Malcolm X and the Seven Principles

Balancing the Scales of Justice and History on a 100th Birthday Pilgrimage to Harlem, USA

Copyright © 2025 Shujaa Baker / All rights reserved

I found exactly what I needed – but not exactly what I was looking for – on my just completed pilgrimage to Harlem, NY for the 100th birthday anniversay for Min. Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz). I have been a committed student and follower of his teachings – and more importantly, his example – since I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X for the first time over forty years ago while in eleventh grade.

I decided to travel to New York city for his centennial birthday so I could walk and work on the same ground that he did; to be among his most committed students and followers on this most significant occasion; and to pay respectful homage to the single greatest Black leader of my lifetime and beyond – Min. Malcolm X.

I have also been a student of Dr. Maulana Karenga and Kawaida philosophy for twenty years – starting when I was almost forty years old. Like me and many others, Dr. Karenga cites Min. Malcolm as his teacher and a primary influence on his work, life, and thought.

While learning about Kawaida, I became convinced of its potential as the “new system of reason and logic” Min. Malcolm called for young Black thinkers to bring forward while speaking at Harvard in March 1964. At the same time, I became increasingly frustrated over the lingering issues from the 1960s and ‘70s that keep so many other people from seeing that potential in it as well. I wrote about those things in my book titled – Building on the Work of Our Elders and Ancestors.

The story and history of these two great teachers merged in a meaningful way on my trip, creating a deeper understanding of each one, in different ways, and a higher sense of obligation to model their teachings – and Min. Malcolm’s example.

Besides honoring him and his legacy, my trip to New York involved work to better understand the origins of the Seven Principles. More specifically, to address a persistent, but unsubstantiated claim about their origin.

My preparation for the trip began as a teenager with Min. Malcolm and in my mid-thirties with Dr. Karenga when I met him at a Kwanzaa event in San Diego in 2003. After an inspiring lecture, I bought over a dozen copies of his Kwanzaa book to be autographed for family and friends while I asked over a dozen questions about the source of his knowledge and the information shared.

“This is the best of African history and culture talking to us…” – he said.

Soon after our second meeting at Rust College in February 2005, I made my first visit to the African American Cultural Center, which Dr. Karenga had operated in different South Central Los Angeles locations for over thirty years at that point. I began taking my first class with him at CSU Long Beach soon after, before becoming a member of his organization, Us, later that year through 2010.

With my work to promote Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba / Seven Principles over the last two decades, I know some Black people don’t like Dr. Karenga, refuse his teachings because of it, and challenge his standing as a respected scholar in the process.

Stories from almost sixty years ago about his organization’s wartime activities during the government instigated Us / Black Panther Party conflict persist in the L.A. area with enough energy to pass that conflict into future generations. This became one of my greatest frustrations and one that I have written about and attempted to help resolve. Those issues combine with other stories and a recent book related to his 1971 conviction to cause many Black people to dismiss the benefit of Dr. Karenga’s six decades of rigorous scholarship and deny his standing as a respected scholar and elder.

I haven’t been affected by those controversies in that way. Instead, I decided to investigate those claims and charges to arrive at my own conclusions, from the broadest and most beneficial perspective possible – and I’m glad I did.

After my research I came to different conclusions than his detractors. My study allowed me to better understand the accusations and conviction in the context which they occurred – as wartime atrocities – that rightfully cause us to hate people who create wars, especially unjust wars, like the one Black people were responding to in the late 1960s.

From that perspective, the moral and strategic errors that occurred came as no surprise. In fact, after my analysis, the only real surprise was that a higher number of tragic mistakes didn’t happen back when twenty-something-year-olds tried to wage a revolution against the most powerful and brutal nation on Earth.

A colorful elder from Los Angeles named RW Akile is among those who remind us of these stories whenever he gets a chance. I had seen and disregarded his stories about Dr. Karenga for several years before and since an unplanned in person meeting in 2019.

RW Akile adds to these charges by making a series of claims linking four other men with the creation and introduction of the Seven Principles. His story credits Dr. Karenga with writing a Swahili translation – the Nguzo Saba – while he is also due credit for adding depth and focus to this communitarian African value system, and for promoting it in his work for six decades.

Akile claims a man named Arthur Graham first compiled the list, inspired by Marcus Garvey’s work, and that Josh Von Woolfolk introduced it during the first Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) meetings in June 1964. Akile adds that Joe Vinson arranged for Dr. Karenga to do the Swahili translation. Most significantly, he claims Dr. Betty thought of the Seven Principles as being a part of Min. Malcolm’s legacy.

Those claims eventually catch the attention of any true Malcolmite.

Beyond his words and memory, RW Akile offers no evidence to support his claims. But as Prof. James Small said in a related discussion while showing us some of the significant Black sites in Harlem,

“Everyone borrows from each other’s work. That is the nature of scholarship.”

Plus, since Akile advances an alternate version of Kwanzaa that he helped create, I dismissed his comments for years as an attempt to draw attention to his version of the holiday.

Yet, because of my work with Kwanzaa and the Seven Principles, I have been a constant target of his social media posts and online commentary over the years to the point of a few tense exchanges and blocked profiles.

As we sought to expand the embrace and understanding of Kwanzaa by recognizing other people who contributed or assisted Dr. Karenga in creating the holiday, I began to consider how the Seven Principles would be more widely received if they were truly connected with Min. Malcolm’s legacy, too, like Akile claims.

I began to think about how I could investigate his stories. Then, in late March 2025 my friend, Brother Imhotep Dennis Boatwright, arranged a phone call with one of Min. Malcolm’s closest associates, and, perhaps, the only surviving founding member of the OAAU – Elder A. Peter Bailey.

I asked Elder Bailey if he had any memory of the Seven Principles being introduced at an early OAAU meeting. Without hesitation, he said, “Yes!” – adding that a rigorous discussion about it had occurred. But in our next meeting, his memory was different and he didn’t recall the details he shared during our phone call – showing how time limits clear memories in all of us and the best of us. We give thanks for Elder A. Peter Bailey, his 88 years of service and struggle, and prospects for reviewing his personal archives in the future.

For now, our visit to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem for related records is most relevant. This was a perfect place to visit for Min. Malcolm’s 100th birthday.

I met Brother Imhotep there and we spent two days reviewing OAAU archives, reading Min. Malcolm’s correspondence and journals, manuscripts of his autobiography, the unpublished chapter titled “The Negro,” and archives from his primary history teacher, Dr. John Henrik Clarke.

The available OAAU archives were very limited. Although we didn’t find evidence of the Seven Principles being introduced in those papers, the content and message in the unpublished chapter, “The Negro,” provided exactly what I needed to make a full and meaningful connection between Min. Malcolm and the Seven Principles.

That chapter contains Min. Malcolm’s criticisms and advice on Black economics that still apply today. It includes ideas directly related to the third and fourth principles – Ujima / Collective Work and Responsibility and Ujamaa / Cooperative Economics – and begins with challenges to Black people’s –

1. frivolous spending habits and the tendency to ‘front and floss’
2. short-term individual focus and lack of collective work around economics, and
3. the diminished self-concept and value system inherited from oppressors that informs the way many people deal with money in the Black community.

But Min. Malcolm didn’t just offer criticisms in that chapter. He also shared plain language guidance, recommendations, and solutions for how we should move differently with money. He offered the same advice in some of his lectures on Black economics back then. So we aren’t limited to the unpublished chapter as the exclusive source of his lessons on these principles.

Because of the confused values that inform the way many of us deal with money, by design, valid criticism and advice about how we use our money can be among the most difficult to share or receive. Ego and false pride become barriers to increased understanding and better choices, because, of course, people have the right to make foolish choices with their money.

Through his words and advice on how we should pool our resources to create increasing advantage over time, Min. Malcolm offered us a guaranteed roadmap to financial security while pointing out how many different immigrant groups have successfully applied the same strategy.

Even though we have had Ujamaa / Cooperative Economics as one of the Seven Principles for almost six decades, we still have not yet created or recreated an effective economy for ourselves within the Black community around it. Dr. Karenga advises us to practice cooperative economics in theory, but in practice, his determination to “not allow the spirit of commercialism” to influence Kwanzaa reaches extremes that cause him to reject or deny support to any substantive cooperative economic effort beyond book sales, paid lectures, his own ideas, or those he controls.

For example, as detailed in my book, we are using his teachings to advance our combined focus on the Kawaida conception of Blackness, the Seven Principles, and S.T.E.M. – “To build and maintain our own shops, stores, and other businesses and to profit from them together.” But privately, he insists that we shouldn’t be doing that.

We agree that we shouldn’t duplicate the exploitive extremes of capitalism in structuring our own economy. But we also shouldn’t be so resistant to progress and other people’s contributions that we limit our collective possibilities. That contradicts the Seven Principles, which, when sincerely applied, guides our steps, and restrains extreme pursuits inherited from our experience with capitalism.

Black people created and recreated our own economies several times before we encountered Europeans and capitalism, and we have done the same against relentless opposition throughout our experience with both.

Corrupt legislation and violence have been used to destroy our efforts, as with Nixon and global corporations exporting our jobs and inner-city economies to China in the 1970s, and with Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK. But we bear responsibility to use all the tools at our disposal to rise again and be more relentless at creating and recreating our own economic advantage than those who work to destroy or diminish the same for us.

Simply put, we must use and develop our resources more wisely if we want better outcomes, and in the unpublished chapter, Min. Malcolm offered us a roadmap to do exactly that. This advice on Ujima / Collective Work and Responsibility and Ujamaa / Cooperative Economics adds to the teachings and example he modeled in his life and continuously taught us concerning the other five principles.

Min. Malcolm was a consistent model of Umoja / Unity, encouraging us, for example, to “leave our religions at home” so differences in beliefs and theology wouldn’t interrupt the need for unity and collective struggle against oppression.

Min. Malcolm was the most consistent model of Kujichagulia / Self-Determination, continuously advising us to seize it – “By any means necessary.”

He regularly encouraged us to practice Ujima / Collective Work and Responsibility and Ujamaa / Cooperative Economics, adding to those lessons in the unpublished chapter of his autobiography.

Of course, Min. Malcolm exemplified Nia / Purpose on a level that few can match in his transformations from Detroit Red to prison to Malcolm X, ultimately evolving to become El Hajj Malik El Shabazz.

He demonstrated Kuumba / Creativity most prominently in his creative use of words and thought to still be one of the most inspiring Black leaders in history almost six decades after his profound faith in Black people led to him sacrificing his life for us in a way that only compares to messiah narratives.

Indeed, the level of faith Min. Malcolm demonstrated in Black people is the greatest lesson he left for us to learn, although I believe only a some of us will fully grasp it.

Imani / Faith in the Seven Principles is about faith in ourselves and each other. Even in the face of betrayal, Min. Malcolm showed us that we must not give up on our people, especially when they are misguided – even if some of them would kill us in that state – because to give up on our people at any time would be to surrender to our own annihilation where Black people would soon cease to exist.

That lesson is difficult for many to comprehend and would be impossible for most to apply. Countless numbers have said or asked, “If he knew they were going to kill him, why didn’t he just walk away?” But Min. Malcolm’s existence was grounded in a level of faith in Black people that few can match. His faith in us and what we could again become was so great that he looked death in the eye and surrendered to it “because he loved us so,” as Ossie Davis said.

How many of our people or leaders are capable of that? How many of them truly love us that much?

We remain receptive to supporting evidence directly linking the Seven Principles with Min. Malcolm’s legacy. But for now, the contents of the unpublished chapter and his life example confirms that Min. Malcolm X / El Hajj Malik El Shabazz lived and embodied the Seven Principles better than anyone ever has, and we give thanks…