An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

understand history, how they practice culture, and the way they live their
lives is based upon their conception of land. Land is not just owning a title
to it, but it is also a tribal nation’s shared sense of belonging. 37
MALCOLM X’S BLACK BELONGING
In Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm frames Indigenous histories and
realities to justify why Black Americans should be granted their rights,
based upon their exploited labor: “Twenty-two million black men! They
have given America four hundred years of toil.” 38 He continues, “They
have bled and died in every battle since the Revolution.”
He underscores that Blacks have been here before the pilgrims and the
massive influx of Eastern European immigrants. And “they are still today at
the bottom of everything.” 39 Black belonging for Malcolm centered on
Black peoples’ exploited labor and their rights to land because that labor
was central in founding the US nation-state. And yet, in the 1960s they
were still not given human dignity and due rights that they clearly deserved.
Early in his political development, he placed a great deal of belief in the
power of political lobbies. Malcolm believed that US politics was based on
being organized in political blocs, especially lobby and special interest
groups. In the Autobiography, he asks, “What group has a more urgent
special interest, what group needs a bloc, a lobby, more than the black
man?” 40 A student of the US political system, he was fully aware of how
the government functioned. Itemizing a few of the federal departments and
their functions, he mentioned that there is a Department of the Interior for
Native people, which for him raises the question, “Is the farmer, the doctor,
the Indian, the greatest problem in America today? No—it is the black
man!” 41 Malcolm has a particular constituent to whom he is talking to,
based upon the black-white binary. But he dismisses the complicated
relationship between Indigenous people and the Department of the Interior,
which Indigenous people staunchly opposed. 42
Land was key in Malcolm’s understanding of Black liberation and
freedom. Black studies scholar Abdul Alkalimat explains, “Our reading [of
Malcolm’s meaning of land] can be full and accurate only when we
understand that he uses the word ‘land’ to represent political economy, the
basis for a people’s survival.” 43 Alkalimat describes Malcolm’s analytic use
and construal of land in four ways: (1) land as agriculture for domestic