Page 57 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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eliminate poverty. He was both nationalist and internationalist.The following quota-
tion reflects King’s complex ideological and political commitment:“Let us be dissat-
isfied until rat-infested, vermin-filled slums will be a thing of a dark past and every
family will have a decent sanitary house in which to live. Let us be dissatisfied until
the empty stomachs of Mississippi are filled and idle industries of Appalachia are re-
vitalized. . . . Let us be dissatisfied until our brothers of the Third World—Asia,Africa
and Latin America—will no longer be the victim of imperialist exploitation, but will
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be lifted from the long night of poverty, illiteracy, and disease.”
comments that “King’s unfinished search for more radical reforms in America may
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have been the central reason he was killed.”
King was assassinated before he completed his historical mission.The assassinations
of Malcolm X in 1965 and King in 1968 and the limit of the civil rights laws to the
conditions of Black masses clearly contributed to the consolidation of Black militancy
and its crisis. Marable asserts, “After the assassinations of Malcolm and Martin, the
modern black movement for biracial democracy had been crippled, to be sure, but it
was by no means destroyed.Yet the absence of a widely-shared theory and strategy for
black liberation was still missing; the political goal of black equality was still murky
and ill-defined; opportunism and accommodation of many black militants and politi-
cal leaders still raised unresolved questions for future struggles.” 186 Manning Marable
The Nation of Islam, a religious national movement, appealed to the Black masses
in the 1950s and the 1960s as the Garvey Movement had.This movement “evolved
over a generation and only gradually became a well-known symbol of protest—at
least in the black ghettos of America’s principal industrial cities.” 187 While other
Black protest organizations attracted well-to-do African Americans and progressive
Whites, like the Garvey Movement, the Nation of Islam mainly attracted lower-class
Blacks. 188 This movement produced Malcolm X, who, after his death, “quickly be-
came the fountainhead of the modern renaissance of black nationalism in the late
1960s.” 189 As Malcolm X gradually evolved to become the revolutionary nationalist
leader, his understanding of the Black question went beyond the comprehension of
the other leaders of the Nation of Islam. Because of his militancy and vision, Mal-
colm was expelled from the Nation of Islam and created first the Muslim Mosque
and then the Organization of African American Unity (OAAU) in 1964. His ideo-
logical and intellectual maturity and his increased commitment to the emancipation
of his people shortened his life. Robert Allen argues that “Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X were both assassinated at precisely the point at which they began work-
ing actively and consciously against the racism and exploitation generated by the
American capitalist system, both at home and abroad.” 190 The assassinations of these
two prominent leaders further frustrated the Black masses and increased their mili-
tancy. Both King and Malcolm, although each emerged through a different route to
lead the Black struggle, recognized the inability of the existing organizations to ac-
complish the objectives of the African American movement. Exploring this problem,
William W. Sales notes,“While the existing institutional structure supported the early
period of the Black insurgency, as the movement matured the existing institutional
and organizational structures were inadequate to the new tasks at hand. Both men
recognized that the further development of the movement required new organiza-
tional forms and for their supporters to relate to each other in new and different
ways. King’s ‘Poor People’s Campaign’ represented this search while Malcolm X cre-
ated the OAAU.” 191