The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has announced a “preliminary” review of the police investigation into the assassination of Malcolm X.
The review was reported last week just days after the premiere of the Netflix documentary Who Killed Malcolm X?, on February 7. And comes as the 55th anniversary of X’s murder by gunmen in the Audubon Theatre in Washington Heights on February 21, 1965, is marked today.
When Malcolm X was assassinated, the Black nationalist intellectual and freedom-fighter had just been to Toronto. He had appeared three weeks earlier on CBC’s Front Page Challenge. But that was not his only connection to Canada.
Malcolm’s parents – Earl and Louise Little – met in Montreal in 1917 and married there in 1919. They were also both members in the 1920s of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the world’s first mobilization of Black people aspiring for true equality and liberty – not to mention, the end of white imperialism in Africa and the Caribbean. By 1922, there were 32 chapters of UNIA in Canada.
Culturally, X’s influence on Black Canada endures to this day.
In his gangster days as Detroit Red, X might have had occasion to cross over to Windsor, or at least to look across the Detroit River and wonder about the white-ruled Dominion south of the United States.
To be sure, like many African-Americans, X may have deemed Canada as Canaan – the “Promised Land” at the end of the Underground Railroad, delivering freedom plus “milk and honey” for fugitive slaves and slave resisters. Martin Luther King, Jr. idealized this notion in his 1967 CBC Massey Lectures.
As a pro-human-rights tribune, X formulated the talking point that any place “south of the Canadian border,” not just the once-slaveholding South, was a warren of Black oppression. Thusly, X was deliberately recasting the anti-racism of the civil rights movement to view all of America, not just the Dixiecrat-controlled South, as practicing white supremacy.
Moreover, X was postulating that anti-Black racism in the U.S. was connected to the historical internationalism of African-American freedom-struggle, and its alliance with Algerians, Vietnamese, Cubans and, notably for Canadians, the “French-Canadians” fighting to defend their language and liberate themselves from their Anglo overlords.
I’ve always wondered whether Pierre Vallières, in his memoir-cum-political tract, White Niggers Of America: The Precocious Autobiography Of A Quebec “Terrorist”, was influenced by X’s Autobiography Of Malcolm X. Certainly, the styles are similar. X demonizes white Americans as reactionaries. Similarly, Vallières damns English-Canadians as colonialists vis-à-vis Quebec.
In his 1965 political jeremiad, Lament For A Nation: The Defeat Of Canadian Nationalism, Canuck philosophe George Grant posits the idea, also proposed by X, that America is a diabolical empire, intent on paving over Vietnam – and happy to bully Canada into importing U.S. nuclear missiles to help in that cause.
By the time of his silencing – or, shall we say, “cancelling” – by the Nation of Islam in November 1963 for seemingly gloating over the assassination of JFK, X had become a major proponent of liberation “by any means necessary.” That included armed (guerrilla) struggle, an idea endorsed by the Front de Libération du Québec as well as by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
Not only that, but he was now articulating – especially after his departure from the Nation of Islam (which now advocated X’s ultimate cancellation by assassination) – the need for Black dignity, Black socio-economic and political power, Black history courses and a love of the Black body (so long demonized by white supremacist propaganda).
These ideas also got picked up by Canada’s foremost Black radical of the 1960s, Burnley “Rocky” Jones.
Jones, and his Angela Davis-fierce wife Joan, founded Canada’s singular chapter of the Black Panther Party and hosted Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and his wife, South African-born singer Miriam Makeba.
They applied X to the need to set up the Black United Front of Nova Scotia, the National Black Coalition of Canada and the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission and to support international anti-war struggles in Vietnam, anti-Apartheid in South Africa, decolonization in the Caribbean, as well as acknowledge links between Canada and Africa.
The Joneses helped establish a Transition Year Program (TYP) focusing on cultural history for African-Nova Scotian and Indigenous students, to prepare them to take regular university classes at Dalhousie University. (The University of Toronto’s TYP is modelled on the Dalhousie program.)
The about-to-be-published novelist Austin Clarke was also influenced by X. In 1963, he travelled to Harlem to interview X for CBC Radio. In 1968, Clarke published a radical pamphlet, Black Man In A White Land, which followed X in being issued under a Muslim pseudonym and attacking white (Canadian) racism.
English Canada’s second Black novelist, Guyana-born Jan Carew, published a book on X’s travels in Africa and their influence on West Indian intellectuals.
Today, writers and activists as diverse as Althea Prince and Desmond Cole have reflected X’s thoughts in their work. X’s example is as deathless as our struggles for true freedom and equality seem endless in Canada.
George Elliott Clarke’s latest books are Portia White: A Portrait In Words (Nimbus) and Canticles II (MMXIX) (Guernica), a continuation – via rewrites of scripture of his epic-in-progress.
@nowtoronto
