Let me begin by expressing my sincere thanks to Dr. Mona Oraby for inviting me to provide comments in this critical forum on the relationship between Malcolm X and the built environment prompted by the publication of Mapping Malcolm. Editor Najha Zigbi-Johnson’s conversation with contributor Dr. Marc Lamont Hill in the volume expands our understanding of Malcolm X’s legacy and the contested ways in which his ideas and activism are remembered, deployed, co-opted, or altogether avoided by nationalists, Muslims, the Nation of Islam, women, queer activists, and others. Dr. Hill’s responses to Zigbi-Johnson’s questions also remind us that above all, Malcolm’s life was a work in progress. Malcolm believed in learning through critical inquiry, which he understood as a prerequisite to self-transformation. What follows is my brief response to a few of the points raised in the conversation between Zigbi-Johnson and Dr. Hill.
On Malcolm X’s international vision and praxis
Malcolm X’s influence on international affairs was nearly unparalleled in modern history. In the final decade of his life, he routinely met with heads of state or their emissaries despite not being a head of state himself. As Dr. Hill notes, Malcolm X’s internationalist vision and engagement was not distinct from his perspective on Black life and the basic struggle for human rights. Consider Malcolm’s meeting with Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro at the Hotel Theresa in the days preceding his September 1960 address to the United Nations General Assembly. Over the previous three months, Malcolm’s political stature among African Americans and Harlemites had increased exponentially as a result of his critical essays in op-ed columns, public debates, and a five-part televised documentary series on the Nation of Islam. Castro’s meeting with Malcolm, after the Cuban delegation relocated to the Hotel Theresa and Harlem following the racist treatment it suffered at the Shelburne Hotel in midtown Manhattan, proved unavoidable. While the incident became an international embarrassment for the Eisenhower administration, Malcolm seized the opportunity of this meeting to align the logical conclusions of his upbringing in Garveyism alongside the Nation of Islam’s theology on race, economic self-reliance, and political self-determination. He considered Cuba and its peoples as part of the Pan-African world and members of the Afro-Asiatic Black race. In addition to enhancing Malcolm’s position on the international stage, his meeting with Castro placed Harlem, Cuba, and the Global South—with the attendant politics of anti-imperial and anti-colonial ideas—at the center of the Cold War.
On nationalism, patriarchy, and political evolution
Although Zigbi-Johnson raises the question of nationalism’s patriarchal and homophobic dimensions, Dr. Hill does not engage this directly. He instead critiques the limitations of nationalist frameworks in capturing Malcolm’s broader political evolution. Building on this, I would point to the problematic assumptions found in the discourse that Dr. Hill did not engage—between Black nationalism and regressive gender/sexual politics—that has led some communities to strategically distance themselves from Malcolm’s legacy altogether, despite its nuanced lessons about systemic oppression.
Certainly, as national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm was no stranger to ideals about the “proper roles” of women that merit critique. However, his legacy remains instructive in revealing how Black communities navigate overarching regimes of oppression in deeply complex ways. It is worth noting, for example, how Black nationalist thought—including Malcolm’s—is often dismissed or reductively labeled as “emotional” or “unrealistic,” a tactic he himself identified as a tool to marginalize Black critical perspectives. The broader pattern is clear: Just as the intellectual labor of women has been historically devalued, so too have the contributions of Black nationalists (including nationalist women) been cast as impractical or illogical, limiting their perceived relevance to social change. Ironically, the failure to engage Malcolm’s legacy on gender history has obscured the significant role that women have played in Malcolm’s political evolution.
As Dr. Hill correctly observes, understanding the critical role that women played, not as servants but as thought leaders, in developing who Malcolm becomes is imperative to teaching Malcolm’s legacy from a critical lens. Why don’t we know more about the life and history of Pat Patterson, an editor at the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch, who tutored Malcolm X in print journalism and how to put together a newspaper during his time in the city? Here was a highly-skilled, extremely confident Black woman in a leadership role who was not particularly well-liked by some of the men in Mosque No. 27 (Los Angeles). Yet Malcolm X was able to forge a genuine relationship with her on the basis of mutual respect and admiration for the power of the printed word. She was well-read on Marcus Garvey and the indelible contributions of Garvey’s wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, which would have served as a natural point of connection between the two given the critical role that Malcolm’s mother, Louise Little, played in augmenting the accessibility and success of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s newspaper: the Negro World. Malcolm sought Patterson out, and she willingly responded to his request for an apprenticeship. The instruction resulted in Malcolm going back to New York and producing Mr. Muhammad Speaks, the forerunner to Muhammad Speaks.
On the question of power
The question of how Malcolm X conceived of power has been challenging for scholars to settle because, as Dr. Hill acknowledges, Malcolm X was consistently growing in his thought on such matters. That said, I believe Dr. Hill’s claim that “it wasn’t cultural politics; it wasn’t symbolic power” misses some important ways that Malcolm used symbols to influence social change and how they were critical antecedents in the evolution of cultural nationalism. Cultural nationalism as a form of Black nationalistic thought had not developed or articulated a clear theory and praxis at the time of Malcolm’s assassination. Cultural nationalists, such as Maulana Karenga, were students of Malcolm X—they were influenced by and clearly linked their activist traditions to his words and vision. Likewise, as a journalist, photographer, and editor, Malcolm used Muhammad Speaks as a vehicle for communicating the Nation’s beliefs (e.g., What the Muslims Want/What the Muslims Believe), defending its values, and projecting its power. Whether on television, radio, or in the press, managing the public image of the Nation was critical to his position as the community’s national spokesperson.
Also, how we teach Malcolm in relation to his contemporaries might obscure his use of symbols and cultural expression as mediums for social change. Malcolm’s legacy is often taught in comparison and contradistinction to Dr. Martin L. King’s philosophy of nonviolence. Discussing Malcolm’s use of symbols, language, and history to build and defend the Nation’s interest don’t work well in that construction, but it is imperative to understanding the phrase most often attributed to him: “by any means necessary.”
Malcolm used art in profoundly political ways. Consider when he reserved Carnegie Hall to stage Louis X’s (Farrakhan) play Orgena on December 24, 1960. On the eve of a global holiday where people were evaluating their worthiness to receive gifts from a white demigod for being “naughty or nice,” Malcolm greenlit the New York appearance of a playcondemning the collective history of white people in relation to people of African descent. The play’s timing and context inverted the notion of a white Santa Clause sitting in moral judgement over the world’s people. Further, he billed the performance as a Broadway hit on the cover of the first issue of his newspaper, Mr. Muhammad Speaks. He literally leaned into both the timing of the Christmas holiday and onto the massive public notoriety and professional acclaim that Lorraine Hansberry received when her play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened on Broadway in March 1959.
Concurrently, recall Malcolm’s use of anthropomorphic imagery, (e.g., the fox and the wolf), in light of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) decision and other legal indicators of racial progress that he considered symbolic in nature. Whereas the Nation had historically caricatured whites as devils based on the rabidly racist white Southerner who reveled in the rape and lynching of Black bodies, within Malcolm’s ministry, the image became transfigured into a trickster, a shapeshifting white Northern liberal. Thus, Malcolm’s ability to use theology and Black folklore to make sense of a rapidly changing legal environment became critical to the Nation’s continued relevance going into the 1960s.
On Malcolm X and the pedagogy of the built environment
Malcolm’s legacy offers myriad resources for courses on urban design and public infrastructure. Set against the backdrop of Harlem’s tenements, high-rise buildings, and local businesses massive open-air, street-level urban amphitheaters emerged to host Malcolm’s speeches and public debates. Malcolm often transgressed the “progressive” attempts of the period to enclose Black life in what J.T. Roane has identified as insurgent Black placemaking.
Dr. Hill’s claim that the memory of Malcolm has been reduced and provincialized—and yet we stand to gain from linking Malcolm to the built environment—is so very poignant, especially if we stop to think about the forces Malcolm navigated during his time in New York City. Toward the end of urban planner Robert Moses’s depraved and destructive efforts to reinforce residential segregation by enclosing Black and Brown life, Malcolm X initiated the selling of the Nation’s newspapers to pedestrians. His efforts (and those of the Fruit of Islam) were massively successful; Muhammad Speaksbecame the largest circulating African American weekly in history. This example shows us how Malcolm navigated anti-Black urban planning and other systems, like prisons, that are designed to facilitate Black social death. What more might we learn about liberation from those who traverse cities on foot?
We should also note that to counter the plans of men like Moses, Malcolm drew upon various resources within his immediate environment. As minister of Temple No. 7, he routinely brought NOI members on field excursions to the American Museum of Natural History, placing his instructional pedagogy in the same space as that of W.E.B. Du Bois, who did the same for his Seminar on Africa, an adult education course taught at the Jefferson School of Social Science in 1953. According to Du Bois, the museum had “the best collection of Africana in the United States.” Du Bois continued to teach courses on Africa at the Jefferson School through the fall of 1956, which suggests that Malcolm was aware of Du Bois’s use of the museum to facilitate teaching—even if Malcolm was not himself a student in the course. What new pedagogical possibilities might we develop by thinking of the museum as a classroom?
How we choose to remember Malcolm and trace the evolution of his thought and ideas is challenging precisely because he represented a model, measure, and colleague to so many. Yet, as Dr. Hill notes, Malcolm’s commitment to transformation through the process of life-long learning demanded that he remain open to the possibility of transformation wherever his studies led. It is Malcolm’s studied curiosity that placed him in conversation with the likes of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad, Pat Patterson, Fidel Castro, and Fannie Lou Hamer. It is this aspect of his life that remains most instructive for how we teach Malcolm going forward.