The Mysteries of History (February 21 Edition)
Karl Marx / Communist Manifesto, el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) Killed
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, 1905
1848 — Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto Published
public domain images from wikimedia commons (Marx and his daughter on the left, the first page of his Manifesto, in German, on the right)
Karl Marx (1818-1883), who was born in Germany and died in London, published Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (literally “Manifest of the Communist Party” but known as The Communist Manifesto [with Friedrich Engels]) on this date in 1848. The book claimed that history was based on class struggle, and that eventually the middle class (the working people) would prevail and bring about a classless society (not “classless” in the sense of wearing your trousers well below your hips, but having no socioeconomic class divides).
The Manifesto’s opening words include, “The proletarians [common folk] have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”
The Communist Manifesto produced a groundswell that, over time, greatly influenced politics. By the 1950s (a century later), almost half of the people in the world lived under Marxist-inspired style of governments, that is to say the more extreme form of socialism known as communism.
Marx wrote another well-known work, Das Kapital (Capital), in 1867. Fifty years later, in the midst of World War 1, Vladimir Lenin led a communist revolution in Russia.
image generated using Bing Image Creator
Questions: How many countries did Marx live in during his life, and what caused him to move around so much? Who was Friedrich Engels? How important was Engels to Marx and to Marx’s books? Have you read any of Marx’s books? What did Marx predict would eventually happen to capitalistic countries? Why do countries care which form of government other countries choose?
1965 — el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) Dies With His Boots On
public domain images from wikimedia commons
The man born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, was killed before his 40th birthday, gunned down while giving a speech in Manhattan, New York. He had given himself the surname X (standing for unknown) because his birth certificate surname, Little, was a slave name — one passed down from ancestors by their slaveholders. Prior to his death, after converting to Islam and making a pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm had changed his name again, wanting to be known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.
Malcolm had enemies because he was not in the middle; for much of his life he had been a radical and an extremist. At one time he stated that the only white person he trusted was John Brown (the militant abolitionist who was hanged in 1859 in Harpers Ferry, Virginia [now West Virginia] for trying to start a slave rebellion), but that he wasn’t entirely sure about whether he should even trust Brown.
Later in life, el-Shabazz had at least moderately mellowed. His attacker on this date in 1965 was a member of the Nation of Islam, whose leader, Elijah Muhammad, was denounced by el-Shabazz for having molested a number of underage girls. It’s possible that el-Shabazz’s killer was a hit man sicced on him by Muhammad. Three men had been arrested for the attack, but two protested their innocence; the one who admitted to his guilt also said the other two had no part in the murder, but they were all imprisoned, anyway. In 2021, the two were proven innocent and exonerated, but one of them had already died.
Later in 1965, the autobiography el-Shabazz had been working on with Alex Haley (1921-1992) was released. It was entitled The Autobiography of Malcolm X, presumably because that’s the name most people knew el-Shabazz by. Haley was also the author of Roots: The Sage of an American Family, which came out in 1976.
Questions: What influence did Malcolm’s father have on him? How did he die? Why did the family relocate from Nebraska to Michigan? Who was “Detroit Red”? How did Malcolm become “radicalized”? Was he a member of the NAACP? Was he a member of the Black Panthers? What was his relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. like? Did el-Shabazz and King have similar philosophies and approaches on how to secure Civil Rights for blacks? If not, why not? What happened to the man who killed el-Shabazz — did he die in prison, or…?
