African American Consciousness by Jr. Conyers

Author:Jr. Conyers [Conyers, Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351533676
Google: 7R4uDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T01:30:27+00:00

A Community Activist: Malcolm and Black Political Empowerment

A community activist as defined here refers to a person who advocates social change, in the context of local group issues, by organizing people around common values and concerns. In the context of Africana Social Movements, Malcolm X’s leadership represents the catalyst for community organizing in the 1950s and 1960s exploring the possibility of social change. Malcolm X as an organizational and community leader used his role to act against social inequality. In his role as a community change agent, Malcolm X publicly condemned racism leading to social inequality as his actions led him to fight for social justice.

The scope of Malcolm X’s leadership can be linked to what can be deemed as either alternative or nontraditional expressions of empowerment as those demonstrated by Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk school in Tennessee in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as Paulo Freire in South America in the 1960s and 1970s. Freire’s emphasis on Critical Consciousness meant that he saw a traditional system of education as a tool to reinforce socioeconomic inequality between the poor and rich of a society. According to Freire, this created a “culture of silence and thus poor people would internalize the low opinion that society had of them.” Freire advocated critical reflection leading to political action and government accountability. 2 Horton’s emphasis on Popular Education through the Highlander School in Tennessee would focus on political empowerment for poor people through grass roots movements. 3 This positions Malcolm X as a de facto, non-formal community activist/educator in the tradition of the critical consciousness advocated by Paulo Freire working toward social change and the popular education of Myles Horton addressing group problems from the grass roots approach. The operative question here is: how did Malcolm X’s ideology and public statements translate into action leading to social change in an African-American community context? The beginning of Malcolm X’s activism occurred in the late 1940s while at the Norfolk State Prison Colony. During his self-directed study, participation in the prison education debate programs and his exploration of Islam, Malcolm X’s intellectual growth and development helped shape his early activism. At the debates involving college teams, up to three hundred visitors would come to watch how prisoners would fare with the best and brightest college students. 4 During this time Malcolm used a public forum to discuss information he obtained from his self-directed learning. 5

Malcolm X’s public speaking in prison allowed him to introduce Islam to African Americans and paved the way for their religious conversion emphasizing racial pride and individual self-worth with the goal that they would have a better way of life than they had previously known. It is at this point that he fused historical and cultural knowledge along with his skills of organizing in order to teach African-American adults to seek liberation from the negative social forces to become empowered.

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