Malcolm X’s Hajj and Today’s Hunt for Humanity

Ideologues of all stripes continue to ignore on-the-ground realities

BY JAMES JONES

“O humanity! Be mindful of your LORD who created you from a single soul, from that soul created its mate, and from them spread countless men and women. And remain conscious of God — in whose name you appeal to one another — and honor family ties. Verily, God is ever watchful over you” (4:1).

“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand human relations on a global scale, race relations in the U.S. and the ability of human beings to transform themselves with God’s help.

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, was brutally assassinated as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, on Feb. 21, 1965, at the young age of 39 in front of his terrified family. Although we tend to assess his biography in terms of the narrow American Black vs. white racist realities that impacted him throughout his short life, we should also step back and try to understand some of the broader global contexts that impacted his development.

Art rendering by Anishmah Banu, 17, from Chicago, who is marketing chair for MYNA’s all-girl ISRAA course. She enjoys creating both digital and traditional art.

Two examples are the eugenics movement, which began in the U.K. during the late 19th century and ended in the U.S. during the 1970s, and the worldwide Great Depression, which began in the U.S. in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. These two phenomena are very important to understanding the complex forces that helped shape Malcolm X’s life.

The eugenics movement reminds us that the post-Reconstruction racial animus aimed at formerly enslaved African Americans was not the only lethal racial game in town. While over 4,000 Blackamericans were being lynched and disfigured (see https://lynchingin america.eji.org/), more than 30 states were busy sterilizing over 60,000 poor whites and various people of color with the blessing of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the U.S. Supreme Court (see SCOTUS Buck v. Bell, 1927). Edwin Black has meticulously documented this essentially liberal elitist movement in his “The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race” (Dialogue Press: 2012). Ironically, Nazi Germany used some of this movement’s philosophy and policies as models for Hitler’s genocidal anti-Jewish and anti-other “undesirables” campaigns.

Consequently, while the U.S. was busy enforcing segregation laws, it was also busy trying to improve the white race through various means, like Dr. John Kellogg’s diet and fitness regimens (for which he invented the Corn Flakes cereal) and the nationwide “fitter families” and “better babies” contests. Combined with state-sanctioned forced sterilizations, these efforts sought to weed out “defective” white people.

This is part of the American context in which Malcolm Little grew up.

In addition, the Great Depression of the 1930s further worsened the African Americans’ already bad situation. Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s highly touted “New Deal” ultimately left “coloreds” more segregated and economically disadvantaged than ever.

As Richard Rothstein noted in his “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” (Liveright [reprint]: 2018): “…until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially-explicit policies of federal, state and local government defined where Whites and African-Americans should live. Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation, but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.” Rothstein makes it abundantly clear that the Federal Housing Administration, one of the major federal agencies that promulgated and implemented this segregated “unhidden public policy,” was also a key component of FDR’s “New Deal” that was supposed to rescue the entire country. However, Malcolm and his family, along with millions of other non-white Americans, got a raw deal from this so-called

AS MALCOLM X FAMOUSLY SAID IN “New Deal.” “Be sure We shall test you with A LETTER WRITTEN DURING HIS HAJJ: something of fear and hunger

“I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF SOMEONE some loss in goods or lives or the fruits (of your toil) but give glad

ELSE’S PROPAGANDA. … I’M FOR tidings to those who patiently TRUTH, NO MATTER WHO TELLS IT. I’M persevere” (2:155). In 2021, the world remains FOR JUSTICE, NO MATTER WHO IT IS in the grips of yet another parFOR OR AGAINST. I’M A HUMAN BEING adigm-shifting phenomenon — the Covid-19 pandemic. As I FIRST AND FOREMOST, AND AS SUCH am writing this article, the world-

I’M FOR WHOEVER AND WHATEVER wide numbers are daunting: over

BENEFITS HUMANITY AS A WHOLE.” 150 million infected and over 3 million dead. The U.S. leads the way in both categories. Once again, we, in our capacity as human beings, are called upon to be God-conscious, step up and care about and for other human beings. As we try to fix this serious problem, I urge us to remember how Malcolm X approached his hajj to find a way out of the crisis. In an earlier article (Islamic Horizons, July/August 2018), I discussed the three love lessons that we can glean from Malcolm X’s hajj: Love for Allah, Love for Learning and Love for Humanity. If we are to handle this crisis without making it worse, we must consistently hunt for our collective humanity while dealing with