Malcolm X: “We ourselves have to lift the level of our community, take the standards of our community to a higher level, make our own society beautiful so that we will be satisfied…we’ve got to change our own minds about each other. we have to see each other with new eyes…we have to come together with warmth…”

From bell hooks’ Salvation:

The assassination of the great prophet of love Martin Luther King, the visionary who had held out to the world the hope of ending domination through nonviolent resistance, created the context for hopelessness and despair. And it was even more a blow to the spirit of those who fought for freedom and justice when Malcolm X, who had done so much to turn young black people away from King’s message, was assassinated just at that moment when he had begun to turn away from a philosophy of kill-or-be-killed toward a vision of strategic struggles for freedom grounded in both a love ethic and the will to choose self-determination. Malcolm X was not murdered at the height of his power, of his call for militant armed struggle. Despite the hype which suggested otherwise, a militaristic, imperialist, white supremacist nation wholeheartedly committed to colonize the world “by any means necessary” understood fully that if violence was the order of the day the state would always prevail. He became much more a threat to the state when he began to oppose imperialism and critique violence as the only possible means of intervention. 

Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated at the point when they began to hone a truly revolutionary vision of liberation, one rooted both in a love ethic and the will to resist domination in all its forms. Martin and Malcolm did not live long enough to fully integrate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that would offer practical guidelines for the eradication of black self-hatred, as well as strategies for building a diverse beloved community…