Thread: Malcolm X

What are your views on Malcolm X and his effect on the civil rights movement? Was he a fear monger or was he a great man who wanted to do whatever was necessary to protect his people? Discuss.

It's hard to sort out Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam and T.H.E.M., even though he left the fold and recanted many of their racist views shortly before his death (quite likely at their hands).

It's a mistake, I think, to view him as a 'civil rights leader;' while his story was instrumental to the movement, the man himself was not a civil rights activist. For most of his public life, he was a fanatical, separatist bigot. With his death, and particularly through Alex Haley's 'autobiography,' he became an example both horrible and inspiring, of a fierce intelligence backed into a corner by the social forces arrayed against him, so that his power was co-opted, but who found a measure of peace and decency before the world finished grinding him under its boot. It serves as both a warning and an illustration of the unjust and destructive nature of prejudice.

I actually know little about Malcolm X, outside of the basics that Taosaur went over. I could never really look at Malcolm as a freedom fighter in the same vein as, say, MLK, because - though his motives may be just - his methods and forms of expression weren't always the most respectable.