workingclasshistory:

On this day, 19 May 1925, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, was born in Omaha, Nebraska. The son of a supporter of Marcus Garvey and local leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, he would become one of the most influential advocates of equal rights as well as one of the harshest critics of white supremacy in the United States before his assassination in 1965.
In particular his advocacy of self defence for Black people shocked the establishment:
“Every time you pick up your newspaper, you see that I’m advocating violence. I have never advocated any violence. I’ve only said that Black people who are the victims of organised violence perpetrated upon us, we should defend ourselves… So, we only mean vigorous action in self-defence and that vigorous action we feel we’re justified in initiating by any means necessary. The press call us racist and people who are ‘violent in reverse.‘… They make you think that if you try to stop the Klan from lynching you, you’re practising 'violence in reverse.’”
Originally a member of the Nation of Islam, El-Shabazz later left the group and founded the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity. He increasingly came to reject capitalism as inherently linked to racism, declaring in 1964: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”
Just three days before his murder he delivered a speech stating:
“We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American Negro is part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which has characterised this era… it is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9128/malcolm-x-born
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