Abstract
This article places El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s praxis, as well as the Africana [Black] movement for freedom, into a human rights discourse. Exploring his evolution into an internationalist activist-theoretician in five rhythmic movements, if you will, the opening; the transitioning; the solidification; the influencing; and the continuities, it is the central premise of this article that in order to truly grasp the breadth and depth of the Africana [Black] struggle for freedom we must explore those involved and their contributions as a product of a critical human rights consciousness. Accordingly, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz becomes an archetype in this regard. This idea rests upon the assertion that his praxis, albeit incomplete, due to his untimely death, represents an important nexus in the Africana struggle for freedom, merging various manifestations of radical praxis into a clearer articulation of the Black radical tradition.
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Notes
The explicit use of Africana Freedom Movement, instead of Black Freedom Movement or Civil Rights Movement is a discursive and conceptual attempt to expand, link, and map the continuities in radical thought and behavior of Africana world as it relates to organically and systematically addressing the institutional conditions of oppression as a product of racial capitalism. This is an attempt to materially frame and conceptually link Africa with its Diasporic communities, re-inscribing and giving agency to the African world as a whole. As being contributors to and influenced by global interactions.
Vincent Harding extended interview on PBS/Religion & Ethics, August 23, 2013, available here: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/08/23/august-23-2013-vincent-harding-extended-interview/19784/.
Grace Lee Boggs interviewed by Bill Moyers for Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, June 15, 2007, available here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06152007/transcript3.html.
The period between the 1940s and 1950s witnessed crisis and opportunity not only in global political and economic relationships, but also in the Africana movement for freedom. With the end of WWII, resistance in the Africana world rested on the praxis of individuals and institutions were forged in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-racism experiences. These men and women represent what scholar Penny Von Eschen calls the Black “avant garde international left.” This group of activist/scholars sought to find ideological symmetry and behavioral expression with radical elements all over the Africana world in an effort to address the implications of race as a cultural-ideological class construct and its continuities in systemic oppression around the globe. They were exemplars of what Cedric Robinson calls the black radical tradition. This group consists of individuals and organizations, such as, but not limited to the following: W.E. B. Du Bois, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, William Patterson, James and Grace Lee Boggs, James and Esther Jackson, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Amilcar Cabral, Council on African Affairs, National Negro Congress (Civil Rights Congress), Southern Negro Youth Congress, and African Liberation Support Committee. This concept can be expanded to include artist and cultural producers. As presented by Penny Von Eschen, I suggest an expended conceptualization to better provide insight on the development and genealogy or their praxis. Within their praxis, we find several important and interdependent points of continuity, which I call critical Africana human rights consciousness (CAHRC): there was a clear presence of internationalism; clear efforts in creating a counter discourse—verbal and/or written; an experiential understanding of the struggle being fundamentally a human rights struggle; a clear radical ideological frame of reference that guided liberation efforts; and clear adherence to the importance of creating institutions which embodied these components in a concerted and sustained effort to reorder fundamental sociopolitical, economic, and cultural structures that produce and reproduce inequities. The motivating impetus of their efforts was an understanding that race/racism was rooted in the formation of global capitalism, propagated by imperial, colonial projects that evolve over time. It was argued that the bonds in which black Americans shared with colonized people were rooted not only in common culture, but a shared history of the racism spawned by slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Their praxis was expressly a critique and expansion of Western human right theory and practice. In essence, this CAHRC gives a frame to synthesizing the objectives and aims of the expansive terrain of black radical tradition.
Evans, Tony. (2005). “Human rights law as knowledge/power,” Human Rights Quarterly, 27(3): 1046–1068.
Evans, Tony. Human rights law as knowledge/power, 2005: 1050.
I purposely use El Hajj Malik El Shabazz for a number of reasons, but two are primary: (1) Malcolm X was the name given by Elijah Muhammad, however, Malcolm chose the name Malachi Shabazz (a variation of Malik Shabazz) as early as 1949 soon after his conversion to Islam while in prison. Additionally, Malcolm used this name in a 1950 letter to President Truman protesting the Korean War, an early hint of the eventual evolution of Malcolm. More importantly, it also hints at the continuity and legacy of the radical discourse on human rights; (2) while traveling and checking into hotels, Malcolm used his real Muslim name, Malik Shabazz as early as 1963. Echoing the analysis of Abdul Alkalimat (McWorter) in a 1965 Black Liberation Month News article, Malcolm transformation into El Hajj Malik El Shabazz was the external indication of his internal transformation, a transformation that the NOI could not contain. Malik Shabazz represents, for this article, the continuity and legacy of revolutionary change—reclamation of one’s humanity as developed through simultaneous internal and external struggle. Malcolm’s internal journey toward liberation was what he wished for the external world, the Africana world. Malik Shabazz’s praxis encapsulated or embodied the continuity and legacy of the Black radical tradition as an articulation of a critical Africana human rights consciousness, as a project rooted singularly in civil rights being was contradiction in black sociopolitical and cultural liberationist ethos.
The study and ethics of the negro problems are invoked here and built upon Anna Julia Cooper’s The Ethics of the Negro Question delivered at the biennial session of Friends General Conference at Asbury Park New Jersey, September 5, 1902, where she sharply deconstructs the contradictions in American values. She writes, “Professing a religion of sublime altruism, a political faith in the inalienable rights of man as man, these jugglers with reason and conscience were at the same moment stealing heathen from their far away homes, forcing them with lash and gun to unrequited toil, making it a penal offense to teach them to read the word of God,—nay, more, were even begetting and breeding mongrels of their own flesh among these helpless creatures and pocketing the guilty increase, the price of their own blood in unholy dollars and cents.” And WEB Du Bois’s, The Study of Negro Problems, where he argues “Before we can begin to study the Negro intelligently, we must realize definitely that not is he affected by all the varying social forces that act on any nation at his stage of advancement, but that in addition to these there is reacting upon him the mighty power of a peculiar and unusual social environment which affects to some extent every other social force. In the second place we should seek to know and measure carefully all the forces and conditions that go to make up these different problems, to trace the historical development of these conditions, and discover as far as possible the probable trend of further development. Without doubt this would be difficult work, and it can with much truth be objected that we cannot ascertain, by the methods of sociological research known to us, all such facts thoroughly and accurately.”
Human rights as conceptualized by international theory and practice are categorized into the following rights: civil, political, economic, social, and cultural. Current human rights standards and norms are encapsulated in the following two covenants: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The splitting of these covenants was due to competing socialist and capitalist ideological models during the Cold War, with ICCPR associated with the West, capitalism; and ICESCR associated with socialist, communism.
Mao Zedong, Statement Supporting the American Negroes in their just struggle against racial discrimination by U.S. imperialism, released August 8, 1963, given at the request of one the freedom movements’ most neglected activists-intellectuals, Robert F. Williams while living in exile in Cuba.
The point of fragmentation in the African American manifestation of the movement for freedom diverted on the issue of agitating for civil rights or struggling for full access to human rights. The historical period which proves to be insightful in this regard is from 1940 to 1967, where the interaction between the end of WWII, the encroachment of a new phase within the global economy, and global movements against imperialism/colonialism in Africa and Latin America are being played out.
Critical trajectory-setting is used, here, to highlight the importance of understanding the influence of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz is/was at a very high level of consciousness development and theoretical practice. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz evolution as a radical theoretician fits squarely into the postulation that without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement, as his growth on a personal level to find a systematic way toward freedom simultaneously impacted the trajectory of freedom movements across the Africana world as a whole. For more see Cervetto, Arrigo. 1964. Class Struggles and Revolutionary Party. Milan, Edizioni Lotta Comunista; Lenin, V. I. 1971. Lenin Selected Works, Volume I. New York; International Publishers: 119–271; Amilcar Cabral’s, January 1966, address delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana, titled The Weapon of Theory, available: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm.
Antonio Gramsci develops the idea of organic intellectuals in his Prison Notebooks while incarcerated in fascist Italy. Antonio Gramsci asserted in his work that all men are intellectuals. With this, he was suggesting that all men have intellectual and rational capabilities, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals (Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935, David Forgacs (editor), (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Gramsci made a point to distinguish between a traditional intellectual, who think deeply, develop new theories, see themselves as a class apart from society, and theoretically support radical politics, and the thinkers which are produce organically. For Gramsci, organic intellectuals do not simply describe social life within scientific rules, but rather articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. Gramsci’s organic intellectual must be and must constantly become activists, social organizers, or cultural workers who seek to challenge the hegemony of the dominant power class. Also, see paper delivered by William Sales at the May 19, 1987, Malcolm X Study Work Group Meeting titled Malcolm X: Afro American Revolutionary Nationalist.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of literature on Malcolm X: Malcolm X, Malcolm X on Afro-American History (New York; Pathfinder Press, 1987); Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York; Ballantine Books, 1993, originally published in 1964); John H. Clarke, Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1990); Robert Jabara, The Word: The Liberation Analects of Malcolm X (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 1994); Kevin Brown, Malcolm X (Brookfield, Connecticut: The Millbrook Press, 1995); Mustafa El-Amin, Afrocentricity: Malcolm X and Al-Islam (Newark, New Jersey: El-Amin Productions, 1993); Eugene Wolfenstein, E. V., The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981); Bruce Perry, Malcolm X: The Last Speeches (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992); William Strickland, Malcolm X: Make it Plain (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994); David Gallen, D ed., Malcolm A to X: The Man and His Ideas (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992); James Cone, Malcolm and Martin and America: A Dream or Nightmare (New York: Orbis, 1991); Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991); Benjamin Karim, Remembering Malcolm (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992); Archie Epps, eds., Malcolm X: Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard (New York: Morrow, 1968); Louis Lomax, When the Word is Given (New York: Signet Books, 1963); Louis Lomax, The Negro Revolt (New York: Harper & Row, 1962); Joe Wood, eds., Malcolm in Our Image (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); William Sales, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994); George Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1990); George Breitman, eds., By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987); George Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1967); Molefi Asante, Malcolm X as Cultural Hero and Other Essays (Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 1993); Oba T‘Shaka, The Political Legacy of Malcolm X (Chicago: Third World Press, 1983).
William Patterson, a leader of the Communist Party USA, was an eminent civil rights attorney who spearheaded defense of the Scottsboro Nine, Black youth in Alabama framed up on phony rape charges in 1932. In the mid 1930s, Patterson went to Cuba to set up the Cuban International Labor Defense and to organize support for those fighting the dictatorship of Batista. In 1938, Patterson went to Chicago to assist in the direction of and to teach in the Abraham Lincoln School for workers and was the founding editor of the Midwest Daily Record, a newspaper concerned with civil liberties before the term became popular. The International Labor Defense was aggressively harassed by federal agents and disbanded into to form a new organization, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). William L. Patterson became National Secretary of the Civil Rights Congress in 1948. In 1951, We Charge Genocide: the Crime of Government, a petition on behalf of African descended persons in the United States charging the U.S. government with the crime of genocide was published by the Civil Rights Congress and was presented to the United Nations General Assembly in Paris by Patterson and to the United Nations Secretariat in New York by Paul Robeson. Patterson was charged with contempt of Congress because he refused to divulge the names of contributors to the Civil Rights Congress and its bail fund as well as the names of the organizations to which he belonged. Patterson served ninety days in the Federal House of Detention in New York and in the Federal Penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut, on contempt charges in 1954–55. William L. Patterson served as an executive in the management of the Worker, the Daily Worker, the Daily World, and the Longview Publishing Company. He retired in 1958. In May of 1969, he joined the defense team of attorneys for Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. He served as a trustee of the Angela Davis Legal Defense Fund and of the National Legal Defense fund.
This article appears after his April 8, 1964, The Black Revolution speech. From April 13 to May 21, he travels to Mecca, Beirut, Cairo, Nigeria, Monrovia, Dakar, Morocco, Algiers, and Ghana. On June 28, 1964, Shabazz announces the founding of the Organization of African American Unity (OAAU). He returns to Cairo in August.
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party? This question is symbolic of an era with deep consequences for the Black radical international Left. During the late 1940s through the 1950s, the US public were propagandized to believe that they should be in fear of subversive Communist influences throughout their lives. Fear was stoked with unsubstantiated claims that “Communists” have infiltrated US institutions, using their positions as schoolteachers, college professors, labor organizers, artists, or journalists to promote a Communist agenda of world domination. This unbridled paranoia about the specter of an internal Communist plots—generally referred to the Red Scare—reached its zenith between 1950 and 1954, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized, unsubstantiated hearings alleging Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and the US Army. These hearings developed into a second phase that saw the arrest, jailing, and defamation of Black activist, academics, union leaders, artist, politicians, most of whom had an internationalist perspective of the African American manifestation of the Africana freedom struggle expressly centering their praxis in human rights discourse—the avant garde international left.
The impact of these interdependent influences cannot be stressed enough nor negated, as the implications are identifiable today—particularly the ideological vacuum that was and is still present. Without an ideological compass that orders, guides, and/or structures individual and/or collective thought, behaviors, and discourse to racist and disproportionate national and international policy decisions, the legitimacy of the power elite is not completely challenged.
Amílcar Cabral, also known as Abel Djassi, was a leader in the independence struggle which fought and secured liberation in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Cabral was a writer, agronomic engineer, and Marxist nationalist.
Malcolm X addressing African heads of state on July 17, 1964 at the OAU conference in Cairo held July 19–21. This speech was delivered after his June 28, 1964 announcement of the formulation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU); Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, (New York: Grove Press, 1990): 73.
A leading intellectual and activist of the post-WWII period, Alphaeus Hunton, Jr., was the education director of the Council on African Affairs (CAA) and editor of the CAA’s publication, New Africa, from 1943 through 1955. In this capacity, Hunton did more than perhaps any other individual to articulate an anticolonial critique of post-war liberalism and racial capitalism and to advance a vision of Pan-African black identity that stressed the inextricable linkage between African Americans, Africans, and colonized peoples around the world. In short order he transformed the CAA from an educational outreach group with limited reach into a political action organization with widespread influence. Lobbying through the federal government, the United Nations, and the burgeoning black press, Hunton spearheaded CAA campaigns on behalf of striking Nigerian trade unionists, famine relief in West and South Africa, and the African National Congress (ANC) which had initiated its nearly century-long struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Hunton published Decision in Africa: Sources of the Current Conflict in 1957 but was unable to find work commensurate with his education and experience. In 1960, he moved to Guinea and shortly thereafter joined W.E.B. Du Bois in Ghana. In 1966 he relocated to Zambia where he spent his final years as a correspondent for the ANC publication Mayibuye.
This notion is deeply rooted in reclaiming individual agency through the recognition of one’s identity by understanding their role and responsibility within a collective, yet one that is often missed in the study of movements. The evolution, legacy, and continuity of the ways those who are oppressed understand their place in the society as well as the world is informed by the culture within which the individual and collective group was developed and maintained through historical memory. The implications of this is clearly articulated by Amilcar Cabral when he writes that the “principal characteristic, common to every kind of imperialist domination, is the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violently usurping the free operation of the process of development of the productive forces. Now, in any given society, the level of development of the productive forces and the system for social utilization of these forces—the ownership system—determines the mode of production. In our opinion, the mode of production whose contradictions are manifested with more or less intensity through the class struggle, is the principal factor in the history of any human group, the level of the productive forces being the true and permanent driving power of history” Amilcar Cabral 1979, 141).
Dr. King gave his Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break Silence speech on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York
Jack O’Dell (Hunter Pitts O’Dell) was not only one of the African American manifestations of the Africana freedom movement’s important thinkers and strategist, he can be considered one of the 20th centuries important sociopolitical theoreticians of the relationship between global political economy and its implications of democratic theory and practice. In 1941, he enlisted in the Merchant Marines. It was during this period that he became exposed to a variety of radical thinkers and activists. During this period, he joined an integrated union (the National Maritime Union) and became involved in a variety of radical organizing activities. In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism in the United States, O’Dell’s radical ideals as well as his membership in the Communist Party USA, led to his expulsion from his union. Nevertheless, he maintained his activism in the US South. During his involvement with planning the 1959 youth march on Washington for integrated schools, O’Dell interacted with civil rights leaders. From this interaction, O’Dell joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and was active in planning the 1963 Birmingham campaign. Because of O’Dell’s involvement, opponents attempted to smear the entire movement as a “communist” front. Recognizing that his continued involvement with King, as one of a few close advisors would be problematic, he resigned from the organization in late 1963. Upon resigning, O’Dell became an editor of and wrote for Freedomways, a political journal dedicated to black freedom struggles worldwide. Jack O’Dell continued his political activity, speaking out against the Vietnam War, working on Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, and was involved in a number of events in New York and other cities across the United States agitating for human rights for African world.
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Pope, J. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz: the Continuity and Legacy of a Critical Africana Human Rights Consciousness. J Afr Am St 24, 357–380 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-020-09486-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-020-09486-3