The Legacy of Malcolm X

With all the recent outpouring of adulation for Malcolm X, climaxed by the column by Ellis, I am dismayed that no one seems to be concerned with the devastating role-model effect of this kind of hero worship. Surely our young blacks are being saturated with the idea that “black manhood” as “taught” by the “shining example” of Malcolm X means grabbing for what you want “by any means necessary.” How can our black young people avoid interpreting this other than as a dutiful order from their idolized messiah to the effect that “any means necessary” includes stealing, looting, burning down cities, and destroying all American non-blacks, whose main purpose in life anyway is the “oppression” of “Afro-Americans”?

Where are the writers--black or non-black--to idolize as role models the great many blacks who in the last few decades alone have managed, in spite of all this alleged “oppression” in “white” America, to attain well-deserved eminence in the most respected fields of American civilization?

NATHAN FLIGSTEN

Los Angeles