Rakesh wrote: "My understanding of Malcolm X derives from several dinners with the prominent SNCC lawyer Len Holt who was quite non plussed by Malcolm's politics before and after his break with SNCC. So I did not learn it from any school. I certainly did not learn about Malcolm X from Spike Lee."
KL: In that case, unless you talk to other SNCC people, I guess you have a problem, but it's a problem that ought to evoke rather more humility and rather less nutty bombast. I have not read Clay Carson's history of SNCC, nor, for that matter, any of the others since Howard Zinn's, but I once played a tiny role in the organization; in 1964 I married the then 16-year-old co-chair of high school SNCC in Chicago; I put up SNCCers from the South when they needed a chance to cool out; from the 1970s to the 1990s I worked with many of them in Mississippi and other parts of the South, and helped organize the sentimental reunions; Jim Forman's kids played with mine while we talked, and Dinky was on the SCEF staff when I was; and I knew/know many of the other people we're discussing as friends and comrades. I write mostly from personal recollection.
At the very inception (for me that means the Fall 1960 SNCC conference in Atlanta, when I was just a 17-year-old white kid from Chicago hoping to learn how to change the world for the better), SNCC members debated the issue of violence. The majority regarded nonviolence as a necessary tactic, not a principle. SNCC's official public policy was nonviolence, but the membership always included advocates and practitioners of armed defense and offense. To my knowledge, their history has not been written comprehensively, although several years ago I published an interview with one of the SNCC guerrilla fighters.
In 1960 the sit-in movement first erupted at Greensboro, and the initial organizing conference was held at Raleigh, but the two most prominent and influential SNCC groups were based in Nashville and Atlanta. The Nashville Student Movement had been tutored by Jim Lawson in Ghandian nonviolence, which thus was the deep-seated philosophical basis of the group, most visibly led by John Lewis, Diane Nash, and James Bevel. The Atlanta group was more diverse, and included the "cowboys," as the military activists were known.
It is not my place to tell any living person's war stories, but it is well known that when SNCC moved into Mississippi, Jim Forman required that the Freedom Houses be capable of repelling armed attacks. The martyred Ralph Featherstone (killed by a bomb along with Che Payne in Maryland, en route to Rap Brown's trial) was the brave and esteemed leader of the SNCC cowboys in Mississippi, based at Meridian in the heart of Klan territory. He carried out many such assignments.
In Holmes County, Hartman Turnbow became a SNCC hero (and subject of a Freedom Singers song) after he returned gunfire against KuKlux attackers and routed them. Although these episodes have never received widespread dissemination, the movement cannot be properly understood without according them proper credit. These events were not and are not invisible to scholars who care to explore the record. Many published letters from Mississippi volunteers alluded to them, and Joanne Grant reported on them in the National Guardian.
Other armed Black movement groups sprang up all over -- Rev. Charles Koen's Cairo United Front; Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick's Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa and Natchez; Max Stanford's [later Akbar Muhammad Ahmad] Revolutionary Action Movement in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and elsewhere; Skip Robinson's United League in Holly Springs; and others. When I moved to Mississippi in 1971 the Deacons were proud and active in Natchez, and Rudy Shields headed RAM in Yazoo City. When we picketed Sunflower supermarkets in Belzoni and Indianola, everyone on the line knew that Rudy was packing his .45 automatic. The United League expanded throughout the northern third of the state after 1978, and engaged in several shootouts with Klansmen. Members of those groups urged me to carry a gun at all times, and I did. They also provided discreet security for me when I gave anti-Klan interviews on radio talk shows in rural counties.
These armed groups were loosely federated, and all were sufficiently mobile that they frequently converged to provide security as violence erupted from place to place. After the incident at the Pettus Bridge, for example, one of my Chicago SNCC friends was posted with his pistol to Selma. All the armed groups joined the 1966 march from the Delta to Jackson after James Meredith had been shot (best remembered for Willie Ricks's "Black Power" chant that transformed the Freedom Movement.)
Except for Robert Williams, who was quickly exiled to Cuba, then to China, but kept in touch through his newsletter The Crusader, Malcolm X was the most visible advocate of armed defense. The cowboys revered him, and they in turn commanded respect from nearly all the community-based SNCC organizers. That is the basis of my previous report. But as long as the official SNCC policy was to turn the other cheek, Malcolm could not endorse them publicly, nor did they expect him to. But to style their hero as a fascist collaborator with their most dangerous enemies is obscene.
Rakesh: "Malcolm X's criticism of the Farce on Washington was quite important--I have already written that-- but again Forman is more illuminating here than Malcolm X."
KL: Why? Malcolm's speech stimulated and shaped mass consciousness. Jim had felt that way both before and after the march, but made no public statement that I recall (because he wanted John Lewis at the podium regardless of other considerations), certainly not one that had any political impact.
Rakesh: "It does not seem to me that you prove that the SNCC could count on Malcolm X, while still a member of NOI, for much other than support of Robert Williams."
KL: This reflects the arrogance and incompetence of the academic intellectual, either incapable of understanding the importance of example and inspiration, or else playing it down for effect. What Rakesh can't see or imagine, therefore doesn't exist -- inverting Descartes.
Rakesh: "And people probably didn't know at that time that Malcolm X had entered the NOI into tacit agreements with Klan. I am curious about why you have said nothing about this."
KL: No one I know knew it, but there was at least one public meeting between Elijah Muhammad's people and a Klan group, which had been photographed and reported. Given NOI ideology, and the Messenger's iron grip on it, I doubt anyone would have regarded this as anything more than a repellent duty Malcolm had been obliged to perform. I also doubt that the "agreement" consisted of anything more than an acknowledgment of both groups' commitment to separation of the races. I know for a fact that Malcolm approved not only of defense, but also of reprisals against KKK terrorists, and of offensive operations against them.
Here's a hypothetical, fictitious example to show what I mean, applied to an actual event: When HUAC came to Chicago in 1965, we convened a mass meeting with Jim Forman as the speaker. He urged everyone "to put their bodies on the line," in protest, and we (virtually every Chicagoan in SNCC and Friends of SNCC) did, tearing up the hearings, attacking the cops, filling the jails, and chasing the Committee out of town in disarray, never again to venture outside Washington. Today Jim is dying of cancer. Suppose he were to confess on his deathbed that on that trip the Communist Party had taken him to a secret meeting with Mayor Daley, to see if a compromise could be reached to avoid the near riots that actually occurred. Should I regard that, if such a thing had transpired, as a betrayal?
Now tell me this: Do you possess a single scrap of evidence that any public political act of Malcolm X's was in any respect insincere, or otherwise compromised by his meeting with the men in hoods? Or is it, as I suspect, the other way around -- without that incident you would lack a pretext for your sweeping charge against Malcolm?
Rakesh: "What made Malcolm X an interesting political figure was his break from the NOI, not his participation in it. We can argue about whether the ideological break was completed before he was assassinated by the Nation of Islam. I think Malcolm X's thought remained a confusing and contradictory mix of islam, pan africanism, incipient socialism, black business development through separation."
KL: Another stupid academic arrogance. The events of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s transformed every activist, not always in a positive direction. The SWP, for example, learned very little from Malcolm's independence, and exaggerated his purported areas of agreement with its brand of Marxism, while playing down the importance of his most trusted collaborators (followers of Robert Williams who founded the Republic of New Africa, such as [revolutionary nationalist] Gaidi Obadele and Imari Obadele, and [Marxist] Wilbur Grattan).
Next month the The United States Postal Service will commemorate Malcolm X as a misunderstood liberal integrationist. Instead of indulging such nonsense, those who are dedicated to the freedom struggle owe our forebears an honest, fully nuanced study of the people and the times, and how they interacted to alter the course of history. Choosing a presumed outcome that soothes your own prejudices as more worthy than the rest obfuscates the importance of both biography and history.
Rakesh: "I am sorry that you have no respect for my intellect. But it's something I will have to live with. You can imagine how pained I am to have won the disrespect of you and Proyect."
KL: I have no knowledge of Proyect's academic influence, if any, though he lays claim to an Upper West Side connection. I have none, so your career will not suffer from my failure to endorse these affronts to a true champion of human liberation. I hope you ate well at the dinners with Len Holt. It would be a pity if you had come away, not only with a poor attitude toward a people's hero, but with indigestion to boot.
Ken Lawrence