19-05-2025
‘The Afterlife of Malcolm X' looks at how we've remembered an icon
In January 1999, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp bearing the likeness of Malcolm X, acknowledging the broad popular appeal of the late Muslim minster. In a news release, the bureaucrats who had approved the stamp held Malcolm up as a man who, late in life, had turned from hatred to espouse 'a more integrationist solution to racial problems.' Many of the historians who had studied him and activists who had shaped their politics in his image, however, dismissed this characterization as not just untrue but a Faustian bargain — a dumbing down of Malcolm's true legacy in exchange for a little respectability. A representative rebuke came from one reader in the pages of The Washington Post. 'By all means let us honor Malcolm X,' he argued, 'but in doing so let us be clear about who and what he was. He was not a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican. He was a revolutionary and an internationalist.' Men and women like that letter writer — veterans of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, doyens of the Free South Africa Movement, gang truce activists and the like — were determined to remind the country that Malcolm justified their commitments and their organizing in the here and now.
