Episode 172 - The Malcolm X Assassination (Part II)

Malcolm X's message resonated with urban blacks - mostly young men with less-than-positive histories with the American (and white) legal system. Like Malcolm X, they were bitter, angry, thirsty for revenge, and open to ideas of hate, separation, black supremacy, and violence.

Though his message led to an increase in converts to the Nation of Islam, it's appeal outside the urban areas was limited, causing fear in white America and even amongst many black Americans that Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam was intent on instigating a race war.

This angry version of Malcolm X, though channeled more productively than the previous criminal version, was never going to achieve the equality and justice he sought. In fact, he was hurting the cause, allowing himself to be used by the white establishment to smear the larger civil rights movement as a whole, destroying the nonviolent, integrationist moral high ground that Martin Luther King, Jr. had worked so hard to achieve, replacing it with a "by any means necessary", segregationist, and rebellious approach that would easily spook the larger society, discrediting the movement and its leaders in the process.

Something would have to change in Malcolm X's own heart before he could become the Black Messiah that J. Edgar Hoover feared would unite the disparate civil rights groups into a single, sympathetic, and unstoppable movement.

https://linktr.ee/barryljones89