FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK LIBERATION: MALCOLM X AND THE ORGANIZATION OF AFRO-AMERICAN UNITY

By William W. Sales, Jr.
South End Press (1994)
$14.00 247 pages
Reviewed by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

The North Africans tell the story of the two brothers who accompanied their elderly father on a trip across the desert. The father was an experienced desert traveler, but the sons had never before been more than five miles from their home tents. Each dawn, therefore, the father would get up to survey the position of the rising sun. Then he would point out the direction the family would travel that day over the shifting dunes. But the trip was exhausting for the old man, and one morning his sons awoke to find that the father had fallen down in the sand, dead.

Some weeks later, a merchant came upon the two brothers still in the same spot in the middle of the desert. They were down on their hands and knees, earnestly and carefully examining the bleaching bones of their father. "What are you doing?" the merchant asked them. "We are lost," one of the sons said, "and we are searching our father for some sign as to which way we should go. Do you have any suggestions?" The merchant looked around the barren, lifeless sand dune where the brothers were crouched and gave a shrug. "Anywhere but here would be good," he replied.

I vividly remember those lost, lonely months following the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. Young African American revolutionaries were adrift, abandoned: our great and shining light had been extinguished, and we were left stumbling in a dangerous dark, trying frantically to find the way out. Oh, how we searched Malcolm's bones...studied the transcriptions of his speeches...read and re-read his autobiography...listened again and again to his albums...picking for some sign as to which way Malcolm thought we should go. And finally, each in some method or manner finding our own private revelation, we set out in our own separate directions: Panthers...Pan-Africanists...politicians. And the great Liberation Movement that Malcolm X would have led broke up and scattered to the obscuring desert winds.

The death of any great leader brings a crisis of direction to the remaining followers. But seeking out the path that Malcolm might have wanted us to take was particularly difficult for the following reasons:

1) Malcolm was primarily an activist, not a writer. He did not leave any comprehensive documents which collected and synthesized his world view. Those who wish to know what Malcolm thought must sift through interviews, speeches, and writings given at widely separated times and on widely variated subjects, and that is the source of much of the confusion about Malcolm.

2) Malcolm's main body of work and thought occurred during his years with the Nation of Islam. But in the last year of his life Malcolm repudiated a good deal of what he had earlier said or done. Figuring out what was valid and what was not from his Nation of Islam years is not an easy task.

3) At the time of his death, Malcolm was clearly in the midst of an intense ideological transition. A transition to what, we simply cannot be certain. The wheel of Malcolm's thought was still spinning when he left us.

Because of these difficulties in figuring out the direction Malcolm X was taking in the months preceding his death, the time came when most of Malcolm's followers either decided that they knew what it was he wanted or simply grew weary and abandoned the effort entirely.

But recent years have seen a revival in the image of Malcolm X among young African Americans, particularly as a symbol of resistance to white racism. And with this renewal in interest in Malcolm X, the symbol, has come a renewal in the debate over what Malcolm X actually believed and where he was heading in his last days.

"From Civil Rights To Black Liberation: Malcolm X And The Organization Of Afro-American Unity" is William W. Sales Jr.'s effort to settle that debate. The OAAU was the organization Malcolm was in the process of forming at the time of his death. Despite some impressive research and revealing insight, Sales' effort fails.

Part of the problem is that Sales wastes too much time on unnecessary details, such as the fact that Sales' mother-in-law thought that Malcolm was a "decent and engaging fellow," or listing the names of participants at various meetings without explaining who they might be or the significance of their participation.

Part of the problem is Sales' failure to go into sufficient depth on some key points, or to provide any proof for some of his conclusions. For example: although the OAAU was in constant financial trouble during its short existence, a situation that contributed to its lack of effectiveness during its short life, Sales reports that "there is no indication that Malcolm was prepared to resort to the standard fundraising mechanism of the [Nation of Islam], tithing. This was a question in the minds of [Malcolm's Muslim followers], and they felt that the middle-class membership in the inner core of the OAAU might not have been accustomed to that kind of discipline." But the Black middle class of the mid-60's was quite familiar with tithing, which is one of the standard fundraising mechanism of the Black church. We are thus left with the conclusion that Malcolm and his closest followers were monumentally ignorant about the Black middle class. That's a possibility, of course. But if it was true, Sales needed to say it.

Part of the problem is Sales' tedious, plodding, academic style of writing, which sometimes produces paragraphs such as the following:

"Malcolm X became a revolutionary force in the Civil Rights movement due to the intersection of his own personal biography with the larger forces transforming the African American community from a rural peasantry into an urban proletariat. As a role model he quintessentially represented the possibilities of individual redemption and transformation resident in the newly activated social group composed of urban ghetto workers and street people. Malcolm was accorded the mantle of leadership by these same people because he both taught them self-knowledge and gave them a voice to debate the strategies and tactics of Black liberation. The nationalism of Malcolm X--taught to him by his parents, Elijah Muhammad, and the political and cultural environment of Harlem--resonated with the mood of this newly emergent social force and gave to it the beginnings of a new conceptual framework for answering the question, 'Which way toward Black liberation?' This new conceptual framework allowed for the reformulation of Black nationalism in a more internationalist, Pan-African, and revolutionary manner and thus facilitated the linking of the Civil Rights movement with the movement toward continental African unity and the world revolutionary process."

To write in such a manner about Malcolm X--who was best known for being able to break down the most complex of subjects into language that even the most illiterate and unlettered could understand--seems almost a sacrilege.

But Sales has done an impressive amount of homework, and the results make parts of this book extremely valuable. He reprints threats made by Minister Louis Farrakhan against Malcolm shortly after Malcolm left the Nation of Islam, interesting in light of Farrakhan's recent gyrations on that point. He details the influence of Malcolm on African American students who were organizing in the South during the civil rights period, influence which is generally ignored by historians of that period. And the section on the progressive/revolutionary African American organizations that emerged immediately after the death of Malcolm--the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of Afrikan Peoples, the Republic of New Africa, the African Liberation Support Committee, and so forth--is an important contribution to another much-neglected subject.

For those who already have a good understanding about Malcolm X and his times, "From Civil Rights To Black Liberation" provides some important supplementary material if you can overlook its many flaws. For those who are just being introduced to the revolutionary 60's, however, this book may only confuse you.