Clarence 13X - Legacy and Reception

Legacy and Reception

Five Percenter membership plunged after Clarence 13X's death, but eventually rebounded in 1970 after new leadership emerged and revitalized the group. After his death, the group was never dominated by a single leader. This may have been a result of their teaching that all black men are gods, which rendered authoritarian leadership untenable.

Knight doubts that Clarence 13X set out to build a movement or a culture, but after his death, the movement expanded and gained converts across the United States. Five Percenters have celebrated Clarence 13X's birthday as a holiday, and minimized the descriptions of his flaws in their accounts of his life. Numerous apocryphal stories from his life have circulated among the group; some accounts have claimed that he gambled only as a means to reach others with his teachings. He did not leave behind a record of his teachings, and the group had few formalized tenets at the time of his death. In the following decades, the group's doctrine became more complicated.

Akbar Muhammad of the NOI described Clarence 13X as "confused", although relations between the Five Percenters and NOI leaders have improved over time. Clarence 13X's teachings may have influenced the doctrines of Dwight York, founder of the Nuwaubian Nation. York, however, saw Clarence 13X's teachings as an insufficient, incomplete path.

Lawyer Sidney Davidoff, one of Lindsay's assistants, deemed Clarence 13X "a little bit snake-oil salesman and a little bit crazy, but no more unstable than anyone else preaching a gospel on the street corner." Davidoff saw Clarence 13X's black supremacist teachings as a way to instill confidence in young people. Knight states that Clarence 13X went from a "'Harlem rowdy' to legitimate community leader", and Lindsay later cast Clarence 13X's role in the city as similar to that of Al Sharpton. Mattias Gardell of Uppsala University views Clarence 13X as a "gifted philosopher".