Written by Ekundayo Igeleke

an article from WARTIME 2025: 100 Years of Malcolm X

A Shooter in More Than One Way: Malcolm X and the Cultural Arsenal

War is spoken in the language of territory and treaties, of barricades and ballots. In Black America, there is no mistake that we are at war to free our communities from the violence of the U.S. Empire. This is also a war over truth. It is a war fought in the realm of culture. As Toni Cade Bambara, that soldier of the word, insisted, the task of the culture worker is to “make revolution irresistible.” This is not a metaphor. It is a strategy. It begins with the recognition, as Bambara did, that we are in a battle over the most fundamental question: what is the truth? Malcolm X understood this battlefield intimately. He knew that for a people to seize liberation, they must also seize the means of their own representation.

For him, culture was not a sidebar to the struggle; it was, as he declared at the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), “an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.” He called for a culture department because he knew that culture, in the words of Walter Rodney, is “a total way of life.” It is what we eat and what we wear; the way we walk and the way we talk. It is the binding agent of a people, the thread that connects us across oceans and time. To control a people’s culture is to control the story of who they are. To reclaim it is to forge a future with the raw materials of the past.

This is why the battle over art is so fierce. The ruling class has always known this. Our ancestor, Amiri Baraka points out that bourgeois philosophy works tirelessly to divide art from politics, to situate it in a “transient realm, beyond ideology.” They individualize it, de-classify it, seeking to remove colonized people from their own cultural roots and re-insert them through the sterile, isolating logic of neoliberal markets. The CIA funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other institutions of cultural production was not an anomaly. It was an admission that the terrain of ideas, of opera and painting and poetry, is a terrain of revolutionary struggle. It is a violent terrain where hegemony is won and lost.

Into this fray, Malcolm carried a weapon that W.E.B. Du Bois had long ago sanctified: the unblushing power of propaganda. “All Art is propaganda and ever must be,” Du Bois declared. For him, the purpose was clear: to use his art as “propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.” This was not a narrow, cynical tool, but a life-giving one—a propaganda that Black people could love, one that asserted the validity of their humanity against an empire unprepared to bear that truth. Malcolm took up this mantle. A big part of his strategy was to engage in a form of living propaganda, a radical re-education.

Amílcar Cabral taught that “only societies which preserve their culture are able to mobilize and organize themselves.” He saw culture as the fertile ground from which the seeds of resistance sprout, determining a society’s chance of “progressing (or regressing).” Malcolm understood this as well. In addition to history and politics, Malcolm was a lover of jazz, poetry, and literature. When we study Malcolm X, we study how to turn the master’s tools against the master’s house. Although none of these tools ever really belonged to the “master.” Malcolm He operationalized this doctrine not just with his words, but with his eyes, with his hands. People forget that Malcolm was a photographer. He engaged this artform as an act of cultural preservation and political mobilization. He understood the power of the image, the photograph, to craft an archive of dignity and self-determination. He was not just a subject of the lens; he was a silent partner, a visual strategist. He curated his own image, yes, but he also wielded the camera himself. By documenting his people and his travels, he prepared fertile ground for the continuity of a global Black struggle. He built an archive for a future that was still fighting to be born. 

At a 1963 civil rights demonstration, Malcolm “brought along a 35-millimeter camera,” busily framing shots, telling a New York Times reporter, “If there were no captions for these pictures, you’d think this was Mississippi or Nazi Germany.” Here, the camera was a forensic tool, collecting evidence of a shared, global oppression. Later, touring Algiers, he learned out of a taxi window to capture the world, building his own visual database of the Pan-African landscape. This was not tourism; it was study, it was connection, it was the work of what Amilcar Cabral would call the very foundation of the liberation movement. It was a declaration that Black people would no longer be merely the object of the gaze, but the subject, the author, the archiver of their own story. This was the practice of being a “shooter” in both senses: one who captures a moment and one who is armed.

Along with other NOI brothers, he started the popular paper, Muhammad Speaks, which would circulate more than any other Black independent newspaper in the country. Again, Malcolm understood the power of cultural production in service of Black liberation. 

Malcolm’s legacy is not a relic. It is a living blueprint. We see it today in the decentralized formations of artist collectives, in the toolkits shared online, in the statements signed by popular artists standing in solidarity with Gaza. When they pledge to use their artistic practices “as tools of liberation,” they are channeling the spirit of Malcolm’s OAAU culture department and the unflinching propaganda of Du Bois. They are recognizing, as he did, that the power to shape narrative is a unique responsibility in the fight for sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination.

Malcolm knew that the revolution would not be televised by its enemies. It will be documented, curated, and broadcast by its own people. It will be written in our poetry, sung in our music, and captured in our photos. The war is over the truth. And the truth, when forged in the fire of cultural resistance, becomes a weapon that is impossible to put down.

It becomes, as Bambara commanded, irresistible.

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