Black Muslims

Forty four years ago today Malcolm X was assassinated. The following year, 1965, we debated his 'British brother', Michael X. The message remains the same.

On September 7 Michael X, a leader of the Black Muslims in Britain, spoke "In Favour of the Separation of the Races" at our Paddington branch. He claimed that "the black man's greatest problem was the white man". White men had shipped black men to the West Indies; they had deprived them of their names, their language, their religion and their culture. Christianity was a slave religion. That was why people like him returned to Islam, the religion of their forefathers. He was president of an organisation that admitted no whites. This was because if they did the whites would help the organisation to death; the "white liberals" would do all the work so that black people would never learn to act for thernselves. Black people from the West Indies were basically agricultural; they were unused to the disciplines of industrial society. They had to learn these "to catch up with the whites". But they could only do this, Michael X said, through "separate development"; by keeping away from, and not trusting, white people and by learning on their own,

In discussion it was pointed out that Socialists did not see themselves as white people or black people or as British or any other nationality. They knew they were members of a world-wide working class without any country. They knew that the only solutions to our troubles as workers was, whatever our pigmentation or what not, through the establishment of a world Socialist community. Members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain had come from all kinds of religious backgrounds - Christian, Jewish, even Muslim. They had seen through all this mumbojumbo. When the Black Muslims had "caught up", what then? Tbey would only be ordinary wage slaves like the rest of us. Was this all they wanted?

In reply Michael X said that Socialism was a "white man's theory'.

Socialist Standard, November 1966