• What seems to have motivated Malcolm X to become a Muslim? Why might there have been an appetite for Islam among Black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s?
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What appears to have motivated Malcom X to become a Muslim and what I assume drew many other Black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s to Islam is the notion that “there’s a man who knows everything.” and “his real name is Allah”. This meant that there was someone, a god, who understood and knew the history of the Black American struggle who had power and empathised with the black community. This figure of “Allah” who was, as a God is, powerful and loving. This belief in conjunction with a teaching that “the white man is the devil” must have been an attractive prospect. For Malcom x and many others there was now a religion fighting for their race, not against it. The Christian white man’s power was being erased and instead replaced with black unity, nationalism and strength. There was bonding, beauty and power in the black Muslim community that would surely have been seen as some sort of salvation or justice to those that had been wronged for so long by their oppressors. The idea that “if you will take one step toward Allah – Allah will take two steps toward you” is a reciprocal relationship that Malcom X may have been drawn to. This religion being presented to them that is so vastly different to Christianity gave them a sense of identity that transcends the framework of the white man. “The devil white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth’s only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity.” This statement about Islam gave Black Americans hope that they could re-find their own identity pre slavery, an identity not marked by sadness or brutality. Therefore Islam was a means by which Black Americans could define themselves without any touch of the White Man, a prospect in America otherwise unfathomable.