Dreaming Differently About Freedom: Malcolm X and Muhammad Speaks
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Dreaming Differently About Freedom: Malcolm X and Muhammad Speaks Khuram Hussain 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This essay traces the emancipatory imagination of Malcolm X and the newspaper Muhammad Speaks. As a minister in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X laid the foundation for the newspaper’s style, content, and grassroots approach. Even after Malcolm X’s break with the Nation of Islam, the widely read Muhammad Speaks produced news and commentary that fastidiously paralleled key features of Malcolm X’s evolving vision of Black liberation. Keywords Black press . Pan-Africanism . Self-determination . Civil rights . Nation of Islam
Voicing Our True Plight Minister Malcolm X held firm belief in the power of the press to shed light on Black liberation struggles. During his imprisonment, he used newspapers to issue grievances of his keepers. As a contributor to Norfolk prison’s newspaper, he protested the conditions of fellow inmates and wrote letters to local press agencies (Sales 1994). For Malcolm X, the Black press played a particularly crucial role as the “only medium for voicing the true plight of our oppressed people to the world” (X 1991, 142). After he was released from prison, Malcolm actively sought to communicate the message of the Nation of Islam (NOI) in Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and New York Amsterdam News. In turn, he commissioned members of the NOI to sell those papers in their neighborhoods. It is unsurprising, then, that he would go to great lengths to initiate an independent newspaper for the Nation of Islam. What is surprising is that the paper would circulate more physical copies than any Black newspaper in history (Woodford 1991). Even more astonishing is that the paper Malcolm X founded would one day be weaponized against him, stoking the violent rhetoric that preceded his assassination. * Khuram Hussain [email protected]
1
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY 14456, USA
Journal of African American Studies
The story of Muhammad Speaks is inextricably bound to the life and legacy of Malcolm X. Its audacious verve and affront to white supremacy mirrored not only his public persona but also his relentless counter-narrative of revolutionary Black empowerment. Like Malcolm X, Muhammad Speaks embodied the conflicts within Black communities that responded to anti-Black racism in multifaceted ways in what historian Jack Dougherty describes as a “process of creative adaptation” (Dougherty 2005, 202). Throughout the 1960s, Malcolm X and Muhammad Speaks both revised and adapted their narratives to ever-changing circumstances that, at times, revealed deep conflicts as well as profound parallels in their vision of Black liberation. This article traces the emergence and evolution of Muhammad Speaks from its 1960 birth in Harlem to its parallel existence with Malcolm X. Despite having no official capacity within the paper after 1960 and despite contemporary efforts to disassociate him from it altogether (Muhammad 2000), Mal
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