NOT long after Malcolm X was assassinated 60 years ago this week, the radical satirical singer-songwriter Phil Ochs summed up the indifferent response among self-proclaimed American liberals: `I cried when they shot Medgar Evers/ Tears ran down my spine/ I cried when they shot Mr Kennedy/ As though Pd lost a father of mine/ But Malcolm X got what was coming/ He got what he asked for this time/ So love me, love me, love me, Pm a liberal.

His reputation as an articulate purveyor of racial hatred was widespread when three gunmen associated with the Nation of Islam (NoI) pumped 21 bullets into the charismatic preacher almost as soon as he rose up to speak on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York, on Feb 21, 1965, while his pregnant wife and four young daughters watched in horror from the front row.

In too many ways, it was the culmination ofthe chronicle ofa deathforetold.In the preceding months, Malcolm had publicly acknowledged that he was a marked man. The previous year, he had disassociated himself from the NoI, after serving for several years as its most effective spokesman. His motives for doing so had steadily multiplied.

The earliest revolved around the hypocrisy of the cult leader Elijah Muhammad.

The NoI favoured black separation in the US, and in doing so attracted the affection of the vilest white racists, including the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. Malcolm`s family home had been raided by the KKK while he was still in his mother`s womb, and he blamed the organisation for his father`s death six years later.

Malcolm`s parents were devotees of Marcus Garvey`s Africa-focused United Negro Improvement Association, which shared some roots with the NoPs precursors. He was involved, uncomfortably, in the NoPs first meeting with the KKK in Atlanta, but locked out of further contacts.

Malcolm was even more appalled by his leader`s transgressions at a personal level, after Elijah`s son Wallace confirmed that his dad had fathered eight children with six of his young secretaries, evidently against their will. Malcolm himself had a murky background as a hustler, drug dealer and pimp that led him to prison at 20. He discovered the library as a means of self-education, and then two of his brothers introduced him to Elijah`s teachings. Like many other African Americans, he was attracted by the notion that blacks were superior to the whites who oppressed them, and deserved a separate territory where they could live without discrimination.

The civil rights movement from themid-1950s, meanwhile, was focused on equal rights for all, regardless of race.

That was a more appealing objective, which attracted the majority of blacks as well as empathetic whites. But progress was incremental, and the more impatient types were attracted to Malcolm`s radical rhetoric, which suggested that the back of the hand would be a more effective response to racism than turning the other cheek, as Martin Luther King Jr implied.

Reviled as he might have been at the time of his preordained demise, carried out by the NoI with the connivance of the FBI and the NYPD, Malcolm`s afterlife has proved even more fascinating than his biography. In his last few years, he visited the Middle East and Africa both as an emissary of Elijah Muhammad and as a free agent who tried to persuade the leaders of newly independent nations to take up the cause of Afro-Americans at the UN.

He visited Europe and the UK during his last months, and left behind an anti-racist legacy that is being marked this month inSmethwick, in the English Midlands.

Participating in a debate at the Oxford Union in December 1964, he eloquently challenged the inadequacies of moderation in the context of truly worthycauses. A preceding pilgrimage to Makkah had reminded him, meanwhile, that the notion of whites as blue-eyed devils was an absurdity. Alongside his Muslim Mosque, Inc, Malcolm by now converted to Sunni Islam from the ersatz variety propagated by Elijah Muhammad also sought to set up an Organisation of Afro-American Unity, inviting the civil rights organisations he had once disdained to join his movement. He was murdered before it couldbeinaugurated.

That`s partly because, as in the case of Paul Robeson more than a decade earlier, the organs of state in the US were paranoid about internationally recognised African Americans exposing the hollowness and absurdity of American claims as a bulwark of liberty and freedom. Malcolm X`s influence seeped into movements from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter.

His afterlife proved to be far more influential than his 39 years on earth. His martyrdom cemented his legacy, and the current state of the benighted nation he sought to awaken can only reinforce the concept of resistance by any means possible. • mahir.dawn @gmail.com