Who Is Malcolm X? : His message could be read so many different ways. To some, his emphasis on responsibility led to black empowerment. To others, his separist views were alarming. He offers hope to the hopeless and ammo for the right.

“What we place in the ground is no more now a man, but a seed, which after the winter of our discontent will come forth to meet us.”

--Ossie Davis’ eulogy for Malcolm X

Even at Malcolm X’s funeral, Ossie Davis felt compelled to borrow from Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and later alluded to Horatio’s eulogy of Hamlet--calling Malcolm X “a prince, a black shining prince.” The slain leader’s autobiography of sin and redemption is most often compared to St. Augustine’s. Instantly after his martyrdom, Malcolm X ascended to myth--and there he has stayed.

Forget the hats, the T-shirts, the fake kinte cloth with X’s snuck in the pattern; forget even a great actor and a great film; Malcolmania is bigger than all that. The man and his messages are everywhere in this country today because we need him. The seed is only now sprouting, because only now are we catching up to the enormity of his life and his words.

At the funeral, Davis also said this: “Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood.” Proof that he is still our manhood, even today, even from the grave, is that black men--everyone from Easy E to Chuck D to Spike Lee to Shelby Steele to Clarence Thomas--have all publicly revered him. No matter what our politic, the image of Malcolm X himself is what we dream ourselves to be--brave, honest and alone. In his fantastic tale of redemption and martyrdom, we all see in him what we wish, borrow what we desire. Yet, in the message of his life, in the words of his speeches, has he left us any solutions? Will the sprout continue to grow and one day bloom? I think so. Read on and I’ll try to explain.

Black nationalists and Afrocentrists light upon his speeches that focus on the culpability of white society. While most Americans see this country and the West in general as basically benign, Malcolm X and later black nationalists and progressives (myself included) view this country, and the West in general, as having done more harm than good.

Malcolm X didn’t see white oppression of nonwhites as unfortunate blemishes on an otherwise enlightened system. He saw the oppression of people different from themselves as the very nature, the fundamental definition of the system.

To this day that is why few blacks and whites agree on solutions to this country’s race problems. While most Americans see cops (white) and robbers (black), Malcolm X saw innocents (black) and offenders (white). So many Afro-Americans (as he called us) have converted to his way of thinking that his once-radical view is now the norm.

Black conservatives embrace his calls for responsibility and self-reliance. On this point I couldn’t agree more. In our community we are so timid about criticizing each other that we have been slow to castigate the stupid, evil acts of gangbangers and other random black thugs who terrorize other black folks. This silence, or worse, rationalizing, is especially common among white liberals and middle-class blacks, like myself, who don’t have to fear stray bullets.

If we truly loved these young men, we wouldn’t make excuses for their idiocy. Trying to rationalize all their behavior by blaming it on inept social policy only makes sense if you think of them as animals who are hopelessly and irredeemably set in their ways.

Malcolm X is the shining counterexample. Not a child today in the 1990s in this country is as disadvantaged as he was--growing up in the Depression, his father murdered, his mother mad. True, he slid effortlessly into a life of crime. Yet he pulled himself out. He redeemed himself.

After his conversion, he said every thinking human being has a choice. He loved his people and knew we could do better. When he called us “brother” and “sister,” you felt he wasn’t just mouthing a fad.

With that imposed kinship, however, comes responsibility. If your brother or sister comes home one day and says, “I couldn’t find a good job so I’ve decided to sell crack,” you don’t just nod and mumble, “Times are hard, I sympathize with your decision.” No, you scream at them, tell them they weren’t raised that way, forbid them from poisoning their own people. Malcolm X never coddled us. He was our harshest critic because he loved us as a people.

What I see in Malcolm X, more than anything else, is the redemption of an irredeemable. That’s something that few of us have faith in anymore.

In this age of cynical fatalism, where we seem to be in a perpetual 11th hour of urban ills, few seem to hold out any hope for a cure. The 25% of us black men who will spend some time in the criminal-justice system during our lifetime are being written off by this society.

When we hear of a 22-year-old O.G. Eight-Trey Gangster Crip doing eight-to-10 in Soledad, we don’t say to ourselves, “When he gets out, maybe he could be my accountant.” No. We see him as finished. We see him as forever more outside the bounds of normal society. When our nation’s leaders decide to speak on the ills of the inner city, they quickly point proudly to the Head Start program. Get them before they’re ruined forever, goes the thinking. On the other hand, our solutions for the already-grown, besides building more prisons, seems to be just to wait for them to die.

What if we tried to recreate the amazing conversion of Malcolm X? Is there a way to institutionalize it? I think so. It costs more to imprison someone than to send them to Stanford. What if we turned prisons into last-resort institutions of higher education? Sentences would be given out at their maximum but if the inmate finished high school, a year might be taken off; graduating college, becoming a licensed contractor, plumber or electrician all might shave three years off his time. You wouldn’t be freed from prison until you could prove you could add something to free society.

Of course, my naive idea would cost a fortune and the newly educated ex-cons would have a hard time finding employers to trust them. Perhaps, the state could offer tax credits to the employer for every ex-prisoner hired; perhaps, the new employee would have a small percentage of his wages garnered to pay back the state some of the cost of imprisoning and educating him.

I’ll leave it to brilliant leaders like Maxine Waters to sweat out the details. I just think the single most important legacy of Malcolm X is his shining example of hope for the hopeless. He zoomed from the worst of us to the best of us, leaping clear over the middle. He soared from man to myth, from statistic to statue.