Eight years before those same televisions played the carnage in Vietnam - and four years before the weekend-long broadcast of sadness in Dallas - they showed Americans Mike Wallace’s CBS special, “The Hate that Hate Produced.”It shockingly introduced white America to the Nation of Islam (NOI) – specifically, to Malcolm X and his NOI brothers. White Americans cringed at the hatred they saw directed at them and the Brothers' deep contempt for American social values.
In it's wake, there was understandable outrage. CBS was accused of inciting racial unrest. It was unprecedented, self-directed American-made hate – playing out on an American stage.
The multi-part special included Louis Farrakhan’s angered indictments of whites: “I charge the white man …with being the greatest murderer on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest peace-breaker on earth.... the greatest robber on earth…the greatest deceiver on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest trouble-maker on earth.”
Amazingly, this was the same Louis Farrakhan that would later confess to his own complicit role in Malcolm’s demise.
This was 1959, and as yet the deep stirrings of the civil rights movement had not yet begun in America’s collective conscience. Thus America’s shock at these images. These words.
Mike Wallace collaborated with Louis Lomax, a black reporter. Lomax told Wallace about Black Muslims for the first time earlier that year. “Mike, they hate white people.”
Wallace was initially skeptical when Lomax told him the specifics – that the movement had already recruited over two hundred thousand black Americans whom were vehemently opposed to integration and "had nothing but contempt for the civil rights movement." Then he witnessed it himself. And filmed it with Lomax.
In his autobiography, Wallace describes the work, “The Hate that Hate Produced,” as one of the most explosive pieces he had ever been involved in. And considering Wallace’s body of work, that statement is astonishing.
The watershed nature of this 1959 expose is that many Americans had no idea that black people had such incendiary feelings towards whites. It was a kind of open, threatened hatred. It was organized - and it was probably really scary for 1959 Americans. Explosive.
Malcolm’s message, despite its angry rhetorical content, was one that America needed to hear. It was a bitter medicine America needed on racial justice and civil rights. But Malcolm’s Nation of Islam was considered extreme in the extreme – his militant radicals had plunged into even more dangerous waters in that era - they were considered fringe communists. They had met with Castro in Harlem in 1960 for the United Nations Opening Session.
His group was considered so extreme, in fact, that the media was galvanized against publicizing their messages on social justice. The racial genie was out of the bottle. The voices had been heard - the messages - the hate - could not be unheard. The media instead looked for a balancing voice - and found it in the newsreels of fire-hoses and dogs and marches in Alabama and Mississippi.
And so it was, in part, that Martin Luther King’s message became the national dialogue. His voice, equally stirring yet infinitely more palatable - is remembered as the medicine that worked. And it Martin that is remembered by history. He is the man who stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and proclaimed his dream.
And after MLK stood on those steps, Malcolm X journeyed to Mecca and returned transformed, renouncing many of his radical positions and his association with the Nation of Islam. For that, three of his radical former brothers killed him in 1964.
There is no doubt among friends and historians that Macolm X was misunderstood. Maybe by me, too.
But I believe that he cannot be morally judged by his words against social injustice. Perhaps they were words of hate – but no less so than the rhetoric of our own civil revolution. Or of the war that ended 15 years before Malcolm began speaking for the NOI.
Malcolm’s voice was heard, even if the message was painful for our mothers and fathers, in their suburban homes, to hear. It was so painful, so extreme, that news network cameras turned to the less threatening, less violent, King – and his message. Malcolm and the NOI were marginalized. King’s voice was another to be heard. Then both were silenced.
Today, we don’t hear voices like King’s or Malcolm’s. Where are the angry African Americans to speak outrage at unemployment, underemployment, irrational imprisonment, collapsing families, and violence in their communities? Where are the ones that can speak and be heard?
We need a soul like Malcolm X to emerge again. Our moral judgments on his message are eclipsed by the effect his words - his voice - had on opening eyes, starting a conversation. We need Malcolm's charismatic and provocative outrage at injustice.
Mike Wallace, who would become a lifelong friend of Malcolm X’s family, remembers him fondly as a deeply charismatic and complex man. The same Mike Wallace that, at 93, had known world leaders, presidents, and history – up close and in detail.
He knew how important Malcolm was to us. He knew Malcolm was a part of America.
And Mike Wallace knew Malcolm was a voice that needed to be heard.
A voice that is missing.
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