Jack & Jill Politics

Especially in the political arena, or in the arena of ideas, it’s tempting to predict what a famous dead person would stand for were he or she still alive today–and especially if that person died tragically in the prime of life.
This conjecture often takes place with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Many—friend and foe alike–contend he would embrace the ideas he embraced before taken from us, which means, of course, that Dr. King would be a proponent of affirmative action and guaranteed employment, ending world hunger and endless wars, eradicating the disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks, etc.
The truth is, however, we don’t really know where King would have stood on these issues today. Given his highly public work with uplifting the disenfranchised, we can assume his ideas would not have changed very much. I know I would.
But the truth of the matter is that people sometimes change.
Take Eldridge Cleaver (insert no “please” jokes here, please).
He was a volatile, card-carrying, police–make that “pig”–confronting Black Panther during the group’s heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. But he ended up a cheerleader for the very American way of life he once despised. Heavens, he died a Republican.
I thought of these things when it hit me that today—February 21st—marks the 47th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination. If my math is correct, and that’s never a given, he would have been 86 years old this year (he was born on May 19, 1925).
Would he, today, still be railing against this nation’s injustices against people of color—and calling for blacks to join fellow sufferers around the world to solve their problems?
Some years ago, as a reporter, I interviewed Malcolm’s brother, and he told me that, contrary to what he said were modern-day historians who try to place Malcolm as an “integrationist” (his word) just before his death, Malcolm remained a “black nationalist”—(his and Malcolm’s phrase) –first. That is, Malcolm knew that the ideal is certainly for all of us to get along—King’s Beloved Community, in fact—but that blacks needed to take care of that nagging problem of their powerlessness before mingling with anyone else—or not to lose sight of that goal in their mingling. I would like to think he would think that now.
But, of course, I don’t really know. He could have begun hanging out with Cleaver and Clarence Thomas; he could have become a Republican or competed with Herman Cain to be the minority spokesman for Newt Gingrich. Like I said, people change sometimes. And he was human, with all of a human’s frailties (he seemed, for example, to love media attention), whatever else we sometimes try to make of him.
But I do know he contributed mightily to the cause while he was around, and I believe those strategies are still effective today, even if he would have changed his mind about espousing them now.
Malcolm, more than any other U.S. black leader, placed our struggle in a human context.
Black leadership for the most part consists of urging the country to do the moral thing and treat its black citizenry right. They appeal to the basic decency in humans to change their disreputable ways.

The movement recognizes people’s aversion to change, and often directs its pace to accommodate that variable.
It spends a great deal of time extolling the resourcefulness of a people who have come through a living hell on Earth. Blacks are, they seem to be saying, special–special good, if you support their cause.
To be sure, many of their supporters view blacks as honorable (I mean, look at all they’ve put up with) but they –white liberals, mainly, but often blacks themselves—also see them as, well, lacking (though they would not use that word), and that their freedom lay in their becoming more acceptable so as to make the greater society accept them. (“I understand the frustration, but why do black men hang on corners when there are so many opportunities now?”)
Malcolm used language that implored blacks to go beyond that model. Get out of the box of provincial righteousness—that personalized one-on-one with your historical tormentors–and take your plight to the United Nations, since that is what several mistreated humans do, he said. I doubt he suspected much would have happened materially if we had done that, but he was always about widening the scope of our struggle— for solutions blinded by fog in the narrow confines of local conflict, if they’re there at all–and then see what would happen. (Frankly, Dr. King had gone to that place when he criticized America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.) Study, Malcolm demanded, movements for change, here and especially around the world, in Asia, Africa, Europe. You may find you’re not that unique (and that it’s not always about race). He also wasn’t that crazy about forming an alliance with the very entity that would send blacks to fight for it on foreign shores for people who suffered just as much as blacks did back home. He reminded his audiences that what he advocated was indeed practiced by the very country whose leadership demanded that blacks do less for their freedom.
Malcolm also unveiled to blacks that they were Africans, and not only in some dashiki or kente wearing way–though there is certainly not anything wrong in dressing African. He said in effect that their struggles were tied in to the liberation of Africa, since the subjugation of the continent began all their woes. When black people heard him, they didn’t feel so much like they were in the minority anymore.
I guess he was saying: You’re grown, and act like it. When you think about it, that’s about the best any political leader can tell you.