[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1053-E1054]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

UNDERSTANDING THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MALCOLM X

______

HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

of new york

in the house of representatives

Monday, May 23, 2005

Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise again today to draw the attention of
this Chamber to the importance of this day in African-American history.
Today marks what would have been the 80th birthday of Malcolm X, one of
the more revolutionary and controversial leaders of the Civil Rights
Movement.
Malcolm X was born on May 19, 1925. It was a time in American history
where the opportunities of African-Americans were limited due to
segregation and racial intolerance. He nonetheless was born to parents
that were, not only proud of the black race, but instilled that pride
in their politics, actions, and, most importantly, their children. He
learned at an early age about the challenges that black men would face
just because of the color of their skin and found ways to rise above
those obstacles.
Too often, historians, social scientists, and the American public
have attempted to pigeonhole Malcolm into a singular character. When
they do so, they miss the true man, his life, and his experiences.
Malcolm X's personal story is a tale of many challenges, many
conflicting events, many goals, and many aspirations. He was not simply
the young son of a slain Black Nationalist or the young black student
discouraged by his white teachers in the 1930s. Neither would he only
be the street thug and hustler of 1940s nor the incarcerated felon of
the 1950s. Nor was he just the influential minister of the Nation of
Islam or the worldly Muslim of the Organization of Afro-American Unity
who loved his white brethren. He was all of these persons and more.
Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Malcolm X, and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz
were the same individual, seeking a goal of racial justice for himself,
his family, and his people. He walked his journey in life in the same
way that many blacks of his time have and as many do today. The
education, radicalism, determination, and sense of justice that Malcolm
fought for in his life represented the thoughts of blacks throughout
the world then and today. To box him into any one of those personas
would be a failure to understand his life and experiences and those of
his time.
We should all take time this day and in the days to come to reflect
on the challenges and accomplishments of Malcolm X. To this goal, I
would like to alert this august chamber to the perceptive exhibition at
the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York
Public Library in Harlem. This new exhibit, ``Malcolm X: A Search for
Truth,'' opened in commemoration of the birthday of Malcolm X and
provides insight into his personal story, development, and journey.
I would like to submit in the Record the following New York Times
review on the value and insight of this exhibition to understanding
Malcolm X. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, it is a fitting
tribute that we honor this extraordinary individual and realize the
significance of his life journey.

The Personal Evolution of a Civil Rights Giant

May 19, 2005--In the 1940's, Malcolm Little a k a Detroit
Red (and, later, a k a Malcolm X, a k a El-Hajj Malik El-
Shabazz) wanted to impress co-conspirators in petty crime
with his ruthlessness and daring. He loaded his pistol with a
single bullet, twirled the cylinder, put the muzzle to his
head and fired. The gesture demonstrated that he was unafraid
of death and therefore not afraid of much else. And when he
recounts the story in his 1965 autobiography (``as told to''
Alex Haley), the reader is also impressed--though evidence of
his brilliance, fury and self-destructiveness is, by then,
hardly necessary.
A new exhibition about Malcolm X opens at the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture today (which would have
been his 80th birthday). And though it doesn't mention this
theatrical gesture in its survey of one of the most
significant black leaders in American history, Malcolm's
public displays of passion and position sometimes seem as
courageous, dangerous, and even, yes, foolish, as his game of
Russian roulette.
The exhibition, ``Malcolm X: A Search for Truth,'' seeks to
map out the major themes of his life in a ``developmental
journey'' reflecting his ``driving intellectual quest for
truth.'' It offers evidence that has been unavailable:
personal papers, journals, letters, lecture outlines--rescued
from being sold at auction in San Francisco and on eBay in
2002.
Those papers, which the Shabazz family had lost control of
when monthly fees for a commercial storage facility were left
unpaid, were returned to them, and then lent for 75 years to
the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center in Harlem. The
documents are lightly sampled in this first public showing,
but they will eventually offer greater insight into Malcolm
X's developmental journey: from child of a Black Nationalist
father murdered in his prime, to a star elementary school
pupil in a largely white school; to a hustler and criminal;
to a convert, while in prison, to Elijah Muhammad's eccentric
brand of Islam; to a radical minister who built Muhammad's
Nation of Islam into a major national movement, declaring the
white race to be the devil incarnate; and finally, to a
political leader who, cut off by Muhammad, turned to
traditional Islam and was rethinking his views, just as he
was assassinated in New York's Audubon Ballroom in 1965 at
the age of 39.
His brief life stands as a challenge no matter one's
perspective, an overweening presence in the roiling currents
of American racial debates. After all, Islam is a force in
the American black community partly because of Malcolm X
(who, after his 1964 hajj to Mecca, changed his name to El-
Hajj Malik El-Shabazz). Advocates of reparations for slavery
echo his arguments. Less radically, so do believers in the
encouragement of black-run businesses and schools. And by
seeking to internationalize race, particularly in the mid-
1960's, Malcolm X helped set the stage for the doctrines of
Third

[[Page E1054]]

Worldism, which asserts that Western enslavement of dark-
skinned peoples is played out on a world scale.
Even those who dissent from such views can recognize in
Malcolm X's fearsome intelligence and self-discipline a kind
of a developmental quest, ultimately left incomplete. The
exhibition, which also includes material from the Schomburg
and other collections, tells that story chronologically,
using textual summaries and photographs to create a context
for the personal papers.
Those papers include letters from Malcolm to his brother,
Philbert Little, describing his first embrace of the Nation
of Islam, as well as a disturbing sequence of letters about
his final embrace, suggesting how Muhammad tried to rein him
in. And above the display cases, the walls are lined with
photographs chronicling the life: an elementary-school
photograph of Malcolm, glimpses of the bodies of Nation of
Islam followers killed by Los Angeles police in 1962, views
of halls packed with devoted listeners, and finally, glimpses
of the fallen chairs and stark disorder of the Audubon
Ballroom after Malcolm X was murdered. An epilogue to the
exhibition displays court drawings of the trial of the
accused assassins, along with objects found on his body,
including a North Vietnamese stamp showing an American
helicopter getting shot down.
But, despite the new personal documents, there is something
familiar about the exhibition, which does not offer new
interpretations and misses an opportunity to delve more
deeply into the difficulties in Malcolm's quest. In his
autobiography, Malcolm X spoke of the importance of speaking
the ``raw, naked truth'' about the nature of race relations.
He also recognized one of the tragic consequences of
enslavement: the erasure of the past. The name ``X'' was
provided to initiates as a stand in for a lost original name.
Names could also be readily changed because they were little
more than expressions of newly formed identities.
In fact, invention became crucial. For Malcolm X, it was a
matter of control: mastering one's past, determining one's
character and, finally, controlling one's future. Documents
describe how members of the Nation of Islam were expelled for
any backsliding, including adultery. In one letter, Malcolm almost
provides a motto for his kind of charismatic discipline:

``For one to control one's thoughts and feelings means one
can actually control one's atmosphere and all who walks into
its sphere of influence.''
But this also means that the truth can seem less crucial
than the kind of identity being constructed, the kind of past
being invented. After reading the autobiography, we learn
from Alex Haley's epilogue that Malcolm actually confessed
that his story of Russian roulette was not what it seemed: He
had palmed the bullet. Everybody had been hustled, the
readers included. The adoption of Nation of Islam ideology,
with its invented history and its evil scientist named Yacub
breeding the white race, is another kind of hustle.
Curiously, the exhibition itself doesn't make enough of
such distinctions. In a wall display, labeled ``Messengers of
Hope and Liberation,'' major figures like W. E. B. Du Bois
have no more stature than such figures as Wallace D. Fard.
Fard was the greater influence on Malcolm X, since he created
the Nation of Islam mythology, but he may not have had any
African heritage at all and, as Karl Evanzz argues in his
recent book, ``The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah
Muhammad,'' he had even encouraged the practice of human
sacrifice.
As if reluctant to be too judgmental, there is also not
enough explanation of the quarrel with Elijah Muhammad,
though the photographer Gordon Parks quoted Malcolm X saying,
just before his death: ``I did many things as a Muslim that
I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then--like all Muslims--I
was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to
march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of
himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years.''
That kind of statement is too blunt for this exhibition,
which makes suggestions but seems reluctant to draw too many
distinctions. But even the differing interpretations of
Malcolm's final transformation might have been outlined with
more clarity. It is intriguing to read, in one 1964 letter
from Malcolm's office to Martin Luther King Jr., an
expression of apology for ``unkind things'' said in the past.
And the trial of the accused assassins from the Nation of
Islam merits more explanation, particularly because a
conspiracy theory of F.B.I. involvement has long simmered,
even as Muhammad was known to have encouraged threats against
Malcolm X and had already sent one disciple to kill him. The
quest for truth, surely, goes on, but part of it means facing
squarely the extent of certain kinds of hustle.
``Malcolm X: A Search for Truth'' is at the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Lenox Avenue, at
135th Street, Harlem, (212) 491-2200, through Dec. 31.

____________________