beration Movement -Martin Luther King the two white students and one man (Goodman, Schwerner and Chainey) killed by racist police during black voter registration in Mississippi (the murders are dramatised in the film Mississippi Burning.
He dropped his opposition to 'mixed marriages' - the Nation of Islam, of course, would never have approved inter-marriage between black and white.
During his last year Malcolm made two trips to Africa, which helped crystallise his views on major questions of strategy for black liberation.
Politics in Africa at that time was awash with left-inclined nationalist forces. Malcolm met many famous nationalist leaders, like Sekou Toure and ware Nkrumah. These people had a positive attitude to socialism, as they understood it, and admired the Soviet Union.
In particular he was influenced by meeting a leader of the Algerian FLN, the organisation which had just evicted French imperialism, who pressed on Malcolm the idea that white people could fight the racist system and be revolutionaries too.
The African trips helped and launching their own struggle.
On this Malcolm had evolved the basic ideas of black self-organisation as a strategy for black liberation. He was a not a theoretician, but an activist, and above all an orator, a tribune for the grievances and determination of black America. But the basic ideas of self-organisation as a liberation strategy was fully developed in his speeches.
In the last few months of his life Malcolm developed an explicit anti-capitalism, and a growing understanding of Questioned about whether capitalism could abolish racism, he replied 'Can a chicken His statements on socialism were very guarded; he was feeling his way. He made favourable comments on socialism, saying it was 'no accident that socialism was so popular among revolutionaries in Africa. If you love black nationalism, he said, then you'll love revolution.
He spoke several times at meetings organised by the US Radicalised by the US imperialist war in Vietnam, black G/s demonstrate 1966 Socialist Workers Party (nothing to do with the British SWP). He granted interviews to their paper the Militant; and ordered copies of their International Socialist Review for some of his key supporters. Among his detractors there were dark rumours about his 'flirtation' with Trotskyism.
Malcolm's organisation of Afro-American Unity was never more than a few hundred strong. During his last months he was wrestling with the idea of what kind of organisation to build.
His main idea was that the OAAU would be a vehicle for unity among the different black organisations, not a rival to the stablished civil rights groups. But he never really had time to think the problem through.
By the end of his life, Malcolm had completed two stages of his political development; the first from separatism to black nationalism, and then towards being a revolutionary anti-capitalist, identifying espe cially with anti-imperialist struggles in the third world.
But he was not a socialist or a Marxist; and speculation about whether he would have become one or the other is pointless.
While his OÂAU never amounted to much, he had given a political profile and definition to black nationalism, embodied in an implicit strategy of black self-organisation and black liberation.
He thus was the key figure in freeing the black movement in America from the purely civil rights and 'integrationist strategy of moderate leaders like Martin Luther King He opened the door for Black Power to become a major force.
These political gains became or years the mainstream o lack US politics; the idea thai blacks should defend themsel ves and not be pacifists, that they had to organise themsel ves for struggle without waiting for white liberals, that blacks were fighting a whole power structure and system, not just individual backwardness and prejudice among whites.
In future issues we will look at the development of the black movement after Malcolm's death. In the reactionary political atmosphere of the 1980s black politics has moved to the right, with middle class blacks being admitted to former white preserves (none more symbolic than General Colin Powell supervising the slaughter in Iraq), and black mayors in major cities channelling black aspirations within the system.
But Malcolm's ideas stood against all that, and are a permanent reservoir and example of another route - that of black liberation, with its inherently anti-capitalist dynamic.
A brilliant organiser and orator armed with a Black Power strategy, openly revolutionary and anti-capitalist-this was a challenge which US capitalism answered in its alltoo-familiar fashion. * George Breitman's book is published by Pathfinder Press. As the US SWP moved increasingly towards Castroism in the early 1980s, Ceorge Breitman remained faithful to Trotskyism and was one of many of the older cadres expelled, becoming a leader of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency