FBI Memo 5/17/61 (From Clayborne Carson's "Malcolm X: The FBI File"):
[BUREAU DELETION] advised on January 30, 1961, that certain Klan officials met with leaders of the NOI on the night of January 28, 1961, in Atlanta, Georgia. One of these NOI leaders identified himself as MALCOLM X of New York, and it was the source's understanding that MALCOLM X claimed to have a hundred seventy-five thousand followers who were complete separationists, were interested in land and were soliciting the aid of the KLAN to obtain land. During this meeting subject stated that his people wanted complete separation from the white race, and that land obtained would be occupied by them and they would maintain their own businesses and government...
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Now the first observation one can make is that either Rakesh was speaking out of ignorance when he says that this meeting was about "cooperating" with Klan terror or just trying to pull the wool over people's eyes. I trust that the newspaper article he is searching for is not in the San Francisco Chronicle article, but in something called the Weekly Chronicle, a tabloid out of Australia. The latest issue has an article titled "I gave birth to a sixty pound baby who looks like Elvis."
We have to allow for two possibilities at this meeting. One, that Malcolm was just carrying out an assignment for the NOI. The other is that he had long abandoned this sort of lunacy, by the time of his subsequent evolution in an internationalist and non-racial direction. As it turns out, both possibilities are true.
Placing things in their historical context is de rigeur for Marxist scholars. For example, when I was a member of the SWP I was required to defend the horrible party line on gay liberation as a "peripheral struggle". Not only did I not believe it when I defended it publicly, I abandoned it the minute I broke with the SWP. The same is true of Malcolm and his relation to the NOI, which PROMOTED these sorts of insane overtures to the Klan AGAINST Malcolm's better judgement. Once he left the NOI, he campaigned to tell the truth about these secret meetings.
Now you don't even have to dig very far to know that this is the truth. In the preface to Clayborne Carson's book on the FBI files, which is generally hostile to Malcolm X, he states that Malcolm "expressed his shame over participating in the meeting, revealing that it resulted in a tacit agreement between the NOI and the Klan."
I regard most Malcolm X biographies as fairly hostile to him, but on this particular question, none that I have seen consider Malcolm's actions to be other than reflecting his submission to NOI discipline. Furthermore, they point out that it was Malcolm himself who subsequently revealed to the world that these overtures had taken place, at GREAT RISK to his life.
Bruce Perry, author of "Malcolm: the life of a man who changed Black America" writes, "Malcolm dug his own grave by announcing, back in New York, that he planned to expose Elijah Muhammed's flirtation with the Ku Klux Klan, which, like the Nation of Islam, advocated racial separation. Five days later, Muhammed Speaks published the following statement by one of Elijah's 'personal' secretaries: throughout the years, I have witnessed the birth and death of many ministers."
The other thing to remember is that once Malcolm severed his ties with the NOI, he repeatedly offered his solidarity to freedom fighters in the south and even softened his attitudes toward Martin Luther King Jr. For an accurate account of Malcolm's militant and public anti-Klan militancy, we read in Peter Goldman's "The Death and Life of Malcolm X":
"The price of defenselessness, as Malcolm saw it, was everywhere in the South that spring and early summer. King's people were being regularly roughed up in St. Augustine; the SNCC-CORE "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi had opened to a wave of beatings, church-burnings and police harassment, and three volunteers--two white college boys and a local black youth--had vanished the very first night. Some of the brothers were itching to retaliate; they wanted Malcolm to take a party of them to Mississippi, say, and while he did the speechmaking, they would organize the local Negroes into armed units trained and equipped to defend their communities and to take a head for a if necessary. This, like so many of the projects they discussed those days, never actually got organized. But it did get advertised, which was Malcolm's gift and was probably just as important; need not actually take heads if one can persuade the enemy that there are people angry enough to take them. Malcolm wired King and James Forman of SNCC that spring, offering to send some of his people South to 'give the Ku Klux Klan a taste of their medicine.'"
Now, it doesn't take a PhD to dig this information up. I just took a walk down to Barnes and Nobel after reading Rakesh's last post and picked up some books that seemed relevant. Ordinarily I use the Columbia library for this, but it is closed for vacation. Now I am not the one pursuing a career in multicultural education, but if I were I'd make damned sure to approach such questions with scrupulous impartiality.
I was persuaded that Rakesh was presenting misinformation and that it wouldn't take much digging to show how disrespectful of historical accuracy he is. Why does he lack the necessary curiosity to dig into the other side of the story? The only place where I have run into such shameful bias is in the sectarian left and in right-wing scholarship. Since Rakesh regards himself as a serious Marxist scholar, I am surprised he can be so lazy and thoughtless.
One last item to consider on Malcolm X and the Klan is the story of his father's run-in with them. Some biographers, including Perry, regard this to be apocryphal. Be that as it may, the inclusion of it in his autobiography is a clear indication of what Malcolm wanted the public record to be, as opposed to the rancid FBI files Rakesh seems so preoccupied with. This is the opening paragraph of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X":
"When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was alone with her three small children, and that my father was away, preaching, in Milwaukee. The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because the 'good Christian white people' were not going to stand for my father's 'spreading trouble' among the 'good' Negroes of Omaha with the 'back to Africa' preachings of Marcus Garvey."
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)