Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2000

Abstract

The years between Malcolm X as the scariest thing mainstream white America could imagine and Malcolm X as pitchman for movies, baseball caps, and t-shirts have been bleak ones for African American progressive politics. The various movements that held so much promise in the 1950s and '60s have, in the words of Cornel West, "been crushed and/or absorbed" (Keeping 246). Manning Marable has divided black politics into "three strategic visions, which can be termed 'inclusion,'... 'black nationalism,' and transformation"' ("History" 73). Generally speaking, "inclusion" and "black nationalism" have been defanged and absorbed, while those ideas represented by Malcolm X's "transformationist" last year have been silenced and crushed. Marable notes the way that the silence has been institutionalized when he points out that "most historians [have] characterized the central divisions within black political culture as the 150-year struggle between 'integration' and 'separation'" ("History" 72), with the poles represented in such easy binaries as Du Bois versus Garvey, Martin versus Malcolm, or Henry Louis Gates versus Molefi Asante.

Publication Title

African American Review

Volume

34

Issue

1

First Page

39

Last Page

59

Comments

© 2000, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Subjects - Topical (LCSH)

African Americans in mass media; Authors, Black--United States--Social conditions; African American motion picture producers and directors; Motion pictures--Social aspects--United States

Geographic Coverage

United States

Genre/Form

articles

Type

Text

Language

English

Format

application/pdf

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