◆ SpookStack

” t+ —! 4 THE LESSON OF MALCOLM X If Makolm X were not a Negro, his autobiography would be litle more than s journal of abnormal psychology, the story of a burglar, dope pusher, addict and jailbird—with a family history of insanity—who acquires messianic de- lusions and sets forth to preach an upside-down religion of “brotherly” hatred. What lends importance to Malcolm's otherwise depressing tale is that he is a leader of the Black Muslims, a sort of Negro Ku Klux Klan. Nobody knows just how large « following he has, but unquestionably the militant hatred he preaches was behind some of the ’ violence of the summer riots in the North. Society musi share the blame for making Malcolm X the angry and possibly dangerous man that he is. His story is the story of all the injustice suill inflicted on his race; it begins in senseless cruelty and violence, moves through poverty and deprivation to the capricious murder of his father and his mother’s insanity, through hia own caay drift into crime and long imprisonment, 1o—finally—the catharsis of a pseudoreligious revejggion. He is, in truth, the product of a world he never made. Bui he ia also, like every other man, self-made. The afsne unjust world has also turned out a Martin Luther King, who has had to face the same deprivations and senseless crucities, yet through them hag reached @ personal serenity and religious revelation founded on the idea of brotherly love. America may consider itself tucky that in a large poll which The New York Times took in Harlem—by coincidence, just before the riots——-King had more than 12 times as many followers as Malcolm X. We say lucky, because this fact shows. More patience, forbearance and trust among Negroes than their past treatment has justified. America has been lucky like that for a long time. The persecuted, neglected, mistreated Negro minority would have seemed a perfect setup for Communist ugitators—and Lenin proved that a very amall minority, properly or- ganized, can overthrow a stale. Yet it is a tribute to the inherent loyalty and good sense of the American Negro that the Communists could never make any real headway among them. It is likely that Malcolm X won't either. It would be understandable if all the ignorant hatreds of the Ku Klux Kian created a black-zobed mirror image of revenge. But Negroes, by and large, are not vengeful. Unlike Maicolm X, must of them would laugh at Mr. Elijah Muhammad's childlike fantasy that the “white devil” is a genetic aberration from the “natusal man,” the Negro, who will regain his rightful mastery when “the black original race (gives] birth to one whose wisdom, knowledge and power would be infinite.” Yet this fantasy is fo more childish than the solemn convicuon of muny a Mississippi fundamentalist that God has doomed Negroes to eternal inferierity as the “sons of Ham," condemned to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water." Though no man, as Jefferson warned, is born booted and spurred with the right to ride on the backs of his fellows, some of the Missis- sipp) delegates to the Democratic convention in Atlantic City seemed to be still under that misspprehensicn. The lesson of Malcolm X, and the lesson of the Mississippi showdown at Atlantic City, is that 49 million Negra Americans, who are equally taxed in all respects, still do not get equat representation, politically or otherwise. Taxe- tion without representation is still tyranny, and until all Americans join in providing every citizen with the rights of citizenship, we shail be lucky if Malcolm X is not succeeded by even weirder and more virulent exipegndats.