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When African Americans protested police brutality in New York, they were portrayed as rioters, Malcolm X told an audience at the London School of Economics. When shop windows were smashed in the Black community, he said, the press gave the impression that “hoodlums, vagrants, criminals” wanted to break in and steal merchandise.
“But this is wrong,” Malcolm contended. “In America the Black community in which we live is not owned by us. The landlord is white. The merchant is white. In fact, the entire economy of the Black community in the states is controlled by someone who doesn’t even live there … And these are the people who suck the economic blood of our community.”
Ten days later Malcolm was dead, slain by assassins at the age of 39 as he began a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. His legacy, however, endures. On Monday, the Reverend Al Sharpton, New York mayor Eric Adams, and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump will join Malcolm’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz for a press conference marking the centenary of the Black nationalist’s birth.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, Sharpton, a veteran activist who is the founder and president of the National Action Network (NAN), reflects on Malcolm’s religious faith, global outlook and indelible contribution to the struggle for racial justice. He also warns that the gains of recent years and decades are being reversed by the presidency of Donald Trump and “white supremacy on steroids”.
Sharpton was nine when Malcolm died and never met him. He also came from a different tradition: at 12 he became the youth director of Operation Breadbasket, an economic programme initiated in Chicago by Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that encouraged patronage of businesses that employed Black workers and supported the Black community.
But Sharpton tells the Guardian by phone: “Even those of us that were of a different tactical movement were enhanced and inspired by Malcolm because he gave us a sense of pride and self-definition that we had not had in our community before. Malcolm X embodied the whole idea of Blacks not only deserving their civil rights but that we were full human beings and should have our human rights and be proud of who we were and who we are.
“That’s why I wanted to have a press conference at my headquarters ‘House of Justice’, named by Jesse Jackson, so people understand he was not limited just to Black nationalist circles. His influence was broader than that. Malcolm meant something to me in terms of teaching us pride and self-affirmation, even though I didn’t agree with his theology and his tactics, and I think it’s important to say that on his 100th birthday.”
He was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on 19 May 1925, the son of a Baptist preacher. He was still a baby when he and his family left for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
At 20, he was convicted of burglary in Boston and sentenced to nearly seven years in prison, where he converted to Islam and later changed his name. He emerged as a fiery Nation of Islam minister with a message that Black people should cast off white oppression “by any means necessary” before later splitting from the Nation of Islam, visiting the holy site of Mecca and renouncing racial separatism.
Malcolm’s Islamic faith was central to his political philosophy, Sharpton says. “It was very important because it gave him a discipline of thought. It gave him a sense of self-importance and self-realisation and, just like the Black church was the foundation of the civil rights movement that I come out of, Islam was the spiritual basis of the movement that we call nationalism because it gives you a discipline, it gives you something to believe in, it gives you structure and organisation.”
Three men were originally convicted of Malcolm’s murder in 1965. In 2021 the convictions of two of the three men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, were vacated after an investigation found authorities withheld evidence. Last year Malcolm’s daughters filed a $100m lawsuit against the CIA, FBI and New York police department, among others, alleging their involvement in the assassination and cover-up.
How different might history have been if Malcolm had lived? “We can only speculate,” Sharpton says. “I feel that he would have expanded and had us think more on a global level. He clearly was one of the first ones to internationalise the movement and make us understand the deal as a diaspora, not just as people that were in one segment of this country.”
If Malcolm could see the US today, Sharpton adds, “he would be saying, while Donald Trump is going all around the Middle East and dealing with Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the like, why isn’t he discussing Sudan? Why isn’t he discussing what’s going on in Mali and what’s going on in Africa?
“He would be very vocal that while they have frozen all of the refugee status, he lets 59 white South Africans come in and give them refugee status. The line is suspended but he created a line for them. Malcolm would be all over that.”
Now it is Sharpton who finds himself at the front line of the battle of civil rights. Just hours after taking the oath of office on 20 January, Trump issued executive orders to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. He went on to blame DEI for a mid-air collision at a Washington DC airport, implying without evidence that diversity equates to incompetence.
Trump revoked a 1965 executive order mandating equal employment opportunities, eliminated environmental protections for communities of colour and gutted funding for minority businesses. He dismissed several high-ranking officials including Charles Q Brown Jr, the second Black chair of the joint chiefs of staff, and Carla Hayden, the first Black person to serve as the librarian of Congress.
He also signed an executive order that seeks to purge “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the museums of the Smithsonian Institution. Sharpton comments: “What they’re advocating is fraudulent education. To try and alter the history of the country is to consciously try and rob people, Black and white, of what really happened and why, and that is, in my opinion, indoctrination not education, and it is going toward a question of white supremacy on steroids.”
He adds: “I know white supremacists are being emboldened but don’t forget, they were involved in before that when they went to [Charlottesville,] Virginia, and we fought them down before and we’ll fight them again. The struggle is a marathon. It’s not a sprint.”
Sharpton led a march on Washington after the death of George Floyd, an African American man, in Minneapolis in 2020. He is now keenly aware of rumours that Trump is considering a pardon for Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered Floyd. Meanwhile Black Lives Matter Plaza, created near the White House in 2020, has been erased.
“Donald Trump wants to undo all the gains of 2020 and 60 years before that. But let’s not forget Donald Trump was the president when George Floyd happened. Donald Trump did nothing. It’s not like he changed from 2020. He was the president and he waited to come back to try to reverse things. The question is not his position. The question is why the private sector, who came with all of these promises in 2020, have changed. That’s why we’re putting heat on them now.”
Sharpton’s NAN says hundreds of billions of dollars in programming and hiring commitments were made by the biggest corporations after the Black Lives Matter protests that followed Floyd’s death, yet few have been realised as businesses now feel pressure from rightwing advocates to break those promises.
In an echo of Operation Breadbasket, NAN has encouraged consumers to avoid retailers that scaled back their DEI initiatives. In January he led his followers on a “buy-cott” at a Costco store in East Harlem in support of the company’s commitment to DEI. Last month he met the chief executive of PepsiCo after warning the company would face a boycott if it did not take steps to restore its DEI pledges.
He is not counting on the Democratic party, still traumatised by its defeat last year and allegations that it has gone too “woke”, to ride to the rescue. “This Democratic party is still struggling,” he says. “The Democratic party didn’t lead the civil rights movement in the 60s, it didn’t lead the racial profiling movement that many of us were involved with in the 80s, and it didn’t lead the movement that I’ve been out front from Trayvon Martin [a 17-year-old African American shot dead in 2012] to George Floyd.
“We were able to get the Democratic party to do certain things but they didn’t lead it. Lyndon Johnson didn’t lead the civil rights movement; Dr King did. I never depend on Democrats to do anything. They’re just better at adjusting when we organise than the Republicans. Republicans organise against us; the Democrats sit there and see who’s going to out-organise who.”
The current malaise will be inescapable on Monday at Sharpton’s press conference and a later celebration of Malcolm’s birthday at the The Malcolm X & Dr Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center in New York. Shabazz, Malcolm’s widow, was an educator and civil rights activist who died in 1997.
She was close to Coretta Scott King, the widow of King, who had been assassinated in Memphis in 1968. Sharpton says: “They communicated all a lot, which is why I wanted to do this press conference, because at some point we all became wedded through movement.
“When Jesse Jackson started Operation Push in 1971, Betty was on his board. When I started National Action Network in 1991, Betty was the speaker at my opening. People tried to isolate Malcolm and don’t realise that he leaped the boundaries of even Black organisational disputes.”
Shabazz was also the godmother to Sharpton’s daughters. He recalls how she once advised him to send them to private school. “I said: ‘I can’t afford that.’ She said: ‘I already paid for the first two years.’ I said: ‘You did what?’ She said: ‘Those kids can’t go to a public school named Sharpton, as controversial as you are. Percy Sutton did it for me; I’m doing it for you.’”
