malcom x

NEW YORK — The only man ever to admit involvement in the assassination of Malcolm X was freed on parole Tuesday, 45 years after he helped gun down the civil rights leader.

Thomas Hagan was the last man still serving time in the 1965 killing, part of the skein of violence that wound through the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s.
Hagan, 69, has repeatedly expressed sorrow for being one of the gunmen who fired on Malcolm X, killing one of the civil rights era's most polarizing and compelling figures. One of the groups dedicated to Malcolm X's memory condemned Hagan's parole.

The Manhattan District Attorney's office, which prosecuted Hagan and his co-defendants, declined to comment on Hagan's release or his account of the killing.
He had been sentenced to up to life in prison for what he described in a 2008 court filing as the deed of a young man who "acted out of rage on impulse and loyalty" to religious leaders.

The assassins gunned down Malcolm X out of anger at his split with the leadership of the Nation of Islam, the black Muslim movement for which he had once served as a prominent spokesman, said Hagan, then known as Talmadge X Hayer.
Over the years since the assassination, "I've had a lot of time, a heck of a lot of time, to think about it," Hagan told a parole board last month, according to a transcript of the interview.

"We just don't think it's ours to decide the fate of this man. We allowed the laws of this nation to develop that," Ramadan said.

Members of the Shabazz family didn't immediately respond to a request for comment made through the center.
The committee holds essay contests and other events in his memory. But after breaking with the Nation of Islam in 1964 and making an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, he began renouncing racial separatism. But his stature grew after his death with sales of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," written with Alex Haley, and later with Spike Lee's 1992 film "Malcolm X," said Manning Marable, the director of Columbia University's Center for Contemporary Black History and the author of a forthcoming biography of Malcolm X.

By 1999, Malcolm X was on a postage stamp. It reflects a good deal on the ideology I adhered to and the way I approached things at that time, when I was 15 and completing grade 9 in Scarborough as a proto-Islamist. It's also remained stagnant in terms of content, the last substantive update being in 2005.

Academically, there was a surge of sustained interest in Malcolm X in the late 1980s and early 90s, in the midst of which Spike Lee produced the film in 1992. This interest reflected the growing relevance of Black nationalism as a response to the conditions of most Black people in the United States -- Public Enemy was on point. Academics were commenting on Malcolm X leading up to and following the film. That is, with the exception of Manning Marable at Columbia University who is now writing a biography of Malcolm.

I keep finding myself coming back to the question of Malcolm X, as well as the question of this web site.
The web sites that are available on Malcolm X do not provide a comprehensive view or assessment of Malcolm: The "official" web site lists one of his major achievements as converting Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, but has little to say about the OAAU.
The challenge is to take Malcolm X, all of him, and present this information in an accessible manner. However, the greatest challenge is to present the 'final' Malcolm X and how he got there -- after his split from the Nation of Islam, and even before it, his views were in rapid flux. However, there is still a considerable degree of interpretation involved; to the extent that Malcolm X is, quite literally, everything to everyone.

To Black nationalists, he is a Black nationalist. To the Nation of Islam, he is a great leader (in public), and a dangerous hell-bound hypocrite (in private). To Muslims, he is a Muslim par excellence, a martyr in the cause of Allah. To socialists, he was a socialist with a piercing critique of international capitalism and imperialism. To misogynists, he was a misogynist, and to feminists, he was a borderline misogynist. Perhaps the one thing that everyone can agree on is his uncompromising stance on the use of armed force in the defense of oneself -- but this gets swept up under the carpet, or under the postage stamps.
There's considerable interpretation involved, and there is no way to get rid of that. The key is to recognize these biases and approach the subject, the man, critically. Malcolm's uncompromising radicalism is something utterly relevant -- it certainly lent itself to inspiring the Black Power movements in the wake of his assassination, but there are lessons to learn about the role of radicalism in the present globalized state of affairs -- an international perspective Malcolm presciently brought to bear to his own analysis.