“By any means necessary.”
By Khari Thompson
Last week, nearly 101 years after the man who would become Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska, I found myself walking the boulevard in Roxbury that bears his name while visiting the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. That’s when it struck me: I had never been to a “Malcolm X” Boulevard until I came to Boston.
Gary, Indiana, where I lived for the first few years of my life, now has one. But it didn’t back when I was coming up. And the neighboring town of Hobart, where my family later moved, was more likely to have houses sporting Confederate imagery than honoring Malcolm X. (Chicago, where I attended university, at least has Malcolm X College, though.)
Malcolm never appeared in my school history books, and he wasn’t spoken of when the Civil Rights Movement came up. When I read about him on my own, it wasn’t hard to understand why. He didn’t play by the rules. He didn’t believe in assimilation or compromise when it came to combating racism. And he didn’t care about asking nicely for the rights he was owed.
The seeds of his pride, instilled in him by his parents, began to sprout in Roxbury.
Those who know his history know well what he means to Roxbury—how embedding himself in the neighborhood’s proud Black community (and later getting arrested here) would transform him from 15-year-old Malcolm Little, who arrived for the first time on Dale Street to live with his half-sister Ella Little-Collins in 1941, to one of the most transformational Black thinkers of all time. (His family still owns that house today.)
But let’s talk about what he means to all of us right now.
Because Malcolm X, as we all know, didn’t live to see his 101st birthday. In fact, it will never cease to bother me knowing both he and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were slain at the age of 39, and how much we all lost in the following years by not having them in the world.
Unlike King, though, Malcolm didn’t live to see the Voting Rights Act or Civil Rights Act of 1965 pass. That said, we do know he didn’t view the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he did live to see, as the transformative moment many at the time thought it was (for good or ill).
Part of why he advocated strongly for Black people to use the ballot to further their political power ahead of the Voting Rights Act’s passage was because he knew the United States of America would happily undo the progress it had made toward democracy when given the chance. And so it has come to pass.
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Malcolm X. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) |
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The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision is just the latest stroke in the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act that Malcolm never lived to see. Piece by piece, by the same institution built to uphold it. Affirmative Action statutes, which he also never saw implemented, have been gutted. And the world drifts further from the one we’ve known since the 1954 Brown v. Board decision that struck the critical blow against legalized segregation and closer to the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which happened 130 years ago on Monday, that enshrined it.
What would Malcolm say?
First, probably some version of “I told you so,” though with no satisfaction.
Then, he would ask, “What are you going to do about it?”
The common misconception about Malcolm X was that he advocated for violence against white Americans—something his detractors frequently used against him. But that wasn’t quite right. Though he said Black people should be prepared to defend themselves against a country hostile to them, he never pushed for the wanton violence America visited on people like him for his entire life.
But he did vehemently proclaim that it was time to quit waiting for permission or for “when the time was right” to demand your just due.
And then, most importantly, to never get complacent in making sure America stays true to its word. To bring the multiracial democracy that he never got to witness—that we ourselves have never truly seen—to fruition.
So that when you walk down Malcolm X Boulevard in Roxbury or Harlem or visit any monument to his name, you can say you obtained freedom and justice “by any means necessary.”
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