When Nathan talks about "ties," he is obviously distorting the real relationship between the NOI and the KKK, let alone Malcolm X's role in all this. As has been repeatedly pointed out, this was Elijah Muhammed's cockeyed scheme and not Malcolm's. It is simply ahistorical to attack Malcolm's role in this meeting. Daniel calls it a "factoid". I would go further. I would call it an innuendo. It is an attempt to shift the focus away from Malcolm's own political trajectory and turn him into a simple black hate-monger. Liberals were guilty of this, long after Malcolm had dropped every vestige of anti-white rhetoric. In the last year of his life, he had to repeatedly explain to reporters from the NY Times why he was not a "black racist". Rakesh and Nathan are simply repackaging this line of attack.
More to the point of collaborating with the KKK, Nathan's beloved Democratic Party was much more into this than the NOI ever was. Bobby Kennedy's dragged his feet as Attorney General when civil rights workers were being beaten or murdered in cold blood. Why? Because the Democratic Party was running the segregationist state governments in the Deep South and nobody wanted to alienate the Dixiecrats. Democratic Party collaboration with the KKK was one of the main causes of the black nationalist revolt, because MLK Jr. and others did not want to break with the racist party which included real Klansmen like George Wallace, Orville Faubus, Lester Maddox, and John Stennis.
> But to discount all the NOI years as
>Louis argues for is to ignore the years that made Malcolm famous.
>Malcolm's last year is a fascinating story of personal discovery, but only
>a small handful of mostly white Trotskyists reduce Malcolm to incipient
>socialist wish fulfillment.
I do not "discount" the NOI years. I simply challenge the notion that the NOI "collaborated" with KKK terror. This is a filthy lie. Anybody who has the slightest understanding of black history in the 50s and 60s would realize how defamatory this is. To begin with, it is ridiculous to assume that the NOI would have ever agreed to not defend civil rights activists in the south when they were hostile to the integration project to begin with. Elijah Muhammed was not interested in integrated schools. He believed in black-only schools under NOI control. He was an ardent separationist. If he wanted to speak to the Klan, it would have been from the perspective of one separationist group speaking to another.
The other thing that continues to amaze me is that anybody could have taken the discussion seriously to begin with. The notion that the KKK could have played a role in granting the NOI millions of acres in the Deep South is absurd. When you read the FBI account, you are struck by the unreality of the whole thing.
Elijah Muhammed was an apolitical nut. His overtures to the KKK would have and could have no impact on the civil rights movement because the NOI lacked the political and institutional power to defeat Klan violence. One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to assume that the NOI was a potential "armed detachment" of the civil rights movement, but forsook this when the KKK offered it some kind of sweetheart "deal." That would have been a real betrayal, but only if there were the slightest shred of evidence that the NOI had some kind of commitment to integration to begin with. As Ken Lawrence points out, the only section of the civil rights movement that was interested in armed self-defense were those who had been PART of the civil rights movement and evolved beyond pacifism. Robert Williams, the subect of the excellent "Negroes with Guns" published by the SWP, had been the president of a local NAACP chapter. The NOI never had anything to do with this. They were too busy setting up mosques or selling bean pies.
>Even if you take Pathfinder Press as gospel, you see a bunch of different
>ideas swirling around, some that fit Rakesh's "radical shopkeeping" model
>and others that show Malcolm moving towards becoming a political hack.
No, the only one that is moving toward becoming a political hack is you, Nathan.
>I have the sense that if Malcolm had lived, Louis would be denouncing him
>as a loudmouthed party hack who had sold out the people to participate in
>bourgois politics.
No, Malcolm was against supporting Democrats. He viewed this party as the "fox" while the Republicans were the "wolves". I instead denounce "socialists" who urge people to support politicians like Bill Clinton, who has presided over the end of welfare. This act has done more to injure black people than all his token appointments can make up for.
>In a sense, Malcolm's death was the best thing that ever happened to him,
>since everyone can project wish fulfillment onto him, without him ever
>choosing one direction or the other and breaking people's heart.
This is a disgusting comment on Nathan Newman's cynical attitude toward politics. "Projecting wish fulfillment" is an apt description for the Clinton presidency and captures his own prostration before the loathsome warmonger and racist from Arkansas.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)