out of their skin until he perfected a race of ‘white devils’, whom he’d created to be a torment to black people.
Malcolm X became the most influential advocate of black separatism. He criticized King’s version of racial integration, which he thought was misguided.
The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 completely abolished racial categories.
