On May 19th, his birthday, many people will remember Malcolm X as a great civil rights leader. He was not. He was a great leader and his views were constantly evolving. But at the time of his assassination Malcolm X was a black militant who saw separation of the races as the only solution to America’s race problems. He surely would have changed that view had he lived to see the country today but in his lifetime he did not. What he did do was evolve from thinking all whites were devils as taught by Elijah Muhammad to seeing racism as only a white American problem that could be ignored by a black nationalism within the wider community.
At least where I live in the Northeast young folks are living Dr King’s dream of a race blind society. With others of my generation I have no problem with interracial couples but I do note it when I see one. Young folk don’t even notice. In fact there was a South Park episode about this. We have a president who went beyond Jesse Jackson’s all inclusive Rainbow Coalition to instead run a race neutral campaign and administration. If there is still a preponderance of old white men at the top of business and industry their seconds in command are often not. Anyone joining a company today has no reason to assume that his immediate and middle management bosses will be either white or male. Of course there is still discrimination and people everywhere have always felt at least vaguely superior to their geographical and ethnic and religious neighbors, but truly Dr King’s dream of white and black children sitting together on the hills of Georgia exists at least among the young in much of America today and in corporate business nationwide. Alive Malcolm X had no faith in the dream of complete American integration. He was a crusader for black nationalism. I expect his spirit is content that he’d been wrong. (Of course having converted to Islam he’d not have liked me calling him a crusader.)
And it wasn’t just Dr King who had a dream. I feel that the celebration of Dr King’s birthday should have a more inclusive name than Martin Luther King Day. His dream was not his alone. Many others shared it and fought for it in their own way. Dr King rallied multitudes of both black and white citizens to the civil rights cause, but others like James Farmer and Thurgood Marshall worked tirelessly for civil rights in the courts. Roy Wilkins was an important organizer as was the labor leader A Philip Randolph. These and others were in their own way as important as Dr. King. But how many young people today know the names of Whitney Young, Ralph Abernathy, or Bayard Ruskin, not to mention those hundreds who worked on a state rather than national stage and were as well known and important in their states. These men and women (Viola Luizzo,, Shirley Chisholm, Mary Peabody) were not militants nor were they dreamers, but hard nosed Americans who shared a vision. Not all were black either. Mary Peabody, the mother of the then Massachusetts governor, was arrested for civil rights activity in Florida. Viola Luzzzo, another white woman, was murdered by the KKK. None of these civil rights activists who risked and sometimes lost their lives had much use for black militants who mostly posed for photo ops but were no more than an angry reaction to the pace of social equality. That was perhaps an inevitable stage which had to be passed through in the 1970s but they would never have dared to pose with guns had it not been for the Rev. King and his partners.