In April 1957, Malcolm X began writing his “God’s Angry Men” column in the New York Amsterdam News, immediately after the brutal police beating of Hinton Johnson. The paragraphs of his June 1st column end with the refrain “White Man’s Heaven Is Black Man’s Hell”—the title of a song Louis X, later Farrakhan, recorded on vinyl in 1960. Farrakhan studied, worked, and served under Malcolm, “enough time for him to incorporate Malcolm’s oratorical style into his own,” writes Manning Marable. Both sampled Elijah Muhammad’s teachings in a call and response that played out in music and print. Farrakhan maybe channeled Malcolm’s words into song, or Malcolm perhaps wove an early, unreleased version into his writing. Regardless, Malcolm X inspired what Richard Brent Turner calls “the soundtrack to a movement,” but also used “music in his message.” Public Enemy titled their 1994 album “Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age,” reinterpreting Farrakhan’s song as “White Heaven/Black Hell”—on the eve of Farrakhan’s Million Man March and during the 1990s resurgence of Malcolm.
Malcolm wove gospel music into his June 1st column, during a time music was nearly banned in the Nation of Islam—and gospel was becoming a critical instrument of the civil rights movement. The NOI forbade music careers at the time, though “Islamic-inspired gospel songs” were allowed. Eventually, Louis X was able to record “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell” and other songs like “Chains” and “Black Gold.” “Music for emancipation,” Hisham Aidi observes, “is permissible.”
Malcolm drew on Elijah Muhammad’s teachings in developing his public voice, but also experimented with the rhetorical style of civil rights leaders. In April 1957, Martin Luther King wove the spiritual “Free at Last” into his “Birth of a New Nation” sermon—referring to Kwame Nkrumah’s inauguration that he had just attended in newly independent Ghana. (This language resurfaced in “I Have A Dream.”) Like Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm used Biblical imagery to call for emancipation from racial slavery; unlike him, he deployed gospel music as a mode of political protest.
The Autobiography testifies to the deep influence of music on Malcolm’s development, through his euphoric and exuberant participation in the music scene while working at the jazz bar Small’s Paradise in Harlem. In Haley’s treatment, the vibrant music fades with Malcolm’s asceticism after his conversion, although the conversions of jazz musicians and musicians like Farrakhan paint a different picture. In 1961, Malcolm X attended Ossie Davis’s musical Purlie Victorious for a Congress of Racial Equality benefit—an “unlikely alliance” rooted in shared understandings of “artistic rebellion as the cultural arm of political revolution,” connections orchestrated under the radar of Elijah Muhammad’s watchful eye.