Emergence of Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement

The racial violence of the 1960s was extreme evidence of the pent-up frustration and outrage long simmering within black America. Back in 1916, Jamaican-born Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940) came to New York to recruit followers for his Universal Negro Improvement Association and by 1921 claimed a million members. The organization, which had as its aim the establishment of a new black nation in Africa, was called “militant” by whites accustomed to seeing African-Americans behave passively and submissively.

Not until the emergence of Malcolm X in the early 1960s was African-American militancy given compelling and eloquent direction. Malcolm X had been born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925. He turned bitter and rebellious after his father, an activist preacher, was murdered in 1931, presumably for advocating the ideas of Marcus Garvey.

Malcolm Little moved to Harlem, where he became a criminal and, convicted of burglary, was imprisoned from 1946 to 1952. While in prison, he became a follower of Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975), leader of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, popularly called the Black Muslims. Rejecting his surname as a “slave name,” Malcolm Little became Malcolm X and, upon his release from prison, served as a leading spokesman for the Black Muslim movement.

What Malcolm X said galvanized many in the black community, giving young black men in particular a sense of pride, purpose, and potential, even as his rhetoric intimidated and outraged many whites, who saw Malcolm X as one of several angry young activists. These included such figures as Stokley Carmichael, who called for “total revolution” and “Black Power”; H. Rap Brown, leader of the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who exhorted angry blacks to “burn this town down” in a 1967 speech in Cambridge, Maryland; and Huey Newton, leader of the militant Black Panther Party, which many whites saw as little more than a national street gang. By the mid 1960s, the civil rights movement was split between the adherents of King’s nonviolence and those who, having lost patience with American society, followed a more aggressive path.

In fact, Malcolm X evolved ideas that were quite different from those not only of King, but of the young militants. Malcolm X split with the Black Muslims and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity in June 1964, advocating a kind of socialist solution to the corruption of American society that had led to racial hatred and the subjugation of blacks. His original message, that the “white man” was (quite literally) the devil incarnate, had become transformed into a religiously inspired quest for racial equality. The quest was tempered by a conviction that black America had to look within, and not to white America, for the means to freedom and progress.

The evolution of Malcolm X was cut short on February 21, 1965, when he was gunned down by three Black Muslims during a speech at Harlem’s Audubon Auditorium. His Autobiography (dictated to Alex Haley, who would later gain fame as the author of Roots, a sweeping novel of black history), published just after his assassination, became an extraor-dinarily influential document in expanding and redefining the civil rights movement.

The journey of black America, like the life of Malcolm X, remained incomplete during the 1960s and remains incomplete to this day. The fact is that African-Americans generally live less affluently, amid more crime, and with less opportunity than white Americans. Yet the range of black leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, from Rosa Parks, to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X, brought hope and social visibility to black America.

Sputnik and the New Frontier

Despite growing racial disharmony, the United States was a fairly self-satisfied place in the 1950s. Then, on October 4, 1957, the world learned that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a 184-pound satellite into earth orbit. Called Sputnik I, its radio transmitter emitted nothing more than electronic beeps, but it sent shock waves through the American nation. Suddenly, the U.S.S.R., our adversary in the postwar world, the embodiment of godless communism, had demonstrated to the world its technological superiority. The launching of Sputnik began a “space race,” in which the United States came in (lead second during the early laps. The Soviets put a man, “cosmonaut” Yuri Gagarin, into orbit four years after Sputnik and one month before American “astronaut” Alan B. Shepard was launched on a 15-minute suborbital flight on May 5, 1961.

Sputnik shook Americans out of their complacency. The 1960 presidential race, between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, and a dashing, youthful senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, almost ended in a tie. But the nation rejected the security of Eisenhower’s man and voted into office a candidate who embodied a new energy, vigor, and challenge.

JFK

At 43, John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president in American history (Theodore Roosevelt was slightly younger when he assumed office after the assassination of William McKinley). Kennedy’s administration established the Peace Corps (an organization of volunteers assigned to work in developing nations), created the Alliance for Progress (which strengthened relations with Latin America), and set a national goal of landing an American on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Despite these accomplishments, Kennedy is best remembered for the magic (there is no better word) he and his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, brought to the White House and the national leadership.

“The Torch Has Been Passed…”

Intelligent (his books included the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage), handsome, idealistic, athletic, irreverently witty, and a war hero, Kennedy declared in his inaugural address that the “torch has been passed to a new generation”—of which he was clearly the embodiment. Mired in a depressing Cold War, plagued by social problems, continually anxious over impending nuclear war, worried that the Soviets and the Chinese were winning the hearts and minds of the world, Americans eagerly embraced the attractive optimism of JFK.

Bay of Pigs and Brink of Armageddon

Although he was adored by many, Kennedy never succeeded in winning the support of Congress. He and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (1925-68), sought to further civil rights but were repeatedly thwarted by Congress. Kennedy tried to create programs to fund broad educational initiatives, only to see them diluted by Congress. He also introduced a program to provide medical care for the elderly, which was delayed by Congress.

Early in Kennedy’s administration, the nation suffered the tragic humiliation of a bungled attempt to invade Cuba, which was under the communist rule of Fidel Castro (b. 1926). In March 1960, President Eisenhower had approved a CIA plan to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles for an invasion to overthrow the Cuban leader. Kennedy allowed the preparations to proceed, and some 1,500 exiles landed on April 17, 1961, at Bay of Pigs on the island’s southwestern coast.

The result was unmitigated disaster. Not only had the attack’s secrecy been breached, but Kennedy, fearing Soviet reprisal, decided not to authorize promised U.S. air support. Worse, the CIA had badly misread the political climate of revolutionary Cuba. The general uprising the CIA believed would be set off by the landing simply did not happen. By April 19, the invasion was crushed and 1,200 survivors were captured. (They were released in December 1962, in exchange for $53 million worth of U.S. medicines and provisions.)