This is a recent speech by Angela Davis, herself a lifelong left political activist, about Malcolm X and his legacy, with additional thoughts on more recent times. Including Ron DeSantis’ ridiculous but ugly War On Wokeness.1
Malcolm X (Malcolm Little, aka, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) was an important figure in the American Black nationalist movement, an important American Muslim figure, and a significant force in the US civil rights movement in the 1960s.
He was then and is often today presented as advocate of violence in the defense of Black rights who was a contrast the the nonviolent leader Martin Luther King, Jr. That may be true as far as it goes. But while Malcolm was a defender of the notion of violent revolutionary action, he did not directly promote such actions in the US, though he (or at least his image) was an inspiration for some who did.
The Nation of Islam of which he became a key leader advocated an explicitly racist view of white people. Malcolm himself broke from the organization and from that particular view after becoming more directly exposed to mainstream Islam in the world. Which - despite what its Islamophobe detractors has to say - does generally have a theological perspective that fundamentally rejects racism of all forms.
Malcolm left the Nation in March 1964 and in the next month founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. During his pilgrimage to Mecca that same year, he experienced a second conversion and embraced Sunni Islam, adopting the Muslim name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. Renouncing the separatist beliefs of the Nation, he claimed that the solution to racial problems in the United States lay in orthodox Islam. On the second of two visits to Africa in 1964, he addressed the Organization of African Unity (known as the African Union since 2002), an intergovernmental group established to promote African unity, international cooperation, and economic development. In 1965 he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity as a secular vehicle to internationalize the plight of Black Americans and to make common cause with the people of the developing world—to move from civil rights to human rights.2 [my emphasis]
In this sense, he was an important figure in encouraging the development of “postcolonial” viewpoint, though he was an organizer and agitator more than a theorist as such.
Malcolm X at 98: Angela Davis on His Enduring Legacy & the "Long Struggle for Liberation". Democracy Now! YouTube channel 05/19/2023. (Accessed: 2023-16-08).
Mamiya, Lawrence A. (2023): Malcolm X. Encyclopedia Britannica, 07/03/2023 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Malcolm-X> (Accessed: 2023-16-08).