This week marks the 100th birthday of el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz — known to the world as Malcolm X. As we commemorate his legacy, we must delve beyond the caricature of the angry black revolutionary often portrayed in mainstream narratives. The real Malcolm was a visionary whose radical transformation both shocked and inspired the world.

His journey from the Nation of Islam and black separatism to a global revolutionary committed to anti-imperialism and solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere offers profound lessons for us today. Malcolm’s evolution wasn’t just political — it was spiritual and intellectual. Initially, he was shaped by the Nation of Islam’s emphasis on self-reliance and racial separation.

In popular accounts, by 1964, having broken with the Nation, Malcolm underwent a profound transformation. His pilgrimage to Mecca, where he prayed with Muslims of all races, led him to embrace a more inclusive vision of solidarity.

However, in reality, Malcolm X’s commitment to global solidarity began long before his pilgrimage. Raised in a Garveyite household, he absorbed Pan-African ideals from his parents, who were active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association. That early grounding shaped his 1959 travels across Africa and the Middle East, where he deepened his understanding of anti-imperialist struggles. The 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba further sharpened his critique of US foreign policy. That same year, Malcolm founded Muhammad Speaks, a newspaper rooted in internationalist politics and black liberation, as part of a global fight against colonialism and empire.

In September 1964, Malcolm X visited Gaza, then under Egyptian administration. During his visit, he met Palestinian poet Harun Hashim Rashid, who recounted narrowly escaping the 1956 Khan Yunis massacre, where Israeli forces killed 275 Palestinians. Rashid’s poem “We Must Return,” which Malcolm transcribed into his diary, powerfully conveyed the enduring spirit of Palestinian resistance and the universal struggle against colonial oppression.

Throughout his travels in Africa and the Middle East, Malcolm met revolutionaries fighting colonialism and US-backed authoritarian governments. These encounters confirmed what he already suspected: America was not a democracy — it was an empire.

“You can’t have capitalism without racism,” Malcolm told an audience at the Militant Labor Forum in 1964.

He observed that the exploitation of black people in the United States was not an exception, but part of a larger global pattern — one that connected Harlem to the Congo, Mississippi to Palestine, and the American ghetto to every colonized nation resisting imperial domination. “The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia,” he said, “is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country.”

Malcolm named US foreign policy for what it was: violent, racist, and imperialist. He opposed the US government not only for how it treated black Americans, but for how it destabilized and dominated other nations. He denounced the CIA’s involvement in assassinations and coups in Africa and Latin America. He exposed US support for apartheid South Africa. And he called out the hypocrisy of a nation that claimed to defend freedom abroad while denying it at home.

Today his critique remains devastatingly accurate.

Malcolm’s warnings echoed America’s ongoing support for Israeli bombardments of Gaza — where entire families are buried under rubble with US weapons. The dehumanization of Palestinians, portrayed as terrorists rather than a people under siege, mirrors the same propaganda Malcolm denounced when black Americans were criminalized for resisting systemic violence. Just as Malcolm exposed the double standards of US policy — human rights for some, occupation for others — today’s mass atrocities in Gaza underscore the same imperial logic he spent his life fighting against.

We see it in the military occupation and destabilization of Haiti, where US-backed governments have left the country in chaos. And we see it in the nearly $1 trillion defense budget that fuels drone wars, coups, and hundreds of military bases around the world, even as poor communities in the United States are starved of basic services and a significant portion of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

Domestically, Malcolm X’s analysis of systemic racism has never been more relevant. He described the police in black communities as an occupying army — language still echoed by activists in the wake of police killings from Ferguson to Minneapolis. Malcolm also understood mass incarceration before it had a name, warning that systems of punishment were designed to control and contain black people, not rehabilitate or protect. “This is what they mean when they say ‘law and order,’” he declared. “They mean they want to keep you and me under control.”

The moment Malcolm returned to the states after he completed his Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and met with leaders and intellectuals during his travels through the Middle East and Africa, he held a press conference at JFK airport. There he spoke about the transformation in his thinking and introduced the idea of approaching the African American struggle as a human rights issue, declaring he would work to bring charges against the United States for its treatment of black people.

Two weeks later, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a telegram to the FBI’s New York office directing them to “do something about Malcolm X.”

Malcolm’s shift toward international human rights advocacy, and his increasing ability to build coalitions across ideologies and races, made him a unique and growing concern to the FBI as the bureau’s illegal COINTELPRO program raged on, targeting black leaders and groups across the country.

Malcolm X’s internationalism was dangerous precisely because it told the truth. It revealed that the United States was not an isolated example of failed democracy but the hub of a global system of racial capitalism. In this sense, Malcolm’s views were more radical — and more accurate — than most of his contemporaries. But he wasn’t alone.

In his final years, Dr Martin Luther King Jr began sounding more like Malcolm — condemning the Vietnam War, the military-industrial complex, and American capitalism. In King’s 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, he declared Washington “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Dr King, like Malcolm, was assassinated soon after articulating this deeper critique of empire.

Malcolm X was killed in 1965, just as his politics were expanding toward a global vision of solidarity and revolutionary struggle. Six decades later, his analysis remains chillingly relevant.

His warnings about US power — its foundation in racial capitalism, its dependence on violence, and its global reach — are confirmed in every drone strike, every police killing, every billion-dollar arms deal, and every neglected neighborhood at home. So, too, is his call for global solidarity: not to reform the machinery of oppression, but to dismantle it altogether.

“You don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it,” he declared in 1964. “Revolutions overturn systems.”

Malcolm refused to choose silence when the truth was inconvenient. He stood with the oppressed — from Harlem to the Congo, from Mississippi to Palestine — not for applause, but because justice demanded it.

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against,” he declared. “I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”

His legacy lives not only in speeches and photos, but in movements: in the global outrage over Israel’s assault on Gaza, in the rejection of US intervention in Haiti, and in the ongoing fight for abolition and dignity from Rikers to Rafah. To honor Malcolm while ignoring these struggles is to betray the very politics that made him dangerous to the Western power structure. He taught us that solidarity must extend beyond borders, beyond comfort, beyond propaganda — that to side with the oppressed is not optional, it is essential.