Malcolm X

1925–1965

African-American Civil Rights Leader

The masculinity of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) is central to his importance within the black community. Malcolm's appeal and continuing legacy stems from his performance and articulation of a vision of black masculinity grounded in black militancy and self-defense.

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska. After white supremacists killed his father and his mother's health deteriorated due to mental illness, Malcolm spent most of his childhood in various foster homes. While in prison for burglary, he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI), a black Muslim group that asserted black pride and embraced Islam as the true religion of nonwhite peoples. When he was released from prison in 1952, Malcolm became a minister, and eventually the national spokesman, for the NOI.

Despite his revolutionary rhetoric, Malcolm accepted and promoted a reactionary and traditional vision of masculinity. To Malcolm, an America dominated by whites required black men to safeguard African-American women and children from whites' hostility and violence. To do this, black men had to function as effective breadwinners and providers in patriarchal families. Citing the brutality faced by female civil rights workers and the history of white rape of black women, Malcolm posited male protection as central to an authentic black masculinity, wondering how black men could “ever expect to be respected as men with black women being beaten and nothing being done about it” (hooks, 186).

Malcolm perceived a historic castration and emasculation of black men as part of their oppressive American experience. He therefore rejected his original surname, which he believed had been given to his ancestors by white slaveholders, and assumed the surname “X” because he believed that black American men had been shorn of meaningful masculine identity when they were involuntarily transported from Africa to America and made subservient to whites. While exposing America's role in the oppression of black men throughout U.S. history, from slavery to police brutality, Malcolm equally blamed black women. Arguing that black liberation and black manhood were impeded by a matriarchal family structure, he often linked black women and whites as joint emasculators of black men and excoriated black women as “the great tool of the devil” (hooks, 187).

Malcolm presented himself and the NOI as the masculine alternative to what he considered a feminized integrationist movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. He argued that integrationist goals and King's strategy of nonviolence contributed to the brutalization of black women and children at the hands of violent whites and smacked of unmanly passivity, subjugation, and emasculation. He proposed instead self-defense, assertive language, and black autonomy from white America as the bases of black masculinity.

Increasingly frustrated with the NOI's apolitical stances and concerned by accusations that NOI leader Elijah Muhammad had fathered illegitimate children, Malcolm broke from the NOI in 1964. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, an Islamic holy site in Saudi Arabia, Malcolm's views of masculinity and gender changed. He rarely spoke thereafter about liberation being the sole responsibility of men, or of women being complicit in the oppression of black men. Instead, he supported a black masculinity defined less by providing for and protecting black women than by joint sacrifice and struggle in a daily fight against white supremacy. This transformation was halted by his assassination in 1965.

...