Fifty years ago this week our nation lost one of the great leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. He was felled by a hail of assassins’ bullets on February 21, 1965, by former associates from the Nation of Islam. Though not as celebrated as some other black leaders of the era, Malcolm X to me is a figured to be studied and remembered as much as any other.<\/p>\n
Most people of my generation know Malcolm X from Spike Lee’s biopic of the man made nearly thirty years after his death. If you haven’t seen it yet, my God, watch it and watch it often. Few movies show music, crime, style, politics, and violence so well. Not\u00a0exactly<\/em> the black\u00a0Godfather<\/em>, but it’s up there.<\/p>\n If you have a little more time I recommend\u00a0The Autobiography of Malcolm X<\/em>, written by the man in collaboration with Alex “Roots” Haley and published shortly after the subject’s death in 1965. It’s amazingly (and sadly) prophetic, and is both entertaining and engrossing without trivializing its importance.<\/p>\n I’m hardly the first person to point out that Malcolm X’s philosophy, by today’s standards (perhaps yesterday’s standards as well), are remarkably\u00a0conservative<\/em> in tone. Do things for yourself and don’t expect the government to help you. Yup, that’s it in a nutshell. This is the man who said he’d rather have Goldwater as president in 1964 than Lyndon Johnson. Amen, brother. And by the end of his life he’d stopped calling white people the devil. Thanks.<\/p>\n One wishes today’s race hustlers and sycophants could be so honest about such matters. I suppose race relations\u00a0have<\/em> improved, on the whole, over the past 50 years, and the work of men like Malcolm X should not be overlooked as responsible for achieving such.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fifty years ago this week our nation lost one of the great leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. He was felled by a hail of assassins’ bullets on February 21, 1965, by former associates from the Nation of Islam. Though … Continue reading