What school taught you these wicked lies about Malcolm X? You should demand a tuition refund, subscribe to a better paper, and resolve to get out into the real world more often to find out what's going on.
From the beginning, Malcolm X loved SNCC, and SNCC people loved Malcolm.
Back in 1961, when SNCC executive secretary Jim Forman was desperate to find allies for Robert Williams and Mae Mallory in Monroe, North Carolina, you could count the supporters on your fingers: Malcolm X, Conrad Lynn, Correspondence (U.S. supporters of C.L.R. James), Carl and Anne Braden, and Workers World Party. I think the SWP also helped, but I don't recall whether that was before or after Williams had escaped to Cuba. Carl Marzani and Alex Munsell published Williams' book Negroes With Guns.
Jim was always SNCC's liaison with Malcolm. Lest you infer that Malcolm's hope was to influence allegedly "anti-white" SNCCers, recall that Jim's wife and mother of his children, Dinky Romilly (daughter of Jessica Mitford), is white, and was always prominent at SNCC's public activities (mainly fund raising) in New York and elsewhere in the North. Ricky McDew is white too, the spouse of SNCC's first chairman, who encouraged Jim to forge an alliance with Malcolm. [The women's given names, which they never used, were Constancia and Fredrica, respectively.]
Malcolm's bitter description of the "Farce on Washington" in 1963 -- "They told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and then they told them to get out of town by sundown" -- gave voice to the resentments felt throughout the SNCC ranks, especially after the censorship of John Lewis's speech. John Lewis humiliated as a sop to Kennedy, for Christ's sake! -- SNCC's shy, quiet Ghandian figurehead.
After the defeat of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's challenge to the Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City in 1964 (a SNCC project from start to finish led by Fannie Lou Hamer, though it embraced SCLC and CORE activists), SNCC sent a delegation to tour newly independent Africa, to reflect on SNCC's successes and failures and to work out its future direction. Among those who went were Matt Jones, who had met Oginga Odinga in Atlanta and wrote a SNCC Freedom Singers song about him, and Jim Forman's trusted aide, Ruby Doris Robinson.
The group met Malcolm in Nairobi, and thrilled to his proposed strategy of charging the U.S. with violating the United Nations charter. At that meeting, Malcolm pledged to become personally involved in the Southern Freedom Movement. Upon their return home, SNCC sent a group of Mississippi teens to Harlem to meet and learn from Malcolm. The following February, Jim Forman brought Malcolm to Alabama, where he spoke to students at Tuskegee, and then (with Fred Shuttlesworth and Coretta King, while M.L. King was in jail there) at a mass meeting in Selma.
Malcolm probably would have been in the front row of marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where they were gassed and beaten bloody by Sheriff Jim Clark's mob, but he had been gunned down two weeks earlier. Nowhere were the shock, dismay, and grief over the loss of Malcolm X more heartfelt than in SNCC.
This list has recorded considerable to-and-fro-ing over the role of intellectuals in struggle, with strong points made on both sides. But Rakesh's rubbish about Malcolm X and SNCC highlights the crazy contrarian tendency of so many academically hidebound intellectuals, to construct entirely fictional histories based on faulty book-learning and flawed theory, and then to present them as factual to those who are too young to remember what really occurred.
At bottom such misrepresentations serve only to dishearten people of good will who otherwise might be inspired to action. That is the reason why activists often seem mistrustful of intellectuals. It seems to me that the burden rests with intellectuals to prove themselves worthy of respect, which Rakesh has yet to do. Ken Lawrence