An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

legacies have been tainted. People forget that it took fifteen years for the
government to put into law Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday.
Thereafter, his “I Have a Dream” speech and ideas became popular. As
Theoharis notes, “By 1987, 76 percent of Americans held a favorable
opinion of the civil rights leader, almost the reverse of his popularity at the
end of his life (only 28 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of
him in 1966).” 16
I also focus on Malcolm X because his legacy is timeless. The hip-hop
generation created renewed interest in Malcolm X as a part of its culture,
perhaps most notably in masculine framings posited by KRS-One on the
cover of his album By All Means Necessary, and also Public Enemy’s use of
Malcolm’s image in various videos and references in their lyrics. Spike Lee
followed suit with his 1992 movie X, superbly played by my favorite actor,
Denzel Washington. In 1998, Time magazine named The Autobiography of
Malcolm X one of the ten most influential books of the twentieth century. 17
Regardless of the mixed reaction to the late historian Manning Marable’s
biography of Malcolm, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, it was an epic
undertaking, and brought, once again, renewed interest in the meaning and
legacy of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X’s Muslim name). More
recently, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me,
winner of the 2015 National Book Award, described the meaning of
Malcolm X in his own life: “I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied,
unlike the schools and their façade of morality, unlike the streets and their
bravado, unlike the world of dreamers. I loved him because he made it
plain.” 18 Malcolm’s influence is enduring, always arriving just in time for
new political moments. To deconstruct his words within the context of
indigeneity is essential to understanding, in part, Black-Indigenous
relations.
I highlight Fannie Lou Hamer because she held a radical vision of what
democracy could look like. Hamer, in the Delta South, represented the
importance of Black women to the civil rights movement, and helped usher
into the movement a more egalitarian structure that allowed local people to
lead in their own liberation. 19 James Baldwin is also an important
contributor to understanding Black views of Native people and histories. He
not only believed in the possibilities of US democracy but that white people
could not be free without Black liberation. Indeed, these four individuals