1. Carson reported a meeting Malcolm X had with the KKK as the latter was terrorizing SNCC. Carson, the editor of ML King's papers, was quoted on this in the San Francisco Chronicle in the early 90s. Malcolm X seems to have been sickened by the anti political nature of the NOI which led him to break with it. But the point here is that his radical politics--such as they were--solidify only after the break with NOI.
2. Breitman argues that Malcolm X evolved towards socialism and national liberation movements. I think he overstates the case for the former (for example, having read his last speeches, I don't see much more than radical shopkeeper politics in terms of an actual domestic political economic agenda--certainly the autobiography doesn't move beyond this); moreover Malcolm X never achieved the critical analysis of national liberation movements which has always struck me as Fanon's greatest insight, though his embrace of the peasantry as the subject of revolutionary change seems to me simply wrong or simplistic (no analysis of the internal differentiation of the peasantry and an unjustified writing off of the industrial working class as a labor aristocracy). For example, see Issa Shivji's criticism of Fanon on this.
3. I have given my reasons why I think the NOI can only serve as a force of oppression against black people. It may be incorrect to characterize it as a fascist movement.
4. The NOI is likely to give a black imprimatur to racist and class biased policies, e.g., termination of AFDC or the placing of fatherless black children in orphanages run by crazy Muslim brothers. It's this imprimatur to actual policy, not hate speech, that worries me. It's the overlap between Farakahn and James Q Wilson that troubles me.
5. As for the dialectical or revolutionary possibilities in minority national movements (AIM or La Raza Unida), I disagree. It's not that I think the fight against Dick Wilson was not more than justified. I do. It's just that the occupation of ALcatraz seems to me not have had revolutioanry implications, and La Raza Unida never was clear about what it was trying to do. Electoral politics on the basis of an ethnically defined party in multiethnic polities? Secession?
Yours, Rakesh