In an era where the image of Che is on t-shirts made in Third World sweatshops and military contingents participate in Martin Luther King Day parades, the following is as true as ever.
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
— State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin, 1917
Of all the shocking things that have happened in my lifetime, the U.S. putting Malcolm X on a postage stamp ranks well up the list.