Malcolm X at 100: Our shining prince

Mail & Guardian

19-05-2025

The March on Washington on 28 August 1963 agitated for civil and economic rights for African Americans. Photo:On 19 May 2025, we mark 100 years since the birth of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, known to the world as Malcolm X.
Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, the boy who would become Malcolm X lived many lives, each transformation marked by a different name. He was Detroit Red on the streets of Harlem, Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam and, finally, Malik El-Shabazz as he evolved into a revolutionary Pan-Africanist.
These were not disguises. They were declarations. There was not a trace of deception in Malcolm X's life. His openness about his past, his flaws and his transformation was the source of his ethical power.
Malcolm X's political philosophy did not arrive fully formed. It emerged through personal trauma, intellectual inquiry, spiritual transformation and, ultimately, true internationalism. His life was a testament to the possibility of radical change and the capacity of one human being to confront and outgrow deeply held dogma in pursuit of a larger, more principled truth. He moved from a narrow racial nationalism to a radical humanism that embraced the global struggles of oppressed peoples. His political thought is not a static doctrine but a process of transformation, a restlessness of mind and spirit that never ceased to interrogate the world and his place within it.
Malcolm's own world was shaped by terror. His father, Earl Little, a follower of Marcus Garvey, was murdered by the white supremacist Black Legion. The family home had already been burned down. His mother, Louise Little, a Grenadian immigrant, was committed to a mental institution under the weight of grief and racist abuse. Her children were taken away and placed in foster care. Malcolm's story, like so many Black stories, begins in a system designed to break families and erase dignity.
A brilliant student, Malcolm once told a teacher he wanted to become a lawyer. The teacher told him that was no job for a 'coloured'. That moment stayed with him. It echoed what Toni Morrison would later write in Beloved, that for a Black child, there is nothing more dangerous than a white schoolteacher. That danger is not simply physical, but spiritual: the danger of having your dreams shrunk before they can even be formed.
As a young man in Harlem, Malcolm became known as Detroit Red. He straightened his hair with chemical relaxers to look more like a white man. 'This was my first really big step toward self-degradation,' he wrote, 'literally burning my flesh.' He sank deep into street life, drugs, gambling, hustling, and was eventually arrested in 1946.
Prison, however, became the site of his rebirth. Locked in Charlestown State Prison, Malcolm gained something that few Black men are ever allowed: time to read, time to think. As Toni Morrison has written, 'There is no place more conducive to the development of a young Black man's mind than prison, because that is often the first time he is allowed solitude.'
Malcolm devoured the prison library, starting with the dictionary, learning every word, and seeing in language the building blocks of reality and its racism. In his solitude, he forged not only an education, but a philosophy. He wrote: 'In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life. That's saying a lot, but how else is a man going to master his own thoughts, his own personality, if he doesn't have the time to reflect and think?'
He began corresponding with Elijah Muhammad and joined the Nation of Islam. When he was released in 1952, he quickly became its most charismatic and effective minister. He grew the Nation's membership from 500 to at least 25,000. He was a brilliant orator, a sharp thinker and a relentless organiser.
Despite this, he never denied his past. 'To have once been a criminal is no disgrace,' he said. 'To remain a criminal is the disgrace.'
knew that in a system built on racism, incarceration could not be used to discredit Black men. 'You can't be a Negro in America and not have a criminal record,' he noted. 'Martin Luther King has been to jail.'
That openness, about his past, his flaws, his growth, was what made Malcolm so dangerous to the American state. He could not be blackmailed, manipulated or reduced. He had seen the worst of the world and made himself anew. His moral authority was rooted not in respectability but in integrity.
Even within the Nation, that integrity caused unease. When he discovered that Elijah Muhammad had fathered children with young women in the movement, Malcolm confronted him and broke with the Nation of Islam, despite the personal danger, the loss of income and the deep emotional cost. 'We believed 100 percent in the divinity of Elijah Muhammad,' he recalled. 'I always believed that he believed in himself. And I was shocked when I found out that he himself didn't believe it.'
To expose corruption in a system built on racism is one kind of bravery. But to expose the corruption of those you once believed in, that is a lonelier and more dangerous road. It takes a different kind of courage to turn against those who were once your political family.
After his break with the Nation, Malcolm founded Muslim Mosque Inc and began developing a broader, more revolutionary vision. He travelled to Africa and the Middle East. He performed Hajj. He saw Muslims of every race praying side by side and began to believe that solidarity across racial lines was possible, if rooted in justice and liberation.
He wrote, 'I had met blonde-haired, blue-eyed men I could call my brothers.' He stated, 'I'm not a racist … I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their colour.'
This was not a retreat into liberal integrationism but a reorientation. He no longer believed race alone defined moral value or political allegiance. Instead, the defining line was between oppressors and the oppressed. He met with African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Gamal Abdel Nasser, and connected the struggle of Black Americans to the anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. He founded the Organisation of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), modelled on the Organisation of African Unity, to foster solidarity and link the civil rights struggle to global liberation.
He wrote: 'The world's course will change the day the African-heritage peoples come together as brothers!'
Malcolm began to understand white supremacy not merely as a Southern American issue but as a global system, one that linked the ghettoes of Harlem to the gold mines of Johannesburg, to the plantations of the Caribbean, and to the bombed-out villages of Vietnam. His shift from nationalist rhetoric to Pan-African, and then humanist language, was not betrayal, it was growth.
Malcolm X's politics were not only about systems and structures, they were also about character. His commitment to truth-telling, discipline and integrity stood in stark contrast to the opportunism of many civil rights leaders and white liberals.
once said, 'I am for truth, no matter who tells it. I am for justice, no matter who it is for or against.'
Even as he began collaborating with other civil rights leaders and speaking to white audiences, he insisted that alliances must be principled. When asked if white people could join the OAAU, he responded: 'If John Brown were alive, maybe him.'
Malcolm never stopped being suspicious of liberalism and compromise. He believed the American system was incapable of reforming itself. Unlike King's appeal to the conscience of America, Malcolm appealed to the conscience of the world.
His final months were marked by profound clarity. He no longer relied on Elijah Muhammad's theology. Instead, he began building a secular, revolutionary analysis of power. He was assassinated before this could fully develop, but his trajectory pointed toward a fusion of Black nationalism, anti-capitalism and international solidarity. He declared shortly before his death: 'Anyone who wants to follow me and my movement has got to be ready to go to jail, to the hospital, and to the cemetery before he can be truly free.'
Today, as racial capitalism deepens, and as the language of diversity is co-opted by elites, Malcolm's clarity is more vital than ever. He reminds us that representation without redistribution is meaningless. He reminds us that the violence of capitalism is not incidental, it is constitutive. And he reminds us that liberation requires more than reform: it demands transformation, discipline, and truth.
bell hooks once wrote that Malcolm gave Black people a vision of themselves 'not as passive victims but as active agents of change'. He did more than that. He gave us a language of struggle, fierce, uncompromising, and tender.
At his funeral, the actor and activist Ossie Davis delivered a eulogy that is one of the most moving political tributes of the 20th century:
'And we will know him then for what he was and is
A Prince.
Our own black shining Prince!
Who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so.'
That is what we remember today, not just a man, but a way of being. Not just a thinker, but an example of courage, integrity, and transformation. Malcolm X did not demand perfection. He demanded growth. He never claimed sainthood. He claimed truth. He did not walk away from his past. He used it to light the way for others.
As we mark a century since his birth, we do not merely commemorate a set of ideas. We invoke a tradition of bravery. A commitment to principles that cannot be bought, borrowed, or broken. Malcolm X remains the measure by which we judge ourselves: our honesty, our courage, our willingness to change.
'In honouring him, we honour the best in ourselves.'
Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and DEI consultant, labour expert, pan-African and South Asian political analyst and curriculum specialist.