Excerpts from an audio recording and CBS News outtakes of a speech by Malcolm X at a rally of his Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a secular global black nationalist group, Audubon Ballroom, Washington Heights, N. Y., Feb. 15, 1965.

GARVEYITE SON

Malcolm X was a son of Early and Louisa Norton Langdon Little, who were staunch followers of the Hon. Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), the Jamaica-born president-general of the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities’ League (UNIA), the largest mass “black” rights organization in history.

In 1963, he recalled in an interview, “My father was…both a Garveyite and a minister, a Baptist minister,” when “it wasn’t the thing for a black man to be outspoken or to deviate from the accepted stereotype that was usually considered the right image for Negroes to fulfill or reflect” (Kenneth B. Clark interview, [6-4-63], in Clark, “The Negro Protest” [Boston: Beacon, 1963], p. 18).

A year later, he told another interviewer, “my mother…was an active worker in the Marcus Garvey Movement” and, “despite the fact that her own father was white–she had more African leanings and African pride and a desire to be identified with Africa” (Yael Lotan interview, early- or mid-6-64, in Kingston, Jamaica, “Sunday Gleaner Magazine,” 7/12/64, p. 5).

The Littles were members of or active in at least five UNIA divisions: Montreal, Canada, where Louisa joined the UNIA, served as a reporter and met and married the visiting Early; Philadelphia, Pa.; Omaha, Neb., where Early was president and Louisa again served as a reporter; Milwaukee, Wis., where Early was the “spiritual advisor”; and Detroit, Mich., which Early often visited after the family moved to Lansing, Mich.

In mid-1926, Louisa had two reports on the Omaha division appear in the popular “The News and Views of U.N.I.A. Divisions” section of “The Negro World,” the group’s global weekly newspaper (Ted Vincent, “The Garveyite Parents of Malcolm X,” “The Black Scholar,” 3/4-89, pp. 10-13).

RETURN TO THE SOURCE

As Garveyites, the Littles believed in “race”-first solidarity, self-reliance and the select (NOT mass) emigration of skilled Western “pioneers” to Africa to help create a “superstate,” as Mr. Garvey called it, which would be powerful enough to protect peoples of African descent wherever they might be.

After Malcolm X broke with Elijah Muhammad’s pseudo-Islamic, separatist Nation of Islam (NOI) in March 1964, he fully embraced these aspects of his parents’ Garveyite beliefs, which guided his two tours that year of Africa, the so-called Middle East and Europe, first as president of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI), a black nationalist and latter Sunni Islamic group, and later as OAAU chairman.

His first trip included a “hajj,” or religious pilgrimage, to the Muslim holy cities and Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia, which legitimized him as a traditional (so-called orthodox) Muslim.

AN OLD TRADITION

Malcolm X sometimes referred to his beliefs as “Pan-Africanism,” a term originally reflecting the mostly-patronizing interest of moderate Western “black” intellectuals in their ancestral homeland when it was coined by Henry Sylvester Williams at his 1900 Pan-African Conference and promoted by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Mr. Garvey’s bitter rival, thru his four Pan-African congresses (1919-45).

After the British Gold Coast colony gained its independence as Ghana in 1957, its leader, Garvey admirer and Dr. Du Bois protégé Kwame Nkrumah, recast Pan-Africanism as the quest for continental African unity.

However, Malcolm X’s post-NOI black nationalist convictions were the same as his parents’ Garveyism, including his belief in a strong Africa as a protector of ALL “black” people, which Williams and Dr. Du Bois never advocated, although Dr. Nkrumah, under the prodding of U.S. Black Power advocate Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, later did.

In fact, this tenet of Garveyism was CENTRAL to the tradition of black nationalists as early as the 1850s, all of whom thought globally, including Dr. Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Edward Wilmot Blyden, James Theodore Holly, Alexander Crummell and Henry McNeal Turner.

GARVEY DID IT

In this speech, Malcolm X credits Mr. Garvey for beginning the process of uniting the “black” world during his heyday in the 1920s, a grand project that was aborted when the U.S. government convicted and jailed him on a trumped-up mail fraud charge in 1925 and deported him back to his island homeland two years later, which fractured his global movement and undermined his influence.

Six days after this speech, Malcolm X was assassinated at this same auditorium by a six-man “special squad,” including a decoy, from the NOI’s Newark and Plainfield, N.J., mosques.

See also “Malcolm X Compares the Garvey Movement and the Nation of Islam”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLg-gZ_3buU

My thanks to Lou DeCaro, Jr., and Jonathan Orr-Stav for their kind assistance.–PL.

source

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