Mythe et heros - Malcolm X

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However, as Marcus Garvey, he didn't believed that freedom, self respect, could never be achieved by black Americans.

The fact that he lived outiside the ghetto (the all black district), and that he wanted to be his own boss just like in the american dream, generated hostility among black people. We can guess that some of them may have been jealous of his life style because many blacks lived in fear of the white and prefered to be submissive.

That's why they probably have resorted MalcolmX father attitude, living in a white neighboorhoud, because they feared that he might cause them trouble.

Malcolm X calls the black people who denoucend his father “uncle tom Negroes” to show how much he despises them, this term refers to a black personn who is submissive to whites.

Whites couldn't bear a black man standing up against the rules, they feared he might influence the other blacks in Lansing. They blamed him for being an “uppity nigger”, for being ambitious, for living outside the all black district whereas a “good nigger” must be submissive, they must be undercontrol.

Although Malcolm X was 4yo, he remembers that night very well, the 2 white men who set fire to their house were probably black legionnaires.

It must have been traumatic to the family but the most revolting is the attitude of the policemen and the firemen. They didn't do anything to stop the fire or to help the family. Obviously they were supporters or members of the black legion..

In Lansing, they lived in hostility, they received threats from the Black Legion, that is a secret group of whit supremaciste similar to the KKK. And one night, Malcolm X's father has been assinated. The murderers must have been black legionnaires.

This passage enlightens us on the racist climate in those days. And make us understands the MalcolmX's position extremist. The fact that he was a criminal can be put in perspective, because of the poverty of the familu after his father's death. All his life has been very difficult, living in fear, loosing members of his family, and all of his problems were dues to racism.

III

We know that Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in march 1964 and went to Mecca( that is a place of pilgrimage for Muslim pilgrims in saoudi Arabia). Now we are going to see that his 1st pilgrimmage to Mecca, in1964 has changed his opinion about white.

After Malcolm X's assasinatin, his family must have put his belongings into this storage unit where 3 types of documents were found. The 1st is a copy of the Koran, there is also letters that he has written to his wife and his brothers. But we are more particularly interested by journals.

It is diaries he had written during his pilgrimage to Mecca. He wrote about the feelings he had had during his 1st pilgrimage and confessed that he had been wrong to advocate a separalist society. It was there that his view of separatism changed.

His words were in sharp contrst with the words he had uttered in his speech “Message to the Grassroots” . He even sounded like Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream” speech, pronunced in Washington Dc in august, 25th, 1963.

During this pilgrimage, he had met people of different colour, but unite by their religion. And I think that just like it is written, it is at this moment that he had realised that “ it was not race but a person's intention that mattered.”

He had written that he was not conscious of colour for the 1st time, and uses a metaphor to express his changing his mind :”the whites don't seem white” .

We can observ that after his pilgrimage to Mecca, he renounced of these extremist ideas and admittend that whites were human just like him. He discovered that colour no longer mattered and consequently that White and Black could coexist.

To conclude , and answer to my problematic, I would say that to my mind, despite his radical and closed thoughs against white people, he was defending an important cause, fighting for the rights of African Americans which is sufficient to considers him as a wonderful personn. After reading his autobiography, and learning more about this subject, I didn't have any dificulties to understands him, and I admire him even more because of his capacity to change, and improve his way of thinking, admitting that he was wrong. Moreover his fight had permitted an international awareness of the African Americans's conditions and an evolution of these conditions, just like Martin Luther King did.