Malcolm X, the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., and Morgan State College

Abstract

Malcolm X, the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., and Morgan State College Judson L. Jeffries Black intellectuals and the rank and file shared a common esteem for Malcolm X. A former convict and one who had been thoroughly familiar with the seamy side of life, Malcolm was a fiery symbol of black anger. His condemnation of white America was merciless. His magnetic personality was matched by a stirring oratory. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters— Plymouth Rock landed on us!” —Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Making of America (1987) No African American public figure was more sought-after by America’s college students during the early to mid-1960s than Malcolm X. In fact, starting in 1960, following the 1959 documentary done by Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax entitled The Hate That Hate Produced, which introduced the Nation of Islam to America, Malcolm maintained an unrelenting schedule, traveling more than he ever had before, lecturing on college campuses, and at convention halls, delivering speeches and sermons at lodges and churches. His life was one of constant motion involving planes, trains, and automobiles. From 1960 to 1963 alone, Malcolm appeared on no less than 30 campuses, including some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, such as Harvard, Cornell, and Brown Universities. He spent so much time on colleges campuses in the New York Metropolitan area that one might have thought him the city’s roving scholar-in-residence. The college scene held a special place in Malcolm’s heart, perhaps because he placed a premium on education and regretted dropping out of school at such a young age. “Education is the passport to the future,” Malcolm was fond of saying. Fortunately, by the time Malcolm had been paroled in the early 1950s, he had educated himself far beyond the limits of any degree he might have earned at any of the highly regarded northeastern universities at which he spoke (Wilmore, 1986). Students, regardless of race, seemed to be [End Page 127] drawn to him, even when they didn’t agree with him. Word has it that Malcolm was always respectful, open-minded, and responsive to his young listeners. His young audience nearly always responded in-kind. Malcolm’s Assistant Minister Benjamin 2X Goodman (later known as Benjamin Karim) remembers how students would rush toward Malcolm after a presentation, jockeying for position: “Students gathered around him like bees around honey in August. They asked him questions about their studies, they sought his advice on term-paper topics, they requested his autograph. Malcolm answered and counseled and obliged” (Karim, 1992, p. 127). In his autobiography, Malcolm himself says: Except for all-black audiences, I liked the college audiences best. The college sessions sometimes ran two to four hours—they often ran overtime. Challenges, queries, and criticisms were fired at me by the usually objective and always alive and searching minds of undergraduate and graduate students, and their faculties. The college sessions never failed to be exhilarating…. It was like being on a battlefield—with intellectual and philosophical bullets. It was an exciting battle with ideas. (Haley, 1965, pp. 282, 365) Much has been made of Malcolm’s visits to many of America’s highly regarded predominantly White institutions, especially those of the Ivy League variety. Even his December 1964 visit to Oxford University in England prompted two scholars to devote entire books to the matter (Ambar, 2014; Tuck, 2014). Few writers and scholars have, however, acknowledged Malcolm’s visits to the country’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, perhaps because those invitations were few and far between.1 Discussions with a number of older HBCU graduates over the years have revealed that many Black schools were in some ways just as conservative as their lily-white institutional counterparts.2 I can think of no African American freedom fighter who was considered more controversial, fascinating, and dynamic, by both Blacks and Whites, during the modern civil rights era than Malcolm X.3 In 1969, Florida A & M University professor Marcus Hanna Boulware wrote, “as the spokesman of Black Muslimism, Malcolm X was worthy of comparison with Gamaliel of the Hebrews and Plato and Aristotle...