Malcolm's Murder; Centering the NOI & Not the Police is Dangerous

Friday, February 21, 2020, was the 55th commemoration of the brutal assassination of El Hajj Malik Shabazz; better known as Malcolm X.  The recent Netflix released docu-series facilitated by Abdul Rahman Muhammad has generated new buzz around Malcolm’s assassination, including talk coming from the New York state (U.S.) District Attorney’s office about reopening the case.

This talk is cumbersome for those of us who have studied and done our best to carry on Malcolm’s Pan-Africanist work over the last five decades.  You will never convince us that the state of New York doesn’t already know who and how Malcolm was killed since they were certainly engaged in helping orchestrate the assassination.  There is plenty, and I mean plenty, written, documented, filmed, etc, on Malcolm’s assassination.  Much of the information presented in the Netflix docu-series has been available for over 50 years now.  This blog carries many articles about Malcolm’s life, Pan-African work, and assassination, so anyone who desires to know more about his work, life, death, etc., has an abundance of material available to study. 

The primary focus of this piece will be to discuss the constant white noise chatter taking place presently, around Malcolm’s assassination in general, and the role of his former organization – the Nation of Islam (NOI), in the entire tragic and historically unfortunate process.  There are particular elements to these attacks that must be addressed.

What’s happening currently is quite a few people within African communities, primarily throughout the U.S., are using the recent refocus on Malcolm to express their disdain for the NOI and Minister Louis Farrakhan.  The Minister’s unfortunate role in contributing to the environment that led to Malcolm being murdered is well documented and his continued unwillingness to simply acknowledge his role is equally documented and unfortunate.  Nobody outside of the NOI’s sphere is much interested in defending their organization and/or Farrakhan through any of this, but there is still so much that these critics are missing and misguided about.  First and foremost, the critics demonstrate to those of us with reasonable experience how inexperienced they are with actual organizing work (beyond individual talking, writing, etc., about the topic).  They fail to recognize Kwame Ture’s (Stokely Carmichael) clear, repeated, and ill refutable warning to us to avoid any criticism of our people that doesn’t include our enemies.  In Kwame’s correct analysis, dismissing and/or ignoring the need to center our enemies – the U.S. capitalist/imperialist network – in any analysis of our suffering does nothing except play, either wittingly or unwittingly, into the hands of our enemies.  In other words, these people criticizing the NOI and Farrakhan while ignoring the role of the state, which is the primary path Muhammad’s docu-series chose to take, are misrepresenting what happened in a very dangerous way. 

These critics have their reasons for disliking the NOI and Farrakhan, but we cannot permit this to cloud our ability to recognize that the U.S. government clearly manipulated the NOI in achieving the environment where Malcolm was killed.  United States intelligence agencies, and all imperialist agencies everywhere, rarely carry out their dirty work themselves.  Their organizing processes are always set up to ensure surrogates carry out their evil deeds so that they can always claim plausible deniability.  Please think about this carefully.  Clearly, and now by their own sorry admission, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a coordinating role in carrying out the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the destabilization of the Congo in 1961 and the illegal overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana in 1966, but in each case, it was Africans who actually carried out the evil on the ground work.  Amilcar Cabral, the founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC), and co-founder of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the All African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), was assassinated in 1973 at the whim of Portuguese colonialists who the PAIGC was fighting to run out of Guinea-Bissau, but it was Africans who actually pulled the trigger and murdered Cabral.  Black Panther Party leaders John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter were each assassinated in 1969 in Los Angeles, California, U.S.  There is no question that this was a coordinated action that was facilitated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) counter intelligence program against the Black Panther Party where the FBI pushed the US Organization, a Los Angeles based Black Nationalist organization, into a street war against the Panthers.  There were other Panthers besides Carter and Huggins killed in this “war” between these two organizations and these killings were carried out by Africans. The role of the FBI and local police in inflaming "gang" tensions between Bloods/Crips, Chicago "street organizations" African/Indigenous/Latino "gangs" to keep the fighting going (and eliminate any political education work among these organizations) are well documented.

We can go on and on with these examples, but the point is if the critics of the NOI and Farrakhan are relying primarily on the fact they contributed to the environment, which they certainly did, a much better and healthier analysis would be to wage struggle with the NOI that places their actions firmly within the context of the FBI’s constant work to derail and sabotage Malcolm’s work to bridge with international revolutionary Pan-Africanists.  The critique should be that the FBI’s primary tactic in doing their work was creating seeds of distrust within the NOI so that they would play that surrogate role in taking care of the U.S. government’s unsavory role in ensuring Malcolm’s important voice would be silenced.  We should be building relationships with the NOI to wage this struggle so that our enemies cannot use the same tactics against us in the future.  The critics aren’t taking this approach.  Instead, they are harping over and over on Farrakhan and the NOI, often – like the docu-series – almost and/or completely ignoring the role of the U.S. government as if this role is ancillary and the NOI’s role was primary to Malcolm being killed.  If these critics believe this, they are painfully naïve.  Taking the position of principled ideological struggle with the NOI (that’s carried out with them, not against them on social media, etc) does nothing to let the NOI and Farrakhan off the hook.  That accountability doesn’t happen, and isn’t happening, through the current white noise campaign anyway.  

Another final area that stings in this entire issue is the apparent and dangerous lack of understanding these critics have about organizing strategies to work with groupings we don’t agree with.  To these folks, if they view someone as wrong that means you unleash an unrelenting public attack against them on social media and everywhere else where blows can be struck.  These people view this approach as principled i.e. not compromising with those they disagree with.

Even if their attacks against NOI are correct, and most of them are concerning the NOI’s unfortunate role with Malcolm, patriarchy, homophobia, etc., this all out attack approach has produced no tangible results for these people besides making themselves feel better.  And, maybe that’s their entire objective; just to feel better.  For us, the objective is the proper organization of our people against this criminal empire and so we spend lots of time, much more time I assure you then these critics, attempting to figure out how to effectively accomplish this critical task.  As a result, for us, the NOI, the US Organization, Bloods/Crips sets, and anyone who these people disagree with, are not the enemy.  Using these organizations as examples, history has proven clearly – study the Inkatha Movement in Azania (South Africa) during the apartheid years or police manipulation of our street organizations for reference – that its bad politics to isolate para-military forces.  Maybe the critics don’t believe in the strength of their principles and positions, but we believe strongly in the basis of our work because we have experience achieving much success with our approaches.  We feel strongly that we can win the ideological struggle with anyone.  As a result, we will never agree with the public attacks approach and unlike the critics, we can demonstrate to anyone the successes we have had over the years influencing the NOI, US Organization, Uhuru Movement, street organizations, etc., in positive ways in many areas.  Our Nkrumahist/Tureist ideology and life work to build revolutionary Pan-Africanism has taught us that there are always primary and secondary contradictions.  The NOI and Farrakhan are not primary contradictions within our communities and anyone who believes that they are, and/or doesn’t understand this dichotomy, has much work to do to understand how to move us forward on a collective level. 

To recap, we encourage positive and principled struggle with the NOI around the assassination of Malcolm X.  We have engaged with them on this level for quite some time and again, we are convinced that principled ideological struggle, not attacks and isolation, are the best approaches to ensure the protection and strengthening of our collective movements.  History is so full of examples that public attack is not an effective tool to address ideological contradictions.  People who are not actively involved in organizing work among of people are confused about this.  Within the A-APRP we used to have a pretty militant practice of refusing to work with individuals, preferring organizations instead.  I still believe this to be a worthwhile process because individuals are only accountable to themselves and many of these people waging these critiques fit this category.  These people don’t demonstrate any desire to wage collective and principled ideological struggle.  Many of them seem much more interested in self promotion than collective forward struggle.  All of this madness must stop.  Only a strong organized African liberation movement will create the objective conditions where the NOI, Farrakhan, and anyone else is held responsible to the masses of our people.  For anyone truly interested in forward progress for the African masses, this is clearly the road we must learn how to travel.