Living in the Centennial Era of Malcolm X
By Jimmy Jones
Jul/Aug 25
“O ye who believe! stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for God can best protect both” (Quran 4:135).
This powerful statement from the Muslim holy book is also found in an unexpected place. According to Harvard University’s “Ask a Librarian” service, these words are displayed in Wasserstein Hall on the Harvard Law School campus as part of the “Words of Justice” art exhibit. Ironically, even though this high standard of justice can be celebrated at an elite American educational institution, it can also be easily denied.
Perhaps the most emblematic example of the denial of justice in the United States are those oft repeated words that appear in the second paragraph of the country’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This compelling declaration of equality and justice sounds magnificent. However, when it was passed by the Second Continental Congress in 1776, this declaration failed miserably when it came to the rights of enslaved Black “men.” Further, even though “men” was commonly used at that time as inclusive of males and females, women had to struggle for almost a century and a half in order to obtain the right to vote in electoral politics. It has only been 105 years since women ultimately received that right with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Thus, for Black enslaved people and women in this country, the justice declared by the Declaration of Independence was, in reality, justice denied.
But the battle for justice did not end in 1920. For instance, on June 8, 1925, in Gitlow vs. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court established that the First Amendment’s free speech protections applied to states. Up until this point, the understanding was that the Constitution’s Bill of Rights (which includes the First Amendment) only applied to federal law. Today, this Supreme Court ruling supporting universally protected free speech is being aggressively challenged.
Currently, the full force of the U.S. government is being weaponized to prosecute free speech. Under the pretext of fighting antisemitism and terrorism, American politicians have sought to defend Israel’s killing of over 50,000 Gazans (mainly women and children) since Oct. 7, 2023 in a so-called “war” bankrolled by American taxpayers. For Muslims, Arabs, Palestinian Americans, allied organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace, and for the country’s diverse body of university students intent on standing up for justice in Palestine, the current McCarthy-like crackdown on free speech is a textbook case of justice denied.
Malcolm Little
Gitlow vs. New York was decided when Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X) was only 21 days old living in Omaha, Neb. He was the fourth of seven children born to Earl and Louise Little. He also had 3 half siblings from his father’s previous marriage. When Little was just 12 days shy of his second birthday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued another infamous ruling. In Buck v Bell, the court held that a 21-year-old white woman could be forcibly sterilized because, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
In this case, the justices declared 8-1 that it was in the state’s best interest to sterilize such people to help improve society and the white race. This unjust decision led to the forced sterilization of over 60,000 people in more than 30 states between 1927 and 1979 as part of the then popular Eugenics movement. Subsequent researchers have called this a “war against the weak.”
The America that Malcolm Little was born into was filled with this kind of injustice. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, over 4,400 Black Americans were lynched between Reconstruction and World War II. Little’s America was a world in which you needed to be the right type of person in order to simply survive.
Malcolm Little, a post World War I baby, was born into a family deeply influenced by Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanist United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In his iconic Autobiography (1965), Little remembered his father: “the image of him that made me proudest was his crusading and militant campaigning with the words of Marcus Garvey. . . it was only me that he sometimes took with him to the Garvey UNIA meetings which he held quietly in different people’s homes.”
When Little was about 6 years old, Earl Little died in Lansing, Mich. in a mysterious streetcar “accident” which Malcolm believed was really a consequence of his outspokenness and organizing around racial issues. Again, although the Supreme Court made a justice-declared ruling supporting universal free speech, it was apparent that when it came to descendants of formerly enslaved people (like his father) and immigrants (like his mother), this was just another case of justice denied.
Both parents’ involvement in the UNIA, his father’s suspicious death, and his mother’s devastating institutionalization when he was 12 were events that had a great impact on the man that he was to become. Thus, when Little encountered Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, he was prepared to accept these illuminating new teachings.
Malcolm X
In the 100 years since Malcolm Little’s birth on May 19, 1925, we have seen justice declared then ultimately denied multiple times. For example, on May 17, 1954 as Malcolm X was about to turn 29, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling declaring the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. This ruling overturned the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case which allowed states to maintain segregated but supposedly “equal” public facilities. This justice declared Supreme Court decision was quickly subverted in 1955 by Brown V Board of Education II, a justice denied ruling which allowed states to move painfully slowly toward desegregation with the vaguely-worded “all deliberate speed” doctrine.
By 1954, Malcolm X was a prominent minister in the Nation of Islam. While much of the Black community saw Brown v. The Board of Education as justice declared, Malcolm saw it as tokenism and hypocrisy. As a proponent of Black nationalism and self-determination, he saw Brown for what it was: another example of justice denied.
Despite such duplicitous justice declared/justice denied realities, Malcolm X went on to become an articulate and assertive international spokesperson for human rights. Up until his assassination in front of his pregnant wife and four young daughters on Feb. 21, 1965 at the age of 39, he consistently spoke truth to power.
In his new book, Mark Whitaker meticulously detailed how Malcom X posthumously continues to impact all Americans. On page xvii of The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America, Whitaker wrote, “In the 21st century, the influence of Malcolm X on American politics ranged from the hold he had over the imagination of Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, to the inspiration he provided to the young leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement that in the summer of 2020 produced the largest outpouring of interracial protest in support of racial justice in a generation.”
60 years after Malcolm refuted his reputation for condoning violence by urging supporters to cast ballots before resorting to bullets, his name was invoked at a Democratic presidential convention. After Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the party’s ticket in the summer of 2024, delegates from Malcolm’s home state of Nebraska proudly wore T-shirts emblazoned with his image on the convention floor in Chicago one of their native icons during a raucous roll call vote. On the political right, meanwhile, X’s calls for Black self-improvement and economic self-reliance have also made him a hero to conservative Black intellectuals, jurists, and policymakers.
100 years after his birth and 60 years after his death, X’s iconic persona encourages Muslims and non-Muslims alike to aspire to obey these powerful words of the Quran, “O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even as against yourself, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for God can best protect both” (4:135-136).
Jimmy E. Jones, DMin, is Executive Vice President and Professor of Comparative Religion and Culture at The Islamic Seminary of America.
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