Impact of Malcolm X on America

Impact of Malcolm X on America

When Malcolm was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan at the age of thirty-nine on February 21, 1965, he was a respected public figure for less than 10 years.

He was a national spokesman of the Nation of Islam, a conservative Muslim group that didn't have very much contact with the American life. His new protest group in Harlem, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, had existed for less than a year and had only several hundred members and supporters when he died. That is why respectable black leaders felt that Malcolm X's influence would soon be forgotten. Only days after he was killed, Bayard Rustin, the architect of the 1963 March on Washington, D.C., wrote: "Now that he is dead, we must resist the temptation to idealize Malcolm X, to elevate charisma to greatness. Malcolm X is not a hero of the movement; he is a tragic victim of the ghetto.... White America, not the Negro people, will determine Malcolm's role in history" Henry Lee Moon, editor of the NAACP's publication The Crisis, said "Malcolm was an anachronism... vivid and articulate but, nevertheless, divorced from the mainstream of Negro American thought."

Years after he was killed, Malcolm X's image and reputation have been seriously changed. Most historians now rank Malcolm X with the 6 most influential people in African-American history. This group includes Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But unlike these other personalities, Malcolm X alone has become an icon to millions of young African Americans since the 1990 's. Most African Americans say that Malcolm X should be considered "a hero for black Americans today." Others responded that Malcolm X symbolized a "strong black male." Dozens of respectable artists within contemporary, urban "hip hop culture" began to draw upon the words and image of Malcolm X in their works. Spike Lee's powerful film showing the life of Malcolm X brought this historical figure to a large audience. By the 1990s, almost three million copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X had been sold worldwide. In 1999, Time magazine selected The Autobiography as one of the top ten nonfiction works of the twentieth century.