FROM ANTHONY G FLOOD'S WEBSITE

 A few days ago National Public Radio's Morning Edition had a segment to remind listeners of the centennial of the birth of Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X;  I spoke with Mr. Flood soon after on other topics, mentioned the NPR report, and complained to Flood, that as usual, the liberal radio network did not mention an important aspect of Malcolm's critique of the civil rights movement.  Mr. Flood then composed an addition to his website for the following day.  I have copied part of his site and placed it on my own blog today.  It is below -  I copied only one of the 2 letters for my blog.

Marking Malcolm X’s centennial: Hugh Murray’s probing letters from the 1990s.

I missed it by a day (sorry!). The centennial of the birth of Malcolm X and 60 years since his assassination (a few months after his Queens home was firebombed a few miles from me) warrant swiping from my old site two letters that my friend Hugh Murray got published in 1994 and 1995. Without further ado:

 

 

What about the Nation of Islam’s Historical Ties to Fascism?

The New York Times, February 23, 1994

It was widely reported when Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, suspended Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who told an audience at Kean College of New Jersey that Jews are bloodsuckers, gays are sissies, and the Pope is a cracker.

Mr. Farrakhan rebuked the manner in which Mr. Muhammad delivered his message, but Mr. Farrakhan reaffirmed the “truths” of that message! Reporters speculate if this is a repudiation of bigotry or not.  But they are silent about the history of the Nation of Islam on these subjects.

American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell (center) at a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally, Uline Arena, Washington, DC, June 25, 1961. During the collection, he shouted: “George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!” (almost $135 in today’s money). Malcolm X, noting the applause, asked him: “George Lincoln Rockwell, you got the biggest hand you ever got, didn’t you?” Elijah Muhammad, NOI founder, invited Rockwell to speak at their next Savior’s Day Convention, which he did on Sunday, February 25, 1962, before 12,175 people in Chicago’s International Amphitheater. (Muhammad Speaks, April 1962, p. 3.) At the podium, in full Nazi regalia, Rockwell opined “that Elijah Muhammad is to the so-called Negro what Adolph Hitler is to the German people. He is the most powerful black man in the country. Heil Hitler!” (Black History and the Class Struggle, Spartacist League, August 1994, p. 37.)

In the early 1960’s, at a large gathering of the Nation of Islam, the featured speaker was Elijah Muhammad, its leader.  But the speaker just before him, addressing Elijah Muhammad’s followers, was George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party.1

In the early 1960’s Malcolm X, as a Nation of Islam spokesman, mocked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  At the height of civil rights protest Malcolm traveled to the South, not to partake in civil rights protest, but to negotiate with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan on how to thwart the struggle for civil rights.  This scene is omitted from Spike Lee’s film and from the recent PBS documentary on Malcolm X.

And in the 1920’s, even before the founding of the Nation of Islam, Marcus Garvey led the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which became America’s largest black nationalist organization.  The association created the Black Cross Nurses, the African Legion, the Knights of the Nile and established the Black Star Steamship Line.  Though black liberals and socialists like A. Philip Randolph and W. E. B. Du Bois bitterly opposed Garvey, Garvey found other associates—the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.

Garvey and Klansmen met and shook hands in the 1920’s.  Eventually, Garvey was deported and lived in Britain, where he supported the Conservative Party and hoped Britain would transfer some of its African colonies to him.  Garvey also admired some European leaders, like Mussolini.  Garvey even reminded his followers, “We were the first Fascists.”2

Thus, the problem is not a single speech by Khalid Muhammad.  Behind much of black nationalism and the Nation of Islam lurks the idea of fascism.  And black fascism, like white fascism, is still fascism.

When Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus attempt to embrace Louis Farrakhan, they are seeking an alliance with a tradition of fascism.

Notes

1 See William H. Schmaltz’s When George Lincoln Rockwell, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X Shared the Same Stage and Rockwell’s own account.—A.G.F.

2 For the source of this quote, see the third reference note to Hugh Murray, “From the Communist Party to Affirmative Action.”—A.G.F

Hugh Murray, Milwaukee

PS--- Kanye is not the first

In January 1965 Malcolm was the featured speaker at the Militant Labor Forum in NYC.  In Feb. 1965 Malcolm was shot dead.  In August 1966 I was the featured speaker at the Militant Labor Forum in NYC.  Happily, I have not been shot. 

COMMENT ON PBS TV PROGRAM ON "THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT"

 I watched the PBS hour-long account of the formation an important, though short-lived organization, the Niagara Movement.  In begins with discussion of 3 important Negroes of that era: Booker T. Washington, the man who essentially made Tuskegee Institute into a major black university; W. E. B. Du Bois, then a young scholar; and William Monroe Trotter, a Boston journalist.  The narrative rightly contrasts the backgrounds of the 3; Washington born into slavery and struggling to gain an education at a newly founded univeristy following the Civil War and Emancipation; while Du Bois and Trotter were raised in New England towns that had few blacks; towns in which they excelled, and both attended Harvard U. 

    At the Atlanta Exhibition of 1895 Booker Washington presented a speech that would be called the great compromise.  He blamed earlier black leaders for attempting to exert their new freedom by beginning at the top, running for political office, orating, becoming senators, representatives, etc.  This was wrong-headed.  Blacks should have begun at the bottom.  The tv program acknowledged it was a major speech, but did not quote it.  In that speech, Washington told a story of a ship in distress that comes across a friendly vessel as requsts fresh water, as they were dying of thirst.  The other ship urges the distressed vessel to cast your bucket where you are.  The captain of the distressed vessel refuses - they cannot drink ocean water.  Eventually, they cast they bucket, and it is fresh water, as they have floated near the flow of the Amazon River when it empties into the ocean.  He then urges blacks to cast their bucket in the South with their white neighbors; and he urges the whites not to look to foreign immigrants, but to the 8 million Southern blacks whom they know and who are ready to work for them without causing strikes and labor troubles; people who were loyal to them in the past.  Moreover, in this way the races could be separate as the fingers on the hand, but united and strong when needed for the power of the hand.  This was interpreted as a policy of avoiding politics, and getting basic education for employment in the South.

    The highly educated New Englanders may have been somewhat ambivalent, but with continued lynchings and civil rights retreats and violations, eventually they formed the Niagara Movement to promote legal protest against growing white racism.  There were divisions in the new NM between Trotter, who opposed female memberships, and Du Bois, and eventually the Niagara Movement was nigh bankrupt.  After anti-black pogroms in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's former base, white liberals also saw aneed for an organization to defend black civil rights, and the NAACP was formed with Du Bois on its board, while what was left of the Niagara Movement falls.

    The program gives the illusion that protest was basically a New England obscession.  No mention on the program of Ida Wells, born a slave in Mississippi, moved to Memphis and writing and part owner of a black newspaper.  She had been dragged from the White Ladies car on a train, sued, won a civil rights case, and then lost it.  In the 1890s a mob wrecked her press and she had to flee north.  In 1898 a fusion ticket won in Wilmington, N C., white Populist and black Republicans, but it was literally overthrow and run out of town by white racists.  Not all Southerners were advocates of Washington, but to survive, some had to flee north. 

    Ida Wells wrote much against lynchings of blacks.  But the largest single lynching, of 11 men who had been found innocent in court, occurred in New Orleans in 1891, a lynching of 11 Italians - members of the black hand, probably an earler name for the Mafia.  What was different - the newly created nation of Italy protested this act to Washington, and the Federal government tole New Orleans to lay off the Italians.  Abyssinia, the only independent black African nation at that time, was not strong enough to protest lynchings of blacks in the US.

    When West Indian Marcus Garvey arrived in the US, he planned to visit Booker Washington, and was quite dispppointed to learn of the death of the leader of Tuskegee.  Garvey would go on to found the Universal Negro Improvement Assn., which in the 1920s far surpassed the NAACP in memberships.  Garvey's black nationalism was om some ways a continuation of the Washington approach and his disdain for the light-skinned Du Bois was mutual.  In the 1930s the NAACP would be challenged by a more vigorous protest group, the International Labor Defence (a Communist Party front), but the CPUSA would also play with the black nationalism with its promotion of an Black Belt inside the US.

    In 1948 the NAACP was captured by the Democrats and became a Dem. front group, in opposition to the Henry Wallace Progressive Party - which was the civil rights movement in the South of that era.  Du Bois supported the Progressives, not Truman, and the NAACP fired Du Bois.

    Garvey was deported, but black nationalism rose again with the Black Muslims.

Hugh Murray

THE GOVERNMENT AND THE LEFT WANT SOME BLACK HISTORY TO DISAPPEAR

  I just posted a comment on a site re the media and the US Govt and their refusal to recognize Black Nationalism and black extremism - which may best explain things like the cause of the black driver of the car into the Christmas parade, killing 6 whites, in Waukesha, Wisconsin in Nov or Dec 2021.  Many academics assert that blacks cannot be racists.  Of course they can, and they can be fascists too.  Hugh Murray

Blacks, like everyone else, can be racists, and can have thinking related to any political ideology. The largest black organization in the US in the 1920s, and which had influence far beyond, was the Universal Negro Improvement Assn., led by West Indian Marcus Garvey. He pushed for black dolls for black girls, the Black Cross nurses, and bought a ship for his Black Star line to return the American diaspora Back to Africa. He opposed the mulatto W.E.B. Du Bois and the then mainly white NAACP; and it may have worked to get the foreigner deported. The Garveyites in the 1920s appear to have worked with another large, similar organization of the 1920s, the KKK. Both sought to retain separation of the races. Even after his deportation, most Garveyites did not join the NAACP.

In the late 1920s, Stalin, a specialist on minorities, wanted the American Communist Party to become more active with blacks, and in the early 30s, a Finnish Party member was put on trial for racism in Harlem, tried, and found guilty by the CP, America's first show trial on racism. A CP front group fought the NAACP for control of the defence of the Scottsboro boys, young blacks accused of rape aboard a freight train in Alabama in 1931. Tho the NAACP hired Clarence Darrow, the radical International Labor Defense hire another top-flight attorney, who so successfully defended the blacks, that the ILD attorneys won 2 major ruling from the very conservative US Supreme Court, saving the lives of the blacks. The CP also promised a Black Belt of majority black counties in the South - an indirect appeal to the Garveyites.

By the mid-30s and Hitler's consolidation of power in Germany, Stalin decided to seek unity with moderates, colonialists, in the Popular Front. Some blacks felt betrayed and left the CP, like George Padmore and others who looked to Pan-Africanism. Garvey, angry at Mussolini for his invasion of Ethiopia (and at Stalin for supplying oil to Italy), Garvey asserted that his UNIA were the first fascists.

In the late 1950s the Black Muslims grew, and like the Garveyites, wanted racial separation. They were opposed to integration, the NAACP, CORE, SNCC. The Black Muslims made deals with the KKK and other segregationists. Malcolm X was ordered to negotiate with the KKK. After CORE began its Freedom Rides in 1961, George Lincold Rockwell, drove his counter - his "hate bus" from Virginia to New Orleans. Rockwell headed the small American Nazi Party. In New Orleans, he and his group also picketed the film Exodus, about the founding of Israel. The following month, Rockwell and several of his fellow Nazis, were invited guests at a large meeting of the Black Muslims in Washington, DC.

But because none of this fits the liberal distorted history of race in America, the media, the academics, the politicians pretend it does not exist.  Under President Biden, he wants to suppress white supremacy and ignore possible black supremists - even though the enormous amount of black on white crime and murder may indicate black supremacy is more of a problem that the white variety, which is more politically correct, especially to the far-left wing and corrupt Biden regime.  It may be politically correct, but historically incorrect.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY: A RACIST IDEA TO OPPRESS WHITES

 Critical Race Theory contends that Blacks cannot be racists, by definition.  History indicates that not only can they be racists, they can be fascists.  I shall add more to this post soon.

Anthony G. Flood, "From Garvey to Farrakhan"

On August 13, 1920 Marcus Garvey presided at the convention of the United Negro Improvement Association held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There he promulgated the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Its 54 points comprise the farthest thing from a fascist manifesto.

And yet, as my friend Hugh Murray noted a quarter-century ago, Garvey “admired . . . leading anti-communists, such as Mussolini. Indeed, in 1937 Garvey proudly proclaimed of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, ‘We were the first fascists.’[1]

Here’s the full quote:

We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.[2]

He said this in 1937, after Mussolini consolidated his rape of Ethiopia.

While many liberals [Murray continues] are the first to hurl the word “fascist” at those with whom they disagree, they usually ignore the fascism of blacks, even when publicly advocated.[3]

A few years after Hugh wrote those words, King’s College Professor of American and English Literature Paul Gilroy came out with “Black Fascism” (Transition, Indiana UPress, 2000, 70-91), a scholarly monograph on Garvey’s boast, the first instance of Black public advocacy of fascism. I recommend it to students of this overlooked chapter of Black American history.

George Lincoln Rockwell, center

On June 25, 1961 American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell sat in the Uline Arena, Washington, DC (where the Beatles would give their first US concert a few years later). He was there at the invitation of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Elijah Muhammad. Thousands were in attendance. During the collection, Rockwell shouted:

George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!

That’s about $135 in today’s money. Malcolm X, noting the applause, asked him:

George Lincoln Rockwell, you got the biggest hand you ever got, didn’t you? [4]

This wasn’t a one-off: Muhammad invited Rockwell to speak at their next Saviour’s Day Convention, which he did on Sunday, February 25, 1962, before 12,175 people in Chicago’s International Amphitheater.

At the podium, in full Nazi regalia, Rockwell adjudged “that Elijah Muhammad is to the so-called Negro what Adolph Hitler is to the German people. He is the most powerful black man in the country.  Heil Hitler!” [5]

Louis Farrakhan, NOI’s current Führer, has not only not repudiated his outfit’s past overtures to American Nazis, but has only reinforced his image as a Black National Socialist. Of course, there isn’t an American Nazi Party worth its salt to invite to a Saviours’ Day commemoration. (Farrakhan pluralized “Saviour” in 1983.) Instead he enjoys the admiration of Black Muslim members of Congress who share his anti-Jewish Weltanschauung and can promote it on a platform wider than the Uline Arena.

Whereas Farrakhan recently joked that he’s not an anti-Semite (only “anti-termite“) it’s the considered view of Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” When, under pressure from the Democratic leadership, she apologized, Farrakhan gently chided her:

Ms. Omar from Somalia—she started talking about ‘the Benjamins’ and they are trying to make her apologize. Sweetheart, don’t do that. Pardon me for calling you sweetheart, but you do have a sweet heart. You sure are using it to shake the government up, but you have nothing to apologize for. . . . Israel and AIPAC pays off senators and congressmen to do their bidding, so you’re not lying, so if you’re not lying. Stop laying down. You were sent there by the people to shake up that corrupt House.

Another Muslim congressional newbie, a 2006 guest columnist for NOI’s The Final Call, is Rashida “Impeach the motherf—–” Tlaib (D-MN). She wants the US to cut off aid to Israel because such aid “doesn’t fit the values of our country,” which “values” apparently include using an obscenity to refer to our country’s president. In front of her child.

Addressing both women, the Minister reminded his “beautiful sisters” that they “were sent there to shake that House up. Your people voted you in, but God is the overseer.”

Then-Senator Obama with Farrakhan and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, 2005

America’s most notable Black Muslims, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, fell out with the NOI: Malcolm in 1964, Ali in 1975.[6] Farrakhan, perhaps the lone survivor of that generation, remains Farrakhan. His 1984 description of “Adolf Hitler [as] a very great man” didn’t socially restrict him from appearing in a photo op with one president or sharing the stage with another.

He was almost certainly at those “ecumenical” NOI events in 1961 and 1962. I would appreciate hearing from any reader who can eliminate the “almost.”

Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton, funeral service for Aretha Franklin, Greater Grace Temple, Detroit, MI, Aug. 31, 2018

[1] See J. A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1947), Vol. II, pp. 602, 605.”

[2] 1937 interview reported by Joel A. Rogers, “Marcus Garvey,” in Negroes of New York series, New York Writers Program, 1939, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. This remark seems to have been dropped from later editions of Rogers’s book.

[3] See Murray’s “White Liberals, Black Racists,” in Chronicles (August, 1994), pp. 43-46.

[4] Muhammad Speaks, April 1962, p. 3.

[5] See Black History and the Class Struggle, Spartacist League, August 1994, p. 37. Those interested in researching this fascinating (if also disturbing) chapter of American history should start with William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell & the American Nazi Party, Washington,DC: Brassey’s, 1999. For the June 25, 1961 event, see Chapter 6, “1961: This Time the World,” 119-21; for February 25, 1962, see Chapter 7, “1962: A World Union of National Socialists,” 133-35. I’ve posted the text of these chapters here. See also Tristan Hopper, “The weird time Nazis made common cause with black nationalists,” National Post, August 24, 2017. Also useful is Mark Jones, “Malcolm X’s Unlikely Washington Connections,” Boundary Stones, February 21, 2015.  The most comprehensive article I’ve seen is Sam McPheeters, “When Malcolm X Met the Nazis,” Vice, April 15, 2015. See also Hugh Murray’s 1994 letter to The New York Times and 1995 letter to The Chronicles of Higher Education. You can read them here.

[6] It probably got Malcolm killed. After he had called out Elijah Muhammad for serially impregnating his underage secretaries, Farrakhan (then “Louis X”) announced that “such a man is worthy of death.” He later regretted that his words may have led to Malcolm’s murder on February 25, 1965—two months after he uttered them.