Had Malcolm X Not Been Murdered…

. . . would he have wound up a dismal black-power Marxisant radical? Or, might he, like Frederick Douglass, who only mid-way in life became a defender of the U.S. Constitution, have become to some degree a model for a conservatism that can speak to blacks?

Two Claremont-influenced Frederick Douglass experts, Peter C. Meyers, and Diana Schaub, debate the issue in a special CRB feature here . Schaub emphasizes some of the more promising sides of Malcom X’s post-Nation of Islam development, whereas Meyers views these sceptically. Since I side more with Meyers, I’ll quote him:

“Those of us to the right of center may well be attracted to Malcolm’s rhetoric of self-help and may well be repelled by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s enthusiasm for a swelling welfare state. Nonetheless, we would do well to resist the temptation to claim Malcolm, or any of the available Malcolms, as one of our own. Malcolm’s capacity and propensity to reinvent himself are evident only in the trajectory of his actual development, and on that evidence, they seem to me not so profound as to license any such claim.
Diana’s review essay adds kindling to this temptation, but she herself wisely resists it. In fact she makes the decisive point against it. Malcolm near the end repudiated racial separatism, she writes, ‘but not radicalism.’ Here we come as close as we can, I think, to the essence of Malcolm’s character. The larger issue reminds me of political philosopher Bernard Yack’s book, The Longing for Total Revolution , published some 20 years ago. Yack described a malady prevalent among some of the great minds of 18th- and 19th-century Western philosophy. But some localized strains of this malady are present here and there in American political thought, and they are particularly powerful in 20th-century Afro-American political thought.”

All in all , a fascinating discussion—kudos to CRB, Meyers, and Schaub.