Remembering Malcolm.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, often heard in the months leading up to the release of Spike Lee's movie, has paired Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in a kind of good cop/bad cop formulation. King, it's said, preached love, integration, and nonviolence; Malcolm X preached hate, separatism, and violence. If the country doesn't wise up and achieve equality as-King proposed, the wisdom goes, then blacks will follow Malcolm X's directive and do it "by any means necessary." Sometimes, especially more recently, the convention is altered to hold that the country has already failed to take Kinds way and that Malcolm X's is in the ascendancy, witnessed in such phenomena as the angry, swaggering style of ghetto youth; the popularity of rap music, replete with threatening, often murderous lyrics; the intimidating mode of black politics practiced in many large cities; and, of course, South-Central Los Angeles.

In either version the formulation is inaccurate on some important points. True, Malcolm X can in some ways be seen as the progenitor of the whole model of black activist behavior that we see today, marked by provocation, confrontation, Afrocentrism, and the excoriation  of the white race. Furthermore, Malcolm X often characterized as "Uncle Toms" those blacks who sought a road of moderation and accommodation, setting the stage for the situation today in which any black who doesn't agree with the militant line can be denounced as a traitor to the race.

But what we now have is the worst of Malcolm X, while the best of him has been conveniently discarded or overlooked. He always insisted, for example, that black people had to realize that along with equal rights there had to be "the bearing of equal responsibilities." According to Remembering Malcolm (Carroll & Graf, 208 pp., $21), a moving memoir by Benjamin Karim, who was one of Malcolm X's assistant ministers at New York's Black Muslim Mosque Number Seven, Malcolm X felt that blacks "had to bear some of the blame for their own unenlightenment. You can blame a person for knocking you down, Malcolm often said, but you can't blame that person if you refuse to get back up .... However much slave history taught us about the injustice and misery we as a people had suffered, it did not excuse us from assuming responsibility for ourselves and each other by altering its course."

Malcolm X's own struggle out of the humiliations, deprivations, and various hellish detours of the-underclass--welfare, reform school, hustling, pimping, alcohol, drugs, crime, and finally prison--taught him the paramount necessity of self-respect and mutual respect among blacks. Moreover, Malcolm X understood how blacks preyed on each other like "animals and vultures" in the ugly black underworld. His autobiography tells of his poignant amazement at witnessing the respect with which black people had learned to treat each other in the Muslim movement. Karim's summary of Malcolm X's message to his followers is this: "Be honest. Harm no one, and take nothing that is not yours. Treat others as you would be treated by them. Practice charity. Exercise self-control. Avoid extremes, keep a middle path. Pay your taxes. Obey the law." With such teachings, Karim says, Malcolm X "rescued us from the myth of our moral inferiority."

And whatever his contribution in creating it, ours is not a world Malcolm X would have been at home in. Twelve years celibate before his marriage, he would have been dismayed at the distribution of condoms to children. The faithful husband and devoted father would be horrified at black men making babies and leaving them to the care of the white man's state.

The slovenly and disordered appearance of youth today, black and white, would have appalled him, as would their language, and the language of rap; he abhorred profanity and even the use of slang words like "kid." Malcolm X, who always dressed impeccably in the grownup masculine style of the 1950s and early 1960s, and couldn't stand to see a Muslim brother with his collar and tie loosened, would have disdained running shoes, baseball caps, and oversized T-shirts with Xs on them.

And Malcolm X loved learning. Affirmative action and curricula based on "self-esteem" might well have broken his heart. In prison, he copied out the entire dictionary, word for word, including punctuation, and read so much in bad fight that he had to begin wearing glasses. ("Any college library would have been lucky to get that collection," he later said of his prison's library.) His excitement at reading, at learning, at taking possession of ideas, is something you can almost taste in his autobiography. Karim reports that Malcolm X once mused ruefully, "How many dictionaries and reference books do you suppose we would collect if we went through a black housing project in New York? Enough to fill a car trunk or van? Or maybe a suitcase?" Karim continues in Malcolm X's voice, '"We can't blame the white man for the dictionaries black children don't have. Poverty, said Malcolm, provides no excuse for ignorance any more than history does. Ignorance breeds poverty, he said, it's not the other way around." For their classes at the mosque, Malcolm X's Muslim students were expected to have a notebook, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a book of synonyms and antonyms, an etymology text, and a library card. They were given extensive study assignments. In addition, Malcolm X encouraged the Muslims to use their spare time creatively, to go to museums, for example, instead of sporting events. In fact, as some have noted, his whole post-prison disposition was rather puritanical,. deliberately repudiating the looseness and ease that had come to be associated with some segments of black life in America.

MALCOLM X was also ruthlessly honest, and he would never have been able to endure the sea of lies about race that we swim in today. "He didn't blame white people for their resistance to integration with the Negro as he lives today," according to Charles W. Wiley--a political activist and journalist who had made his acquaintance--writing in NATIONAL REVIEW almost thirty years ago. "He said that a white person who pretends that property values don't go down when Negroes move into a neighborhood is a fool, but that when a white man tells the truth about such issues he is called a bigot." Malcolm X often embarrassed liberals by proclaiming, for example, that the Sixties were "an era of hypocrisy. You pretend that you're my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you're my brother."

Malcolm X knew that "pie-in-the-sky promises of equality through passing laws" would not work, that laws could not change attitudes. He predicted that riots would follow the passage of civil-rights legislation, when the entire civil-rights leadership thought that such legislation would solve the whole racial problem. And he was right. "A hungry man will dislike you if you refuse to give him help," he told Wiley, "but will hate you if you promise help and give him a check that bounces." He was not talking so much about actual food as about spiritual food, black people's need to feel and be accepted in the fullness of their humanity, something he believed they could not get from sitting at lunch counters and singing '"We Shall Overcome." Malcolm X knew that the ghettoes contained the explosive and lethal rage that he remembered from his own past, although he would not have confused it with political protest. His much-vaunted belief in violence was really only an assertion of the need for self-defense when the government falls to protect certain citizens.

During the period of poverty and dysfunction that followed his fathers death, Malcolm X resented the official intervention of state welfare agencies into his family's life, but the reader of his autobiography cannot help being struck by how relatively humane and well intentioned this intervention was; and the reform school and foster homes Malcolm X was sent to were by no means a Dickensian horror. What the state agencies could not provide is, alas, what no state can: dignity, self-respect, a tranquil affirmation of the rightness of one's fundamental self. Palpable in Malcolm X's autobiography is his own search for wholeness, a search which was not fulfilled until his pilgrimage to Mecca, "the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being." After this experience, Malcolm X dropped much of his racist and separatist rhetoric and was able to declare, 'Tin a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."

One of Malcolm X's daughters has said that her father has never really been understood, and a new collection of essays by black writers, titled Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, (St. Martin's, 246 pp., $18.95), supports her assertion. Indeed, as the subtitle indicates, these writers may not even be trying to understand him on his own terms. Some of the essays are concerned with discrepancies in Malcolm X's biography; sometimes this concern is legitimate but sometimes it seems to be merely by way of claiming him for one or another cause. Quite a few of the essays are preoccupied with Malcolm X's possible and actual violations of political correctness. One faults him for criticizing the ghetto style of his hustler days too much, for failing to recognize it as a form of rebellion against racist America. Some fret about what they see as his excessive puritanism. Others worry over his "sexism" and "homophobia." Some try to make him into a proto-feminist or Marxist. The last essay is told by a student at Spelman College named Deidre Bailey to a couple of black journalists. She is a young black woman we may hope to hear more from in the future. Her understanding of Malcolm X's legacy is his respect for women and his example that one can, by conscious choice, change one's life for the better. She deplores a lot of the "X" phenomenon and the association of Malcolm X with hatred and random violence.

AS MALCOLM X has been given a bad rap on some scores, Martin Luther King has perhaps been overidealized. In an ironic way, King may be more responsible than Malcolm X for the enmity in black-white relationships today. "Let ns therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream," said' King in one of his brilliantly ringing addresses. "Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto of social and economic oppression is dissolved and Negroes and whites-live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary houses. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past .... Let us march on poverty... until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns, in search of jobs that do not exist. Let us march on poverty until the wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi are filled... the idle industries of Appalachia are... revitalized, and broken lives in sweltering ghettoes are mended and remolded."

These were the kind of words that young people in the Sixties thrilled to hear. Taken inspirationally and motivationally, they are wonderful; taken absolutely literally, which is apparently how they were taken, they are a recipe for disillusionment and despair. Even Jesus said that we would always have some poor with us. Martin Luther King set the goals so high that America had no way of achieving them, and today's angry, never-satisfied liberals, both white and black, may well have learned their disenchantment and disgust with their country from just this style of rhetoric.

Conservative and traditional civil-rights thought often protests that Kings legacy of color-blind justice and equality of opportunity has been forgotten or distorted by subsequent black spokesmen, but in truth he seems te have left them plenty of ammunition. If, after the passage of the civil-rights laws, King escalated the moral demands he placed on our society, he also began to de-emphasize the only real way by which they could at least partly be achieved: by the assumption of individual responsibility. In many ways Martin Luther King was a privileged middle-class liberal as much as he was a black. One good look at the black underclass in the North after the Watts riots of 1965, and he began to speak of the need for massive government intervention at every level, redistribution of income, and the restructuring of American society. He who had prophesied black-white brotherhood began to speak of America as a "sick society" and to insist "that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously."

After Watts, according to James H. Cone, author of Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Orbis Books, 358 pp., $22.95), the anti-capitalist sentiments of Kings graduate-school days combined with his new-found admiration of Sweden to bring him to the point of advancing socialism as the solution for America's black underclass. He began to challenge many of his own advisors who were strongly pro-capitalist: "We've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society," he insisted. "We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. "Who owns the oil?'... 'Who owns the iron ore?'... Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?'"

A recent article in The New Yorker reported critically Malcolm X's common-sense observation from his Middle East experience--that even without racism, people of the same kind tend to flock together. This sort of observation is an embarrassment to the utopian universalism according to which we can never call ourselves a just society until each and every area of life is proportionally integrated; anything short of that represents pandemic racism that must be rooted out by endless agitation. "We must all learn to live together as brothers," said Martin Luther King. But Malcolm X understood that "no government laws can ever force brotherhood." "Men are attracted by spirit," he said. "Love is engendered by spirit .... The only true world solution today is governments guided by true religion-of the spirit." The conventional wisdom sometimes asserts that we've lost King's dream and are now living Malcolm X's nightmare, but perhaps it's not Malcolm X's nightmare that we are living, but King's dream turned into a nightmare, like all the utopian dreams of this century. And maybe it is Malcolm X who can wake us up.