“He almost had me convinced that I was made up of brown sugar,” Qubilah Shabazz recalls of her father adding, “Every morning, he’d take my finger and stir his coffee with my finger…he said it was to sweeten it up.” Was she talking about Malcolm X, the same Malcolm X who put white racists on notice with the rallying cry “by any means necessary”? Admittedly, the thought of Malcolm X as a doting “Girl Dad,” playfully engaging his little daughter at the kitchen table was a powerful revelation for me.
When I read about this version of Malcolm years ago, it unsettled me, because it went against the idea of the “strong” ultra-serious Black man that has been a source of so much inspiration for generations of Black folk. As bell hooks observed in her book Outlaw Culture, there has been a tendency to “make liberation synonymous with the establishment of black patriarchy, of black men gaining the right to dominate women and children.” Yet, it has always been a contradiction: the warrior that we want patrolling our communities and protecting us from the violence of white Supremacy, and the benevolent patriarch who is at home, supporting the matriarch in the primary work of raising the family is an aspirational myth.
For Malcolm there was little choice — in his public life, at least — but to invest in that myth. Malcolm was both the product of his historical times, and perhaps most significantly, he was a product of The Nation of Islam. The very foundations of “The Nation” were rooted in rigid expectations of gender roles, though “The Nation” is not an outlier among Black American religious institutions. The public lives of Black fathers often come at the expense of their private and domestic lives.
We tend to obsess about what Black children, partners and families need from Black men and fathers, and rightfully so. Black fathers find themselves trying to meet shifting expectations, while also simply trying to survive — and survival tends to be little more than another hustle. In many of our communities there is not enough consideration of what Black fathers need — and I’m talking about more than weed, alcohol and porn. Given the stakes, Black men are admittedly loathed, and in some cases incapable, of articulating what it is that they need.
Given the daily threats and dances with death that Malcolm faced during the last years of his life, one can only imagine what comfort, and even joy, he took in just spending a few quiet moments with his little daughter.
For Malcolm, this was not frivolous and wasteful time, but a reprieve; he needed these moments of levity and playfulness. Malcolm’s life (and death) was a stark reminder that we can’t be two places at once.
IIyasah Shabazz, the third of Malcolm’s daughters, was two years old when he died. She, like her older sister Qubilah, was at the Audubon Ballroom the afternoon that her father was killed. But in her memoir Growing Up X, Ilyasah recalls an earlier moment, eight days earlier, when the family’s East Elmhurst home was firebombed. What Ilyasah saw was a father who was “Barking orders and grabbing terrified children, my father got us all up and out the back door into the yard. It took the fire department an hour to extinguish the flames.”
And just as quickly as that occurred, Illyasah’s father the protector transitioned into the provider: “through it all he kept working, flying to Detroit to speak at an event in honor of Charles Howard…then turning around and flying back home to New York for another flurry of speaking engagements and interviews. In between all this activity, he worked hard to find a new home for all of us.” (16) Ilyasah memories of those last days of her father are likely buttressed by the reflections of her older sisters and family friends, but those memories, however formed, speak to how she saw her father.
What Malcolm’s daughters could not see was a Black father who was “in-progress.” It is this process of “growing up” and “growing old” into Black fatherhood, that so many Black men don’t even survive long enough to experience. In contrast, Malcolm perhaps began to see his daughters in ways that helped him begin to broaden his views on gender, and Black women. In a quote from a 1962 speech, Malcolm X states “The most disrespected person in America, is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”
While Malcolm’s comments were premised on very patriarchal notions of protection and possession — he continued “And as Muslims, the honorable Elijah Muhammed teaches us to respect, our women, and to protect our women” — it does suggest a softening view. In her essay “Malcolm X: The Longed-for Feminist Manhood,” bell hooks suggests that Malcolm’s worldview began to shift as he left The Nation, observing “Strategically, Malcolm had to build an autonomous constituency…It was not surprising that he became more aware that women could be formidable advocates leading resistance struggle, and he would need to rely of female comrades.”
Malcolm X might have been our idea of the “perfect” Black man, but he still fell short in the eyes of one of his daughters. I “resented the fact that he was not a grocery-store clerk,” Qubilah explains. Qubilah’s sentiments push up against the legions of Black folk who saw Malcolm X as their father, uncle, grandfather, son, homie, leader, as their male role-model, and yes, as our prince. Qubilah didn’t want to hear any of that, she just wanted her dad, a regular dad, who came home in time for family dinner every night, who would scold her when she did something wrong and would wipe her tears away and put a bandage on her scraped knee.
Collectively, we’ve paid less attention to who Malcolm was as father. Yet, in our imaginations, and for at least three generations of Black men and fathers, Malcolm is the Black fatherhood we’ve aspired to. What we’ve known most about Malcolm as a father can be reduced to a single, well-known photograph of him sitting with two of his daughters and a third, sitting next to him on heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali’s lap. Malcolm’s wife Betty is also in the photo, sitting on his right, though in many reproductions of the photo, originally taken in January of 1964, she is cropped out.
The photo was taken in Miami, Florida, where Ali was training for his heavyweight championship fight against Sonny Liston. This was during Malcolm’s 90-day suspension from the Nation, which culminated with his break from them. That time in Miami was likely the most time that Malcolm spent with his then three daughters. When Ali invited Malcolm and his family to visit his training camp, it was the first (and last) vacation that he took with his family. The photo has resonated for many over the years because it offered a more humane view of a figure that most Americans, at one time or another, viewed as a militant agitator who hated white people.
The late historian Manning Marable reveals in his biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention that Malcolm viewed the vacation, and the photos taken through the trip as an opportunity to “recraft his image.” To be sure, it wasn’t an empty public relations gesture; with his break with The Nation, he would be without regular employment (the Nation, tried to take his home and car), and his ability to support his still growing family was premised on his ability to gain paid speaking engagements.
My point here is not to offer a cynical view of Malcolm as a father, but on the contrary, to suggest that he too was dogged by the guilt experienced by so many Black men about not being around enough, and not being able to do enough. That Malcolm did so with the specter of violence directed, specifically at him, made his circumstance somewhat exceptional — though so many Black men live with the reality of being visited by random violence. Malcolm was keenly aware that he would not live long enough to see his daughters reach adulthood.
Yet what does mean that one of Black America’s “father-figures,’’ struggled with his role as a father, so much so that he felt the need to stage for public consumption, images of himself as a “family man” to not only humanize himself in the eyes of a white public, but also as a memory frozen in time, as it were, for his daughters and others.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Mark Anthony Neal's work on Medium.