Malcolm X’s challenge to mass incarceration
/Fifty years ago today, assassins killed black power activist Malcolm X during a speech to the Organization for Afro-American Unity at New York City’s Audubon Ballroom. Although they ended the life of one of the 20th century’s most dynamic leaders, they did not kill his impact. His insights into racism and freedom are as necessary today as when he first spoke them. A half-century after his murder, Malcolm X may still be one of our best guides for making sense of American racism, the evil that once again roils the country in unrest.
Malcolm X’s enduring influence owes in part to the truth of his metaphors, his way with words and the relentlessness of his criticism — in particular, his depiction of the United States as a prison. In making the comparison, he gave voice to the confinement he saw in a white supremacy still evident.
“Don’t be shocked when I say I was in prison,” he often told his audiences. “You’re still in prison. That’s what America means — prison.”
Before he was a political activist, Malcolm X spent several years incarcerated for a series of robberies. It was in prison, like hundreds of other black men in the 1950s and 1960s, that he joined the black nationalist religious group the Nation of Islam and launched his time as an activist.
To Malcolm X, prison was more than its bricks and mortar. It was a metaphor for racism. Prisons use armed force to deny the mobility, insult the integrity and restrict the civic and political participation of its captives. And for the black audiences who heard Malcolm X speak — men and women who went to underfunded schools, worked dangerous and low-paying jobs where they could find them, faced harassment in employment lines or welfare offices, were forced to live in only certain neighborhoods and in many parts of the country were barred from voting by police and vigilante organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan — the United States did mean prison.
Prison, then, was an exaggerated form of the daily indignities black women and men faced. What made this metaphor ring so true is that black communities — years before the launch of the war on drugs — were already heavily policed and disproportionately incarcerated.
Rejecting the character assassination of criminalization, Malcolm X inverted concepts of guilt and innocence as they played out in the routine arrests of black people. “You can’t be a Negro in America and not have a criminal record,” he said. “Martin Luther King has been to jail. James Farmer has been to jail. Why, you can’t name a black man in this country who is sick and tired of the hell that he’s catching who hasn’t been to jail.”
