By All Means

Nadra Enzi argues that Malcolm X should be viewed as a conservative icon.

Malcolm X embodies the redemptive power of a community conservatism that pulled him up by prison issue bootstraps and offered him new fellowship after release. The same streets he preyed upon were now patrolled by a man on fire to change them for the better!


He in turn urges generations to do the same, minus callousness toward inner city problems exhibited by some majority population-oriented Black conservatives. These folks use the inner city either for publicity purposes as a whipping boy or worse, a meal ticket to establish phony Hood credentials for personal gain.


Malcolm X represents authentic conservatism from Black America's dynamic heart.

I can't imagine Malcolm X being a Tea Partier today, but he was critical of progressives during his time, declaring in a famous 1963 speech that "...[T]he liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative."

Malcolm X as a man of the right? Perhaps it's a stretch, but not as much of a stretch as the implication by such figures as Glenn Beck that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a conservative.

(Hat tip to Booker Rising, who disagrees with Enzi's argument.)