The Commemoration of the Life of Malcolm X

            Authors note: previous correspondence provided a key to directly e mail me.American postage stamp design in recent history has portrayed a seemingly endless montage of themes. In 2006 the United States Postal Service issued stamps commemorating everything from the White Sturgeon to Our Wedding, and everyone from Mickey Mouse to Mickey Mantle. If they have not done so already they will likely have a stamp commemorating Commemorative Stamps. If any agency program can be cited for a policy of inclusion, this is it: as their issues continue the easier question will be who have they missed as opposed to included. In 1999 the Postal Service issued a stamp being the image of black activist Malcolm X. Given the policy of the USPS it was inevitable; however, inevitability does not necessarily make for a wise choice.

As with each issue, the USPS provides details and a rationale for their choice; the USPS issue came with the following statement:

The 22nd stamp in the Black Heritage series honors Malcolm X, one of the most influential African-American leaders of the 1960s. His controversial ideas sharpened America’s debate about racial relations and strategies for social change. Born Malcolm Little in 1925, Malcolm X became the most visible spokesperson for the Nation of Islam in the early 1960s. He later broke away from the organization, disavowed his earlier separatist preaching and supported a more integrationist solution to racial problems. Under the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, he attempted to organize an independent movement to put his new ideas into effect. On Feb. 21, 1965, he was shot to death while giving a speech to his followers in Harlem.

(USPS)

Like the man, the stamp was controversial as soon as it was in the public’s eye. It was applauded by his family and supporters and ridiculed by white and black opponents.

            The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley by Alex Haley and Malcolm X gives an extremely captivating account of an extremely captivating man. He was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925. He endured what can only be described as a horrific childhood. Impoverished after the murder of his activist father, the family struggled on together until his mother suffered an emotional and mental breakdown. Without parental stability, Malcolm and his six brothers and sisters became wards of the state and were physically separated for foster care. Three issues would have a profound impact on the youthful Malcolm. His grandfather white, apparently the rapist of his grandmother and Malcolm shared his mother’s light complexion. He was keenly intelligent and nothing short of charismatic. His grades were excellent and he garnered great popularity with everyone across age and racial lines. Mentioning a career as a lawyer as a goal young Malcolm was subjected to, even not in retrospect, disgusting advice from a teacher:

Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to thing about something you can be. You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person—you’d get all kinds of work. (Haley 38)

            He marked the lecture as the point “that I began to change—inside” (38). The process of that change is a fascinating study of a man initially caught and moving between two cultures and then gravitating towards one, like a satellite caught in orbit between the grasp of giant planets. Carrying the analogy further, it didn’t take him very long to crash head-first into a violent drug-infested predatory world.

            In the pre-war years and without substantial education Malcolm toiled in a variety of subservient positions in the white man’s world—porter, dishwasher, shoe shine “boy”. He was quickly tutored in the ways of “getting by” the white man as well as the hipster lifestyle of young black culture. For a while he moved between the two worlds with relative ease. By day a soda jerk by night a popular “homeboy” on the dance floor. Work as a busboy on trains provided visits to a variety of cities and income to afford a decent young bachelor’s lifestyle. But soon the tug of the underworld exerted an irresistible pull and life became a blur of drugs and ultimately violence. As an armed robber he was successful for a while and was ultimately caught and sentenced in 1946 to ten years in jail.

            Incarceration was another seminal milestone for Malcolm. His drug use and violent behavior continued, and he was punished accordingly. Yet Malcolm states:

preferred the solitary that this behavior brought me. I would pace for hours like a caged leopard, viciously cursing aloud to myself. And my favorite targets where the Bible and God. But there was a legal limit to how much time one could be kept in solitary. Eventually the men in the cellblock had a name for me: “Satan.” Because of my anti-religious attitude. (156)

While imprisoned he began his conversion to Islam. In 1948 he received letters from his brothers who had become members of the Nation of Islam. Initially resistant, then curious, he finally reached out to, and was received by Elijah Muhammad. At that point he embraced his new religion with fury.

            Malcolm was released from prison in 1952 and moved to Detroit, Michigan under the recommendation and tutelage of Elijah Mohammed. By the early sixties he was aware of and quite adept at his unique ability to radicalize all components of the complex racial equation. Responding to a reporter’s baited question he states the following:

Asked by a reporter whether “did I feel any white man had ever done anything for the black man in America, I told him ‘yes, I can think of two. Hitler, and Stalin. The black man in America couldn’t get a decent factory job until Hitler put so much pressure on the white man. And then Stalin kept up the pressure—‘ (247)

His wrath was not exclusively directed at the white man. He referred to the mainstream black leadership of the era as “‘black bodies with white heads!’ I called them what they were” (248). His gift for rhetoric was matched only by his naiveté regarding media manipulation. In the spotlight as Elijah Muhammad’s heir apparent, his infamous quote upon the death of President John Kennedy—“the chickens coming home to roost” was a blunder even Elijah himself had a problem with. He “silenced” Malcolm for ninety days “so that the Muslims everywhere can be disassociated from the blunder” (308).

            Malcolm broke with the Nation of Islam and because of that lived in fear of his life before he was indeed assassinated. He remained in the spotlight as the founder and leader of the Organization of Afro-American Unity; perhaps out of wisdom or discretion he toned down the flames of rhetoric, yet continued the separatist theme. Faced with a growing number of whites in agreement with his position he still had “these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way to salve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are ‘proving’ that they are ‘with us’” (383).

            In 1965, obviously intimate with the darker side of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam Malcolm lived

each day as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do. When I am dead—I say it in that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form—I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with ‘hate’ (389).

After his death a “new” Malcolm began to emerge: now “his attitude toward the white man underwent a marked change in 1964—a change that contributed to his break with Elijah Mohammed and his racist doctrine” and had contact with “white men who were not the ‘devils’ the had thought they were” (Introduction, xxix).

            In today’s politically correct climate it would be extremely inappropriate to criticize the memory of Malcolm or his postage stamp memorial. From his death in 1965 to date there appears to be a subtle reshaping of history and values not inconsistent with “political correctness” and its intolerance. By 1999 at the ceremony for his stamp, no other than Mike Wallace, a real darling of the liberal media, took the podium and proclaimed “the stamp that honors him today is the kind of recognition he deserves as a courageous American hero” (Introduction, xvi). One is left to ponder if Malcolm would consider Wallace one of the distrusted whites exhibiting his “escapist way to salve their consciences.” If nothing else Malcolm spoke his mind, and should therefore respect anyone else doing the same.

            There is a real problem in considering him a “hero” in any sense of the word. He was, in his own acknowledgement, a demagogue—“Yes, I have cherished my ‘demagogue’ role” (389). An “emotional dictator” “gaining power by appealing to people’s emotions and prejudices” defines the role, according to the Encarta Dictionary. This was in reality a man who “learned to hate every drop of that white rapist’s (his grandfather) blood that is in me” (3). No doubt a brilliant man he disingenuously predicts he will be “identified with hate”. And he should be surprised by that? Later apologists would insist he was struck down before white America could see him transform into some sort of voice of reason. Maybe so; but it is difficult to commend a man for what he may have been in view of what he was.

            His daughter, writing the Forward to the latest edition of her father’s autobiography tells us “Behold, America. Just when our country’s cultural evolution appears to have stagnated and we’ve grown insensitive to justice…this national commemoration, three decades after his lifetime, pays tribute to his immeasurable contributions on behalf of one’s innate right to self-preservation and human dignity” (Foreword, ix). His own self-preservation is deeply suspect and there is little dignity to be seen in his unyielding attacks on anyone or anything contrary to his demagoguery. Of course he is commemorated by a stamp, how could he not be—and with due respect to his daughter—his USPS commemoration carries as much popular support and interest as any number of other commemorative issues: pasted in a philatelist’s collection but not on a national consciousness.

Works Cited

Haley, Alex, and X, Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley.

New York: Ballantine Books, 1999.

United States Postal Service. 1999 Black Heritage Commemorative Issue, Malcolm X.

            http://www.usps.com/images/stamps/99/malcolmx.htm