ABSTRACT
In an address to a “Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference,” organized by the “Group on Advanced Leadership” (GOAL) held in Detroit in November of 1963, Malcolm X declared:
Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you’ve got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. Once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.1 (Emphasis added)
The opening statement of the above quote represents perhaps the central tenet of Malcolm X’s liberation, and revolutionary thought, and it would reappear in his other speeches and numerous publications. It underscores his enduring faith in the potency of historical knowledge as a weapon of black liberation. Whenever he invoked the statement, Malcolm was often reflecting on, and perhaps even lamenting, the daunting challenge of eradicating the debilitating consequences of a condition Carter G. Woodson drew attention to decades earlier: the mis-education of the Negro, the degree to which blacks had been misinformed and misled about their history and heritage, and the consequent negative and disempowering consciousness they developed.2 This tragic “historical” consciousness induced self-loathing, while stifling self-deterministic consciousness. It also confined blacks in a condition akin to intellectual atrophy, or some would say, intellectual deformity, their consciousness infused with ethos of negativism and falsehood about the self, their history and heritage. Blacks remained frozen in this historical twilight zone of negativism and negation, burdened with, and tormented by, feelings of worthlessness and inferiority complex, conditions that legitimized and reinforced white domination.3 Underscoring the need for historical knowledge, Malcolm stated
once you see that the condition that we’re in is directly related to our lack of knowledge concerning the history of the black man, only then can you realize the importance of knowing something about the history of the black man.4
