For details on WBAI's five hours of special Malcolm X programming on May 19, 2026, click here.

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MUMIA ABU-JAMAL'S COMMENTARY ON WHITE RADICALS INFLUENCED BY MALCOLM X

​b​y John Riley, with contributions by Bob Lederer

I read the autobiography of Malcolm X in the 1970s when I was at the University of Iowa, in the very white state of Iowa. Anti-apartheid divestment struggle in 1979 and was impressed by his vivid descriptions of the challenges he faced living in a racist society, the center of an empire. I became involved in a student network with a variety of leftists, some of whom were revolutionaries, and in study groups with them. I learned more about Malcolm X’s contribution to the Black Freedom struggle, which is central in all freedom struggles in America. ​In this group I learned about everything from the Nation of Islam to the Black Panthers to Mumia Abu-Jamal. 

I want to read a short excerpt of a commentary by Black political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1991. It was titled "The Legacy of Malcolm X," published in a special issue of the revived Black Panther Party newspaper, marking the 25th anniversary of the party's founding. Mumia wrote:

"Several White anti-imperialist rebels, imprisoned now for principled resistance against the empire, have marked their transition from mainstream middle-class American life to radical rivers and tributaries and movements, from the moment they heard Malcolm, over 25 years ago - like Dr. Alan Berkman, fellow radical Laura Whitehorn, and others. Perhaps therein lies [Malcolm's] significance..."

Alan Berkman, who we lost in 2009, & Laura Whitehorn, happily still alive and well, were both among the co-founders of the May 19th Communist Organization, named after Malcolm's and Ho Chi Minh's birthdays. This followed their long histories of solidarity work with people of color domestically and internationally. Alan and Laura later went underground with the Red Guerrilla Resistance until their arrests in 1985. Alan was released in 1992, Laura in 1999.

Today Laura works with the prison abolition group RAPP, Release Aging People in Prison. Laura is an out lesbian who has long supported queer and women's liberation, as well as the freedom of all oppressed people worldwide. 

Alan was a physician, a straight man, and friend who, in 1998, inspired Out-FM's Bob Lederer and myself (John Riley) to work with him and ACT UP activist Eric Sawyer to cofound Health GAP, a national coalition to demand immediate access to low-cost generic powerful AIDS treatments, as well as major drug price reductions, in poor nations, particularly in Africa. Our goal of opposing AIDS genocide in the Global South was partly inspired by Malcolm's global analysis of white world supremacy.

Since its very first demonstration ACT UP struggled against high prices for AIDS drugs and was in the middle of a campaign to lower the price of the new highly active triple drug combinations. We in ACT UP thought working in Solidarity with People with AIDS ​in the ​Global ​South would benefit both our work, exposing the exorbitant pricing, not related to production costs, of the medications. ACT UP’s very ​existence was tied to the Genocide of gay and bisexual men and injection drug users who were being killed by the neglectful government and pharmaceutical industry. The AIDS activist community in the US was able to slow the advance of AIDS through prevention and eventually better drugs that we fought for by demanding  larger budgets in research, prevention and treatment.

It is now estimated that the ​AIDS treatment/care programs instituted by the U.S. and U.N. due to grassroots pressure worldwide, particularly from U.S. and South African activists, saved well over 25 million lives, prior to Trump's recent horrendous rollback.

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BACKGROUND ON MALCOLM X and BLACK LGBT LEADERS OF BLACK POWER MOVEMENT

by Bob Lederer

 

As a queer historian, one fact I've found fascinating is the number of Black lesbian and gay leaders and intellectuals influenced by Malcolm X's thinking. Several -- but not all -- of his contemporaries were closeted during Malcolm's lifetime, and either came out later or have been documented to have been queer. Three examples:

 

1. David Du Bois: In 1964, after leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X took two tours of Africa to build alliances for the U.S. Black liberation movement. In July, he addressed a summit meeting in Cairo of the Organization of African Unity or OAU, composed of all the independent countries plus the liberation movements in still-colonized nations like South Africa and Angola. In that speech -- like in the interview we just heard, which was six months later -- he urged African heads of state to bring the U.S. up on charges of human rights violations before the United Nations.

 

During that trip, Malcolm befriended David Graham Du Bois, a U.S. Black exile living in Cairo, who was a son of Shirley Graham Du Bois and stepson of W.E.B. Du Bois -- as well as being a closeted gay man who only came out privately decades later to his childhood friend, lesbian feminist historian Bettina Aptheker. (We've interviewed her about David on Out-FM here.) In Malcolm's personal journal, he recorded, according to an historian, his "growing closeness and great assistance [that David] Du Bois offered him as Malcolm prepared for his speech at the OAU." That help included connecting Malcolm to various liberation movement leaders and to President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, whom Du Bois and his family knew as exiles and guests of the state. Du Bois also published Malcolm's speech in the leading Cairo newspaper and other articles tracking Malcolm's sojourn throughout Africa and the Arab world. That Cairo trip included a visit to Gaza where Malcolm met with the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO.

 

Last year, when doing research on David Du Bois at the Schomberg Library, I found a letter Malcolm wrote in December 1964 to Du Bois, in which Malcolm thanked him for his support and welcomed his decision to help establish a Cairo chapter of the OAAU.

 

As a closing note, 11 years later in 1975, after David Du Bois had moved to Oakland, California and was named editor-in-chief of the Black Panther Party newspaper, he wrote and serialized in that paper a novel loosely based on his own life in Cairo in which Malcolm X was a main character. It's titled "And Bid Him Sing."

 

2. James Baldwin, who was open about his homosexuality, was not simply a brilliant writer and civil rights advocate, for which he was well known, but also an activist who worked with radical civil rights group like SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), publicly debated Malcolm X about tactics for the Black movement in a mutually respectful way, and was clearly influenced by Malcolm's philosophy. Baldwin publicly supported Black Power, praised Malcolm's thinking, and later spoke at a Black Panther Party event in Oakland. In 1972 wrote a screenplay for a laudatory bio pic about Malcolm that was ultimately censored by Columbia Pictures and then re-edited and ultimately killed by Paramount Pictures.

 

3. Lorraine Hansberry, who was partly closeted as a lesbian but also wrote letters under a pseudonym for the country's only lesbian magazine, similarly was far more than the gifted playwright and civil rights advocate she's been portrayed as. In the 1950s she had been an active Communist Party member, a journalist with Paul Robeson's Pan Africanist journal Freedom, and a participant in the Black feminist group, Sojourners for Peace and Justice, that protested racist violence. She later supported the call for Black Power. Before her tragically early death from pancreatic cancer at age 34 in January 1965, she publicly debated Malcolm about tactics. Malcolm developed a respect for her that culminated when he attended her funeral just a month before his own, even though he knew his life was in danger. Lorraine Hansberry also happened to share Malcolm's birthday of May 19th.

 

IN CONCLUSION, as we have seen so often, queer figures have played key roles in the history of social justice movements, and have also been deeply influenced by -- and sometimes provided influence to -- important heterosexual revolutionary leaders like Malcolm X.