| ||||||
|
Arts & Entertainment  BooksComics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
Current Click here to read the latest stories from the wires. - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Books stories, go to the
Books home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Books Reviews Reviews Ivory Tower Dear Mr. Blue - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
False prophet | page 1, 2
It's striking that it was the working-class, often darker-skinned leaders who stressed the international context for black Americans' oppression, while middle-class blacks rarely did. Having no alternative and no reason not to, the former identified with the dark-skinned of the world, while the latter wanted the respect of and a closer relationship with American whites. The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad By Karl Evanzz
Portentously, and no doubt frighteningly to whites, bourgeois blacks and the U.S. government, UNIA's first international convention in New York in 1922 drew representatives from 25 countries, many of which the U.S. government considered enemies. The Nation of Islam would continue to expand this internationalist drive, much to the consternation of both the U.S. government and mainstream civil rights leaders. Years later, the Nation may have wanted Malcolm X dead because he told the truth on the Messenger, but the Man wanted him dead because not only was he effective domestically, but he was hooked up with undesirable Arab and African leaders. While it was maddening for whites to demand good citizenship of those they legally considered to be less than citizens, one may legitimately ask exactly how America should have responded to movements like Garvey's and, later, Muhammad's and Malcolm's. While it was unfair to oppress blacks and call them traitors for looking for international assistance, the government still had a natural impulse to protect itself from foreigners who claim to hate the U.S. Garvey preached a new nation in Africa for African-Americans, which he called the United States of Africa. His words rang in Elijah's ears after a day of insults and the assembly line: "Where is the black man's government? Where is his king and kingdom? Where is his president, his country and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?" It certainly wasn't in America, at least not for Garvey. Elijah, on the other hand, didn't want to relocate. He began to dream, and later to preach, of the white man's impending extinction, his self-implosion through an overload of evil. (Then as now, Muhammad's followers took in stride the ever-slipping deadlines for the death of the white man.) When the white man was extinct, the black man would rule without having to change addresses. To bring closer that day of black men dancing on white men's graves, Elijah worked actively to undermine and overthrow the U.S. government and encouraged his followers to do the same. The lessons that both white and black America taught Marcus Garvey made a big impression on Elijah Muhammad. Garvey served five years for mail fraud and was deported back to Jamaica, discredited. He blamed not white America but his "opponents of the colored race" for his downfall. "They are light-colored Negroes who think that the Negro can always develop in this country. They also resent the fact that I, a black Negro, am a leader." In 1959, Thurgood Marshall, the embodiment of the black bourgeoisie and mainstream movement work, would dis the Black Muslims as "run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure, by Nasser or some Arab group." Can anyone fail to see why the black working class jumped on the chance to get out from under the thumb of the "blue-veined mulattoes"? Marshall, of all people, should have known that lots of those black folks in jails were guilty of little more than the quest to survive. The glancing light Evanzz casts on black informants and double agents is another fascinating aspect of his book. When an enraged Hoover made the destruction of Elijah Muhammad a top priority -- as he had done with Garvey -- the FBI had no trouble recruiting moles to funnel information out and disinformation in. Far more Americans, black and white, approved of Martin Luther King, but even so, Evanzz reports that 3,000 black and Hispanic agents were recruited to wreak havoc in King's planned 1968 Washington Spring Project. Who were these agents? From the '20s through the '40s there was intense political turmoil in the black community -- much of which did not involve the mainstream civil rights movement and direct opposition to white racism. Evanzz is to be praised for bringing to light an aspect of black history that many blacks likely want to forget: collusion with the Japanese on the eve of World War II, and conscientious objection based on opposition not to war itself but to fighting for "the white man." Elijah traveled the country giving pro-Japanese sermons and exulted in the carnage at Pearl Harbor primarily because he believed it when the Japanese promised blacks "nice homes on islands near the United States" in exchange for their assistance. It is also possible that the Japanese gave him money. Elijah so hated America, he wouldn't even allow his followers to vote. While he's not a strong writer, Evanzz is a stellar researcher, and no one interested in understanding black America -- or in critiquing it -- can skip this book. But if the only discussion it engenders is a warmed-over debate over the merits of nonviolent and violent protest, we will have wasted a golden opportunity to address more complex issues, like patriotism in the face of oppression, and repressive, exploitative hierarchies within the black community. It's easy to talk about what the white man has done to blacks. The time has come for blacks to talk about what they've done to each other.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon | |||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
