Vol. 74/No. 20      May 24, 2010

What about the evolution of Malcolm’s views on religion and revolutionary politics?

First, in order to minimize misunderstanding about the political points we need to clarify, let me emphasize that I’m not calling into question Malcolm’s assertions up till the final days of his life that he remained a Muslim.

We’re looking at something else. What did Malcolm think about the place of religion in building a modern revolutionary movement, a revolutionary organization? Once again, there’s no single answer that holds good for the entire final fifty weeks of Malcolm’s life. But the position he had arrived at prior to his assassination is clear.

To begin with, when Malcolm made public his break from the Nation in March 1964, the only organizational step he announced was the establishment of a religious organization. “I am going to organize and head a new mosque in New York City, known as the Muslim Mosque, Inc.,” he told the press. “This gives us a religious base, and the spiritual force necessary to rid our people of the vices that destroy the moral fiber of our community.” …

Only a few weeks later, however, Malcolm’s emphasis was already shifting. As opportunities expanded for Malcolm to collaborate with others, he began stressing that being a Muslim was not a precondition to common political action in combating the oppression of Blacks. There was no religious litmus test.

He made that point clear, for example, during a talk he presented to an April 3 gathering in Cleveland, sponsored by the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), on “The Negro Revolt—What Comes Next?” The meeting was held in a Methodist Church. In closing his talk, which Malcolm titled “The Ballot or the Bullet,” he said he wanted to add “a few things concerning the Muslim Mosque, Inc., which we established recently in New York City. It’s true we’re Muslims and our religion is Islam,” Malcolm said, “but we don’t mix our religion with our politics and our economics and our social and civil activities—not any more. We keep our religion in our mosque. After our religious services are over, then as Muslims we become involved in political action, economic action and social and civic action. We become involved with anybody, anywhere, any time and in any manner that’s designed to eliminate the evils, the political, economic and social evils that are afflicting the people of our community.”

Less than a week later, when Malcolm spoke to the Militant Labor Forum in New York City for the first of three times, he made the same point. Malcolm said he was still a Muslim, “That just happens to be my personal religion. But in the capacity in which I am functioning today, I have no intention of mixing my religion with the problems of 22 million Black people in this country.”  
 
‘Keep religion in the closet’
And a few days after that, speaking to the Group on Advanced Leadership in Detroit, Malcolm said: “This afternoon, it’s not our intention to talk religion. We’re going to forget religion. If we bring up religion, we’ll be in an argument. And the best way to keep away from arguments and differences, as I said earlier, is to put your religion at home, in the closet, keep it between you and your God.” With several Christian pastors in the audience, Malcolm couldn’t help himself, adding: “Because if it hasn’t done anything more for you than it has, you need to forget it anyway.”

Almost each speech during those initial weeks after his break from the Nation seemed to mark another step. But it was only upon Malcolm’s return from his first of two trips to Africa and the Middle East that year that he set out to build a political organization open to all African Americans, regardless of religion or other beliefs. In late June 1964 he called together a public meeting in Harlem to establish the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). “Up until now,” Malcolm said, “these meetings have been sponsored and paid for by the Muslim Mosque, Inc. Beginning next Sunday, they will be sponsored and paid for by the Organization of Afro-American Unity.”

So Malcolm’s first step, in March 1964, had been to act decisively on his deeply held conviction that those—such as Elijah Muhammad—whose individual conduct flew in the face of their stated beliefs were not qualified to serve as a guide to either religion or to politics.

By June, however, Malcolm had taken another step: that religion itself cannot be a guide to effective modern political action. That religion and religious organizations need to be separated from political organization, so people can work together to build a revolutionary political organization—a form of practical activity that transcends religious beliefs or affiliations. “Because whether he was a Methodist or a Baptist or an atheist or an agnostic, [Blacks] caught the same hell,” as Malcolm told a meeting at the Corn Hill Methodist Church in Rochester, New York, just five days before he was assassinated.

Meeting with a group of Mississippi youth visiting Harlem on New Year’s Day 1965, Malcolm explained that he and others who had left the Nation of Islam had recognized “that there was a problem confronting our people in this country that had nothing to do with religion and went above and beyond religion. A religious organization couldn’t attack that problem according to the magnitude of the problem, the complexity of the problem itself. So those in that group, after analyzing the problem, saw the need, or the necessity, of forming another group that had nothing to do with religion whatsoever. And that group is what’s named and is today known as the Organization of Afro-American Unity.”

This was a crucial advance. Because while Malcolm to our knowledge remained a Muslim, and thus committed to a revealed religion whose tenets are not testable, he also came to the conviction that such revelations are not, and cannot be, valid criteria for revolutionary politics. The criteria, goals, and methods of political activity must be open to objective discussion, debate, and testing in common by all those who come together in the fight, regardless of other views, beliefs, or affiliations of any kind, and he explicitly included nonbelievers… .

As I noted earlier, Malcolm didn’t imitate the rhetoric of a preacher when he spoke. He never tried to get anybody to accept what he said on the basis of authority. He encouraged the Mississippi youth to learn how to “see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself.” He always tried to increase the political confidence of those he was speaking to.

“I put it to you just as plain as I know how to put it,” Malcolm told the young civil rights activists from Mississippi. “There’s no interpretation necessary.”

There’s no interpretation necessary.

That’s a very important sentence. Malcolm was a straight shooter. He spoke clearly. Nobody had to “divine” what he was saying. His words could be misused. But they could not be misinterpreted due to ambiguity, let alone “irony” with its accompanying whiff of cynicism.  
 
‘An American nightmare’
Malcolm had no dreams to offer. “I don’t see any American dream,” he said in April 1964. “I see an American nightmare.” He sought to explain the source of that waking nightmare, which he increasingly recognized as the capitalist system of oppression and exploitation here and around the world. And he began organizing to open a discussion on a way forward to fight our way out of that nightmare.

Nor did Malcolm try to develop a “liberation theology,” Islamic or otherwise. Because he concluded, based on years of firsthand experience, that such an effort could only narrow, weaken, and disorient a revolutionary movement. While there is no evidence that Malcolm had become an atheist during the last year of his political activity, he had become a-theistic in carrying out revolutionary politics and all civil, secular activity. He kept his religion—however it may have been evolving—“in the closet,” as he put it.

I think we appreciate Malcolm’s contribution in this regard more fully today than we did at the time. Speaking for myself, I was convinced—and I still am—that Malcolm would sooner or later have put religion behind him. But that’s a different question, of course, and one that can never be settled. What’s decisive is Malcolm’s evolution, in word and deed, to advancing common political activity by revolutionists.
 
 
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