Murray N. Rothbard, “Their Malcolm...and Mine” (1993)

Rothbard’s 1993 essay is a brief, sharp polemic on the revival of Malcolm X as a public icon in the early 1990s. Its opening problem is not Malcolm’s historical importance alone, but the suddenness and style of his commodified return.

Why the sudden rage, replete with baseball caps inscribed with X’s, for a man assassinated nearly thirty years ago?

The first explanation Rothbard offers is cultural manufacture. He treats the Malcolm revival as a product of film, fashion, and elite political signaling, especially in the wake of Spike Lee’s movie. His tone is openly satirical, casting the new cult of Malcolm as an episode in media-driven sanctification.

Partly it’s media hype, centered around the new hagiographic movie made by our Most Politically Correct Movie Director, Black Division.

But the essay quickly moves beyond film criticism. Rothbard folds the Malcolm phenomenon into his broader hostility to official commemoration, arguing that public holidays and anniversaries function as instruments of ideological rule. Civic memory, in this account, is not innocent remembrance but a technique for disciplining political imagination.

To paraphrase LBJ, seize control of a nation’s celebrations, and their hearts and minds will follow.

Rothbard then asks why Malcolm, rather than Martin Luther King Jr., became the object of this renewed fascination. He accepts the obvious contrast: Malcolm was more confrontational, separatist, and nationalist, while King represented integrationist liberalism. Yet he denies that this distinction fully explains Malcolm’s symbolic power.

It’s true that Malcolm was more militant than King; he was a black nationalist rather than an integrationist.

For Rothbard, Malcolm’s attraction lies partly in the fact that he was unfinished. After breaking with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm’s future trajectory remained uncertain: he had encountered orthodox Islam, attracted attention from radical leftists, and retained themes of discipline, self-help, entrepreneurship, and opposition to welfare dependence. This openness allows Rothbard to distinguish the living Malcolm from the later icon.

Yet, the emphasis on Malcolm’s ideas in the Received Version doesn’t begin to explain the Malcolm phenomenon.

The essay’s middle section uses Malcolm to stage Rothbard’s libertarian critique of race politics. He regards Black nationalism as preferable to compulsory integration insofar as it implies voluntary separation rather than state-enforced association. But he insists that nationalism must confront territorial reality. Proposals such as a southern Black Belt nation, urban separatist enclaves, or Garveyite return to Africa are treated as politically implausible or dependent on continued American subsidy.

The final turn is personal. Rothbard’s Malcolm is not chiefly a policy thinker but a charismatic presence: intelligent, sardonic, disciplined, unsentimental, and resistant to liberal condescension. This admiration is also racially charged; Rothbard praises Malcolm through categories that reveal his own hierarchy of manners, intellect, and authority. The result is a revealing paleolibertarian portrait: Malcolm as a figure who unsettles integrationist liberalism, exposes the politics of official memory, and remains powerful because his life ended before any single faction could conclusively possess him.