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Malcolm X's Michigan Worldview
An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies
By Rita Kiki Edozie, Curtis Stokes Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-172-1
CHAPTER 1
PART 1.
Malcolm as a Theoretical Framework
Malcolm X from Michigan
Race, Identity, and Community across the Black World
Rita Kiki Edozie with Curtis Stokes
In defending the intellect of a first Black president—Barack Obama—who had come under caustic critique by some media channels for his policies, a December 2011 blog post article cited a quotation representative of the language, style, and poetry depicting, honoring, commemorating, and eulogizing Malcolm X. The blog cited Malcolm as stating, "What do you call an educated negro with a B.A. or an M.A., with a B.S., or a PhD?" The answer? "You call him a nigger, because that is what the white man calls him, a nigger" (DeVega 2012).
We begin this chapter with Malcolm's controversial (perhaps politically incorrect) quotation to underscore what has been a major grievance for Black intellectuals who have constantly had to prove their worth within the academy. For us, not only is Malcolm X an inspirational role model for his critical insights on Black life but, as the quote in the previous paragraph implies, he is an intellectual leader whose Black Studies study still lives through his public discourses. This is exemplified through Malcolm X's message of cultural pride, his self-study, his critical analysis, and his social protest against injustice, which all served as a pedagogical approach for the education of Black people that would foreshadow the Black Studies academic movement (Smallwood 2001).
It is in this regard that, in celebrating Malcolm's ninetieth birthday anniversary memorial in 2015, our edited volume examines Malcolm X as a historic African American leader, a child and onetime native of Michigan, a master orator and sage, and a foremost Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist public intellectual. Given these many distinctive attributes of Malcolm, his life in Michigan, and the orientations and status of the Black/Africana Studies discipline in the millennium, a cohort of Black Studies faculty at Michigan State University has long been inspired by Malcolm's iconography as a multidimensional intellectual and community activist who connects local community activism to nationwide Black nationalism and to global Pan-Africanism. Malcolm's 1963 visit to MSU and his earlier formative lived experiences in the Michigan region have motivated the editors to publish the current volume that brings the Black world community and academic discipline together in ways that bell hooks has described as practice in conjunction with contemplation (hooks 2003).
In this vein, as transdisciplinary Black Studies scholars, we hope to act as advocates of hook's notion of praxis, considered as action and reflection upon the world in order to change it. We especially consider our operative base in Michigan at MSU and from the university's African American and African Studies major academic unit as distinctive community and academic spaces that will influence the way that we narrate our perspectives on Malcolm. In considering our narratives this way, the current book, titled Malcolm X's Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies, uses Malcolm's Michigan location as a launching board to posit his life as an excellent model, an epitome, a paragon, a quintessence, or an exemplar, as we subtitle the book, to navigate the complex contours of our academic discipline.
Four key questions guide our objectives in this regard: What do Malcolm's lived experiences and politics tell us about Black world existence, being, consciousness, human predicament, expression and empowerment? How is this experience relayed in the state of Michigan and its distinct Black communities (of Detroit and in Lansing) as places from which Malcolm hails? What is the genre and legacy of Malcolm's leadership in the Black world vis-à-vis the ideological platforms of civil rights and Black Power, liberalism and nationalism, human rights and Pan-Africanism? How can the Black Studies discipline be used as an effective tool to discern insights from Malcolm's lived experiences and political practices, and in turn, how can these insights help to develop the intellectual tenets of the discipline?
Furthermore, the manner in which our contributors respond to these questions is captured by four general themes that guide the overall study. A first theme concerns the way that we strategically engage with the "Malcolm Debate," which in 2011 was revitalized by the publication of the late Manning Marable's highly acclaimed yet provocative volume on Malcolm, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Marable 2011). Leveraging this debate, though proceeding in a very distinctive direction from Marable and the plethora of academic responses to his book, our anthology examines Malcolm as an icon, an exemplar, a philosophical vehicle for navigating and interrogating Malcolm X's lived experience in relation to the study of the Black world. Graeme Abernethy's Iconography of Malcolm X (2013) uses imagery to explore Malcolm's visual prominence in the eras of civil rights, Black Power, and hip-hop through prisms of representation across a variety of media.
Though slightly differently from Abernethy, we present Malcolm's icon in the way described in James Tyner's Geography of Malcolm X. In that book, Tyner presents Malcolm as an intellectual who developed his political thought from a dialectical dialogue of lived experience and critical integration. Tyner contends that the dialogue that Malcolm exuberates represents a geographical imagining that he regards as a feature of the black intellectual tradition's radical hermeneutic of everyday experiences (Tyner 2006, 104). In Malcolm X and African American Self-Consciousness (2005), Magnus Bassey motivates us further in this light when he writes that more needs to be done to relay Malcolm's contribution to African American self-consciousness vis-à-vis an Africana philosophy. Bassey writes that Malcolm raised questions about African American existence, being, consciousness, hopelessness, helplessness, expression, human predicament, and empowerment. These are all elements of an Africana philosophy that situates the articulations and traditions of Africans and peoples of African descent collectively to engage in discipline forming, tradition defining, and/or tradition reconstruction. Bassey's notion of dialectical dialogue representations of Malcolm's lived experiences presented by our volume as Black political thought is core to our exposition, analysis, and arguments about the Malcolm X icon.
A second related theme examines Malcolm's icon through the prism of community. We do this by immersing our inquiries about what we refer to as "the Malcolm phenomenon," a term that we use to interrogate Malcolm's distinctiveness in relation to issues of race and African diaspora cultural community grounding. To do so we examine issues of space and place, particularly from the vantage point of Malcolm's experiences in the state of Michigan. In How Racism Takes Place (2011), George Lipsitz presents a thesis that explains how racism takes place by not only describing things that happen in history, but especially describing how social relations take on their full force and meaning when they are enacted physically in actual places. Lipsitz goes on to illustrate how, through community issues such as residential and school segregation, mortgage and insurance redlining, transportation and taxation policies, we learn how race is produced by space.
For our study of Malcolm, Michigan localities, including East Lansing, Lansing, Detroit, and Mason, constitute geographical spaces undergoing the kinds of community issues that Lipsitz writes about. The regional place that we will examine represents an important network of towns and cities in Michigan where Malcolm X grew up and developed some formative ideas that led him to action and prominence. We feel that the platform from which we stand at MSU and the community in which we live, the state of Michigan, are opportune regional communities to examine the Malcolm X lived experience and its relationship to Black Studies. This is true when one considers ways that Malcolm's speeches invoke several memories that elucidate the circumstances and intricate contours of his lived experience in these areas. For example, when Malcolm lived in Lansing, he recalled of East Lansing that, "In those days Negroes weren't allowed after dark in East Lansing proper. There's where Michigan State University is located" (Malcolm X 1992, 6).
We know that Malcolm's father was controversially killed in Lansing, revealing violent race relations linked to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s. The Lansing community has attempted to address its wrongs against the Little family. On October 12, 1975, a historical marker was dedicated to the Lansing legacy of Malcolm X at 4705 South Logan, Lansing, Michigan. The plaque, put up by the Michigan Department of State, marks the spot where Malcolm's boyhood home once stood. The marker reads, "Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, lived on this site in the 1930s.... He developed an understanding of black hatred and came to see his years in Lansing as common to the black experience" (Michigan Historical Center 2007).
Of Detroit, the site of his first arrest for grand larceny in 1945 and where Malcolm had been known as "Detroit Red," he would later remember, "My life has been a mirror of what the Black Ghetto across America presents as a community of despair" (qtd. in Cunningham 2010).
And yet again, on MSU's campus, on January 23, 1963, Malcolm spoke at the Erickson Hall Kiva where he had been invited by the NAACP MSU Chapter and the African Students Association to speak to faculty and students about the "race problem." In what was then well known to be the eloquent discourse of civil rights America's most dynamic revolutionary and Black nationalist leader, Malcolm would commend the African American and African student unity at MSU for rising to the occasion to address race, which he referred to as the most serious problem of our time (Malcolm X 1963b).
In revealing Malcolm's iconic attributes in relation to his status as a community, national, and international Black leader of repute and his enormous positive impact in the realm of Black politics in relation to race and identity themes in communities of color, we arrive at our third guiding theme. This concerns the complicated dimensions and impacts that political leadership, Black nationalisms, and democratic struggles play in discerning the politics and political legacies of Malcolm. Diverse opinions exist about how Black leadership is defined and what constitutes the ideological worldviews and political practices of various Black leaders. The late Ronald Walters and Robert C. Smith in their book African American Leadership (1999) define Black leadership as the capacity of an individual to affect the attitudes and behavior of African Americans insofar as social and political goals and/or methods are concerned.
Walters and Smith's characterization of leadership augments the earlier work of James Wilson who, in Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (1965), describes the Black leader to be a civic leader—a person who acted as if the interests of the race or community were their goal. Also underscoring the importance of race as a dimension of Malcolm's radical leadership, in Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, Peniel Joseph reveals a distinctive political role that Malcolm embodies as a Black leader. Joseph locates Malcolm as one of two of the most daring and provocative activists emerging from Black America during the civil rights era who introduced Black Power as a new political landscape that permanently altered black identity. Joseph contends that this brand of politics scandalized race relations in the United States and transformed American democracy where leaders like Malcolm unleashed passionate debates and sparked enduring controversy over the very meaning of black identity, American citizenship, and the prospect of a social, political, and cultural revolution (Joseph 2010, 12).
All three themes aforementioned inform our fourth theme, which concerns our lenses and method for examining Malcolm's lived experience in relation to the Black Studies discipline. At MSU, the university's just over a decade old program in African American and African Studies acts as the vehicle through which to examine scholarly phenomenon of Malcolm X in this manner. We are reminded that the civil rights period through which Malcolm pioneered his genre of politics also marked an important landmark in the formative establishment of racial inclusion practices in higher education and the institutionalization of the Black Studies discipline. Occurring during a first-phase era of Black Studies' emergence, the successful establishment of Black Studies programs that have proliferated in higher educational institutions across the country today emerged as a result of protests and demonstrations initiated by Black university students similar to the groups that hosted Malcolm X at MSU in 1963. Ibram Rogers (2012) has described this Black Student Movement as the academic manifestation of Black nationalism.
With fifteen PhD programs in African American and African Studies of which MSU is one, fifty-one years after our campus hosted Malcolm in 1963, we find ourselves in the third stage of Black Studies. In celebration of that historic event, by using Malcolm's lived experiences to deepen our understanding of the discipline as well as contribute to the emergent discipline's formulation and strengthening, the current anthology is MSU's contribution to the discipline's intellectual development. In African American and African Studies at MSU, housed in a humanities college (the College of Arts and Letters), we approach our core curricular in Black/Africana Studies as a humanistic discipline in key dimensions of the human and social lived experience.
First, we are conceptually interdisciplinary, incorporating African language, literature, history, philosophy, the arts, and social science to reflect on diverse heritages, traditions, and histories of African descendants and to engage the relevance of these studies with the current conditions of national and international life. We also encourage qualitative research methods that underscore dialogue, historical and logical analysis, subject voices, and critical interpretation and scholarly investigation. Finally, we emphasize engaged scholarship to impact community transformation, thereby shaping both individuality and community and presenting opportunities to infuse day-to-day life with humanistic knowledge and vice versa.
No doubt, the discipline variably referred to as Black/Africana Studies continues to present various definitions of what it is and what it constitutes. Indeed, there are still some who insist that it is not even a discipline as of yet, but a conceptually interdisciplinary field of study that supplements traditional disciplines. Nonetheless, we affirm the disciplinary nature of the study, which we acknowledge is an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary, theoretical and methodological academic study, consisting of an existing-but-nascent body of systematically and critically derived knowledge about the political, economic, and socio-culturally lived experiences of African descendent and African peoples and communities around the world.
We reference the National Council of Black Studies definition of our disciplinary mission (also called African American and African Studies, Afro-American Studies, Pan-African Studies, Black American Studies, and African Diaspora Studies). NCBS presents the discipline's domain of inquiry as part of a mission to advance and transmit broad knowledge of the histories, cultures, and linkages among peoples of Africa and their descendants in the New World, and to provide intellectual tools to analyze, understand, and address the significant social, political, economic, and humanist problems they face.
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Excerpted from Malcolm X's Michigan Worldview by Rita Kiki Edozie, Curtis Stokes. Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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