Our March 11th issue contains the second of Brandon Terry’s two essays on the life and legacy of Malcolm X. The first, “Malcolm’s Ministry,” on Malcolm X’s political education, was published in our February 25th issue. The second, “What Dignity Requires,” compares the intellectual paths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. with the myths and contradictions that obscure the lives and thoughts of these men in our minds today.
With the kind permission of the author
Terry grew up in a family that, as he said via email, “had a lot of intense political arguments”. He first recorded Malcolm X’s famous autobiography when he was eleven or twelve years old – probably too young, as he now admits – and found words fit into the “incomplete sense of anger and resentment I had about the The obvious suffering I’d seen in his hometown “brought Baltimore, a city that, as Terry writes,” boldly relieves America’s staggering class differences and legacy of racial injustice. “
At home, “racing was almost always the focus of our conversations,” he told me, especially with his mother, grandmother and uncles Ronald and Eddie, who “unlike some adults who believe that politics is not a matter for young people”, Terry wallowed in his curiosity, “and left me sitting at the ring as a kind of judge whose reaction could easily hit a competition that is limited by mutual love and therefore cannot really end. “
These two uncles were divided over the slang term for judging a person’s politics – “Malcolm or Martin?” Ronald was “a strict black nationalist” who celebrated Kwanzaa and filled his library with books on African history, Afrocentric philosophy and “terrifying brochures about alleged conspiracies and plans against the black race – especially its men and boys”. A self-taught building contractor, Ronald refurbished some of the abandoned townhouses in Baltimore to “build decent housing for poor and black workers in the city.”
Where “Ronald adored Malcolm, Eddie adored King,” said Terry. Eddie was, in the words of his nephew, “the kind of combative centrist liberal that was more common in those days,” “relentless in his high expectations,” and “capable of indulging in chitlins and classical music and teaching his nieces and nephews about art museums and Motown, all with the same equanimity. ”Eddie’s belief in the art’s ability to overcome race was based in part, according to Terry, on his experience as a“ closed-off gay man in late 20th century Baltimore, ”the“ interracial Fraternity and cultural vitality for his intimate life found far more hospitable than the blacks found nationalism in the offer of Louis Farrakhan and Frances Cress Welsing. “
Eddie put his nephew at $ 60 that he would come to Harvard. Terry accepted and paid his uncle on admission – an investment in his future as Assistant Professor of Social Studies and African Studies and African American Studies. “I now have a painting of him in my office to remind me of his faith and generosity,” says Terry. But Terry’s own intellectual trajectory differs from that of his uncles. As he read Malcolm X’s autobiography, he was into “Malcolm’s otherworldly discipline and the way he turned learning and arguing into something glamorous and meaningful. I loved his boast: “You will never catch me with a quarter of an hour off not studying something that I believe can help the black man,” and tried to live with the vacillating self-seriousness of an ambitious man Young people who are much more inclined to have fun than fanaticism. “
And, like so many other readers, Terry was enchanted by the “fire and brimstone” – how Malcolm spoke without apology or moderation of those who appeared to have been left behind by the civil rights achievements our teachers celebrated – imprisoning people like my two Brothers or my family members on crumbling housing projects dealing with drug addiction. “
As a college student, Terry studied black political thinking with many of the scholars who are now his peers, and his thinking changed again. “I began to see how much more fire than light such rhetoric throws on questions of political economy, the metaphysics of race and the ethics of racial solidarity,” he told me, and the desire to answer these questions led him to Philosophy of Dr. King.
I asked Terry what he saw as the most important gap in the public understanding of Malcolm and King. “It’s hard to pick just one,” he said, but went on to both men’s deep criticism of American militarism: Malcolm X’s anti-colonial vision is largely ignored, and “King’s is mostly caricatured, as in Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize speech, as being naive Pacificism or tight complaint about federal spending priorities. “But he continued,” Both men made remarkably predictive and prophetic judgments about how state security manipulation and lavish warfare would prove utterly devastating to American life. “
The argument in Terry’s upcoming book, The Civil Rights Movement’s Tragic Vision, as he explained it to me, is, “The stories we tell about this epoch-making event are at the heart of who Americans imagine: in the concepts (citizenship , Rights, equality, racism) with which we argue with one another, and even on the existential level of what we could reasonably hope for in our future. “This era, which once seemed romantic, is now” stalling because of its depth and explains the persistence of racist injustice, “extreme economic inequality,” and “the marginalization of the voices and needs of black women”.
Many activists in the contemporary movement for black life draw cautionary lessons from this period, including the need to avoid the personality cult that both Dr. King as well as Malcolm X surrounded. “For many organizers it is now taken for granted,” noted Terry Charismatic leadership goes hand in hand with lack of democracy, sexism and heterosexism, and weakness in the face of state repression or media demonization. “Part of Terry’s job is to complicate our view of these men as mere figureheads: they were each flawed individuals, clever strategists, and political philosophers in their own right.
Today, “in the heat of rejuvenated black radicalism,” Terry told me, we should not blindly repeat the civil rights struggle tactics or dismiss them as utter failure. Instead, he hopes, we can bring back the “radical criticism, self-reflection and reconstructive vision” that made Malcolm X and Martin Luther King such enduring figures in the first place.
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