Don Wildman

Malcolm X spoke truth to power, plainly and without apology, in the heady days of the civil rights movement, delivering a message that made many people of this country very uncomfortable.

But he did it with such perceptive intelligence and charisma that even now, more than 60 years after his passing,

his undeniable presence endures.

We discuss this consequential figure with Professor Clarence Lang, the Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State University, and a professor of African American Studies, historian of Black urban history and social movements, and author of several acclaimed books examining race, power, and protest in 20th century America.

Professor Lang, Clarence, glad to welcome you.

Before we turn to the formative events of his early life, let's define the movement in which Malcolm X will come to play such a major role.

I think it will help the audience to sort of back up for a moment and understand this.

Black nationalism was an international movement of the early 20th century that continues on today, really, but arose in response to, of course, centuries of degradation felt by Black populations around the world, the result of colonialism, slavery, Black exploitation.

How had Black nationalism in America addressed those issues differently than elsewhere?

Yeah, it's a fascinating time because, I mean, this is all against the backdrop, of course, of segregation and Jim Crow, as far as the American story goes in the first half of the 20th century.

It's about asserting, as you say, self-determination politically, economically, culturally, outside the constraints necessarily of white dominated society.

Fair to say?

That's correct.

And it's important to me to sketch this because there's a lot of people that don't understand how much was happening in this world, certainly in the in those decades among black communities spurred on by the Great Migration, which was happening around the World War One time frame and before that.

This enormous amount of migration northward.

And as families took root in these new places and there's generations happening, a new sensibility was happening in American black communities as far as how do we move onward.

And there was kind of a split.

There was sort of a fork in the road between the Booker T. Washington school of thinking where you kind of assimilate or accommodate versus reforming the world that you're in.

Am I correct in how I'm framing this?

As we speak about Malcolm X, there is an enormous context to Malcolm X, and that is what is so remarkable about him, how he distinguishes his argument from what is so rich and layered in his youth, even with his own father, who was a Garveyite himself, right?