Malcolm X would have turned 100 on May 19, 2025. February 21, 2025, also marks the 60th anniversary of his assassination in Washington Heights, a neighborhood outside Harlem’s boundaries that his presence made a permanent part of New York City’s cultural tapestry. His legacy embodies Black Islamic revolutionary cosmopolitan international cool.
Malcolm X’s political journey from the heady weeks of public friendship and brotherhood with the young heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay (who shortly would be rechristened Muhammad Ali) until his assassination on Sunday, February 21, 1965, offers evocative lessons for our current age of global crises and opportunities.
In his final year, Malcolm X set out to fundamentally transform America’s domestic civil rights struggle into a global human rights movement. Black America’s prosecuting attorney expansively imagined the Black struggle for dignity and citizenship as the beating heart of international liberation movements, altering the relationship between the global North and South. Malcolm cultivated alliances with African, Middle Eastern, and Third World leaders who, he argued, held a moral responsibility to aid their suffering Black American brothers and sisters in the United States. In so doing, Malcolm X came to bestride the global age of decolonization, emerging as the era’s most iconic anti-imperialist revolutionary leader.
Malcolm’s political journey unfolded amidst local, national, and global liberation movements. Malcolm grew into far more than the dazzling parts of his professional career and personal biography during this time. Maturity turned him into a statesman. A revolutionary prime minister traversing the world to broker international coalitions, forge deep political friendships, and enable twenty-two million Black folks to claim their human rights back home. Malcolm’s itinerary reflected the energies of a man making up for lost years while running out of time.
Over one year, Harlem’s Hero became the leader of an unfolding anti-colonial movement encompassing Africa, the Middle East, and vast parts of the world. From his revelation in the hajj to meetings with leaders, prime ministers, and presidents of Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Egypt, Malcolm blazed new trails, forging a daring fusion of Pan-African, Pan-Islamic, Third World, and Black American political traditions.
Malcolm’s trips to Europe amplified his human rights message, offering a platform within the Western world more receptive to his political evolution than American media. In London, multiracial crowds of university students, Muslims, Caribbean African expatriates, and local activists recognized Malcolm as a human rights revolutionary. Malcolm’s time at Oxford University, where, as a guest of the Oxford Union, he revealed his intention to work with people of all colors to “change the miserable condition on the face of this earth,” remains legendary.
Malcolm X’s greatest political and intellectual contribution remains the idea of radical Black dignity. Malcolm argued that God endowed Black people with innate dignity. For Malcolm, citizenship represented the mere external recognition of human dignity. Malcolm devoted his life to spreading a message of Black dignity to the masses of African American people who were then called Negroes. Malcolm proved instrumental in transforming Negroes into Black people.
He argued that if Black people experienced a dignity recognized by institutions in America and worldwide, they would achieve freedom beyond emancipation. For Malcolm, Black dignity represented the key to a global human rights project with universal implications. Yet he insisted that his definition of dignity transcended geographic and racial boundaries. He defined the struggle for Black dignity as the common denominator linking international liberation movements. When Black, African, and Third World peoples achieved human dignity, the repercussions would be felt around the world. The United Nations’ declaration of 1960 as the “Year of Africa” acknowledged independence movements sweeping the continent and impacting the world. Africa’s post-colonial future bumped into neo-colonial Western policies from without and a battle against corruption from within. Malcolm witnessed these challenges up close. Malcolm would spend his last year searching for an undiscovered country, and his final act of political organizing helped birth it.
Malcolm’s final message of radical Black dignity resonated internationally. Young people, Muslims, Christians, prisoners, intellectuals, and organizers followed Malcolm’s travels with intensity and inspiration. His travails ennobled and enlightened at least two generations of Black, Third World, and white activists around the world. They paid careful attention to Malcolm’s religious journey, political vision, and cultural evolution, transforming his global sojourn into the sight of their horizon over time.
His audience also included a sprawling group of enemies that ranged from the FBI and New York Police Department’s particular investigative unit to the CIA and State Department to members of the Nation of Islam who made plans to silence Malcolm through a campaign of surveillance, harassment, death threats, economic warfare, and, eventually, assassination.
Malcolm spent much of his last year abroad. Like an itinerant preacher spreading his gospel to distant lands, Malcolm became a global Islamic evangelist of a human rights revolution. In doing so, he became the avatar of movements for Black dignity and citizenship that resonated in far corners of the world. Malcolm internationalized freedom struggles and created a new language for a political revolution that contemporary and future generations still utilize.
The centennial of Malcolm X’s birthday offers space for Black folk in America and across the global diaspora to reflect on the expanse of a revolutionary human rights activist whose struggle for dignity continues to inspire social movements in America and around the world. Malcolm embodies the quest for radical political self-determination and self-love that expansively reimagines the contours of Black humanity at the local, regional, national, and global levels. In an age of renewed political division, racial backlash, and authoritarianism, Malcolm’s quest for a world of dignity beyond the sight of the visible horizon manifests itself in new generations of activists across the globe who continue the pursuit of human rights that Harlem’s Hero dedicated his life to.
