February 21, 2025 marked 60 years since the assassination of Malcolm X. As he took to the stage for a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, the legendary minister and Black activist was gunned down in cold blood by three men, who shot him 21 times as his wife and daughters watched in terror from the front row.
Decades later, in November 2024, one of those daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, stood in front of the press to announce that her family had filed a $100 million wrongful death lawsuit alleging a conspiracy by the New York Police Department, FBI and CIA to murder her father and pin it on former Nation of Islam (NOI) members.
Though the lawsuit is new, the allegations of a state conspiracy are not. Malcolm X was one of the most radical figures of the Civil Rights era. Raised by political activists, his own father killed by an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, he was a charismatic, passionate and fearless fighter against white supremacy and the racist American state. He was a staunch Black nationalist for most of his public life and one of the loudest voices calling for Black empowerment. To many people, it is not hard to believe that the ruling class would want him dead.
But, 60 years removed from his assassination, it’s an important time to reflect on and reexamine our understanding of Malcolm X’s political development. The Black struggle rages on, and many of the conditions Malcolm X fought against — income inequality, police violence, an inadequate education system, and racial discrimination — are as present as ever under a Trump administration that is steering American capitalism to even more ruthless lows.
As we ask ourselves what it will take to achieve Black liberation, it’s useful to consider how Malcolm X thought about that same question, especially in the final days of his life when he broke from the NOI and began to grapple with an internationalist and anti-capitalist point of view.
Black Nationalism
Politics were a part of Malcolm X’s life from the start. His parents taught their children to embrace Black pride, and they were key activists in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a Black nationalist group founded by Marcus Garvey. After his father’s death and his mother’s institutionalization in a mental hospital, Malcolm bounced between foster homes before ending up in prison. At 20 years old, his siblings introduced him to the NOI — at the time, a tiny organization that preached a form of Islam that differed greatly from mainstream Islam.
The NOI gave Malcolm X something to fight for and organize through. For the next decade, he would become the public face of the group, and as his profile grew, so did its membership (up to 100,000 by the early 1960s).
While Martin Luther King Jr. was calling for racial unity, Malcolm X preached in favor Black nationalism, an ideology that views racial integration as a pipe dream. According to Black nationalism, it would be better for Black people to secede from other races and establish their own Black nation. Some Black nationalists advocate for a “return to Africa.” Others call for the creation of Black capitalism, essentially a separate economy where Black people only buy from Black-owned businesses.
The flaw with Black nationalism is that it preserves the very system that creates racial oppression in the first place: capitalism. Oppression is baked into the profit motive that drives capitalism; it requires a system of haves (the ruling class who own capital and the means of production) and have nots (the exploited working class who trade their labor for money). Racism is one way in which the ruling class divides, exploits and oppresses the working class, keeping the working class busy hating each other rather than their true enemy, the capitalists.
It’s a flaw that Malcolm X began to grapple with in the final year of his life, when his personal politics began to diverge dramatically from that of the NOI.
Internationalism & Anti-capitalism
In the early 60s, a split developed between Malcolm X and the NOI’s leader, Elijah Muhammad. While Malcolm wanted to move the NOI further into political struggle during the Civil Rights movement, Muhammad demanded he fall back and focus on the organization’s religious ministry. The final straw was Malcolm’s comments after the JFK assassination, when he famously said, “the chickens have come home to roost,” in defiance of NOI orders that banned ministers from commenting on the killing. He was banned from public speaking for 90 days.
Malcolm left the NOI in 1964 promising to build a new Black nationalist organization. He set out abroad, and his international travels to Africa, Europe and the Middle East opened him up to new ideas. He converted to Sunni Islam, and he became more exposed to the international struggle against imperialism and colonialism. He witnessed different forms of racial oppression, and they challenged his preconception that the primary conflict was between Black and white people. That was especially true after a visit to the Northern African country of Algeria, where many people did not have dark skin. He began to view Black struggle through an international lens, where the oppressed of every nation could be united against their common oppressors.
“It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white, or as a purely American problem,” he said. “Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”
Turning his attention to the struggle at home, he called for independent political action for Black people. He was a fierce critic of the Democratic Party, which had positioned itself well among liberal Black activist organizations like the NAACP. He also met with the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization. Commenting on the two-party system, he said “With these choices, I felt the American black man only had to choose which one to be eaten by, the ‘liberal’ fox or the ‘conservative’ wolf — because both of them would eat him.”
His understanding of the role of Black workers in the labor struggle remained raw. While he did call for the poor to conduct rent strikes, he did not yet advocate for Black workers to take part in labor action. For example, a call for Black and white workers to withhold their labor power and strike capitalists where it hurts most — their wallets — would have been a radical demand at the height of the Civil Rights era.
And he still held some illusions in liberal institutions. He launched a campaign to take the US to the United Nations and charge it with crimes against African American human rights. Although this followed in the tradition of the “We Charge Genocide” campaign launched by Black activists Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, and William Paterson in 1951, the reality is that the UN is an extension of US imperialism and capitalism. No justice for Black people can be found within that bourgeois institution.
His Legacy Today
Malcolm X only lived to be 39 years old, but he had multiple political shifts during his short life. At times his views were backwards; he could be misogynist, homophobic, and antisemitic. His championing of Black nationalism pointed toward a dead end. But he was honest about his failings, and his political development in the final year of his life suggested he was on a trajectory toward an anti-capitalist analysis. Although he was never a socialist, one can’t help but wonder what conclusions he could have drawn had he not been killed so early in this process.
MLK was also drawing anti-capitalist conclusions at the end of his life. What would have happened if he and Malcolm X had joined forces on the Poor People’s campaign? What might have been possible if Malcolm had been able to throw himself full force into the anti-Vietnam War campaign? What would his legacy look like today if he had advocated for a multi-racial revolutionary mass movement?
These ideas are a bigger danger to the ruling class because they directly attack the foundations of capitalism. The international ruling elite, US governmental forces and NOI members wanted Malcolm dead because of his potential to organize, inspire and provide an alternative to racism and capitalism.
It’s easy to find this demoralizing — what hope is there for change if our political leaders can be cut down by the powers that be? The truth is that while leaders like Malcolm X can inspire, true revolutionary power relies on the power of the many; with multiracial mass movements united around a political program that points the way toward a socialist future.
