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Sixty-one years after the assassination of Malcom X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965, his murder continues to cast a long, clarifying shadow over American power. At 39, while addressing the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm was gunned down in a hail of bullets orchestrated amid internal Nation of Islam tensions but enabled by a broader climate of state surveillance and provocation.

His death was neither isolated nor accidental; it formed the centrepiece of a five-year cataclysm (1963–1968) that eliminated America’s most progressive white liberal leaders – John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy – and its most radical Black voices—Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

This sequence, extended by the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme that systematically dismantled the Black Panther Party and waged a parallel war on the white New Left, profoundly altered US political trajectories. 

History has since vindicated Malcolm X’s most powerful insights: the United States is a racialised settler-colonial empire whose domestic hierarchies of race and class are inseparable from its global project of domination. Liberal promises of inclusion serve as ideological cover, while the system deploys raw force against those who refuse co-optation.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony provides a precise lens through which to understand this dual strategy. Hegemony, for Gramsci, is never achieved through coercion alone; it is a dynamic combination of consent and force. The ruling class secures consent by shaping cultural norms, institutions and ‘common sense’, so that its dominance appears natural and inevitable, while reserving force – legal, extra-legal, or lethal – for those who challenge the consensus too directly.

The American elite executed precisely this strategy in the 1960s and beyond: force was unleashed against uncompromising radicals like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King in his final radical phase, and the Black Panthers, while consent was manufactured by co-opting more moderate voices and integrating select Black and progressive figures into the system without dismantling its foundations.

JFK represented the high-water mark of postwar liberal internationalism within the white elite. His 1963 American University speech called for peace and mutual understanding with the Soviet Union; he resisted full escalation in Vietnam and signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. RFK, initially a........

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