The Third World Politics of Malcolm X

The 1950’s and 1960’s were an era defined by the bipolarity of the Cold War. The struggle between Soviet Communism and the United States’ neoliberal vision for the world, however, was not the only ideological movement taking place at the time. Indeed, a coalescence of various decolonization processes throughout the Global South provided the conditions for a rising Third World movement to unite much of Africa, Asia, and South America in a refusal of the dichotomy of the Cold War, wherein both major world powers lobbied burgeoning states for ideological and geopolitical influence. At the same time within the U.S., various grassroots social justice movements were gaining traction, giving rise to the civil rights leaders whose thinking and rhetoric shaped the U.S.’ political discourse during that period. Perhaps the most infamous among these leaders was Malcolm X.

X, born Malcolm Little before renaming himself to sever his ties to the name given to him by the white man who had enslaved his ancestors, was known most for his fiery rhetoric and his advocacy of Black Nationalist Separatism, the belief that only “a separate nation for blacks could provide the basis for their self-improvement and advancement as a people.” However, viewing X’s career holistically and in the context of the complex ideological linkages with the Third World he developed in the decade prior to his death in 1965 reveals a far more complete and complex picture of his luminary understanding of civil rights, colonialism, and revolutionary politics. Indeed, while X’s activism is often portrayed as the villainous foil to Martin Luther King-style nonviolence, X’s ideology was ever-evolving and far from monolithic. Specifically, prompted by various Third World influences from 1955 to his death in 1965, Malcolm X’s rhetoric reflected his shift from belief in Black Nationalist separatism championed by the Nation of Islam to a realist vision of internationalist grassroots revolution.

Growing Pains

Born in May of 1925 to Black Nationalist and baptist preacher Earl Little and seamstress Louise Little in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm X lost his father and mother respectively in 1931 to a streetcar accident (which X died believing was the work of a white supremacist group) and in 1938 to a mental illness diagnosis and spent most of his teenage years with foster families. During this time, X developed a tendency for resistance against and hatred for the United States government, infamously declaring that he would “fight for the Japanese” after being drafted to fight in the Second World War in 1943 and subsequently being declared unfit for service. In 1946, at the age of 21, X was arrested on account of grand larceny after embarking on a stealing spree in Boston. X would spend his next six years in Norfolk County Prison in Massachusetts, where he experienced the dehumanizing nature of the U.S. prison system. In an interview with historian Manning Marable for his posthumously published biography A Life of Reinvention, X lamented that in prison, one “never heard [their own] name, only [their] number,” and that these numbers were “stenciled” on every aspect of their lives, from “all of their clothing” to the depths of “[their] brain”. That the US prison system disproportionately incarcerated black people racialized X’s time in prison, reinforcing his belief that black and white people were irreconcilably and inherently opposed to one another, and injecting his hatred of the state with a flare of revolutionary activism. X subsequently sought to consolidate this alienating conceptualization of racism, and succeeded in doing so after his sister Hilda Little introduced him to the thought of converting to the burgeoning Nation of Islam (NOI), a sect of black American Islamists who advocated for complete separation of black and white America and the use of self-defensive violence, headed by a preacher named Elijah Muhammed, and of which four of X’s siblings and his father had been a part. Hilda explained to X the Nation’s founding myth - in which Yacub, an evil black scientist, genetically engineered the creation of the white race 6000 years ago to commit crimes against black people; black separatism, and reverence of Allah, claimed the myth, was the only way to ensure the survival of the black race. The myth, in its scale and grandeur, provided an appealing historical justification for X’s hardline hatred for what he came to see as institutions of whiteness. Thus, following a series of letter correspondences with Elijah Muhammed, and after being released from prison on parole in 1952, X officially joined the NOI, where he quickly rose through the ranks.

X’s activism between his introduction to the NOI and his first major ideological exchange with the Third World in 1955 prominently featured the separatism and religious rhetoric of the NOI. Late in his time in Norfolk County Prison, for example, X produced a manifesto condemning the Charlestown county order that banned Muslim prisoners from leaving their beds after curfew for their evening prayers as an attack upon religious rights that threatened to redress the entire global community of Islamic faiths - work emblematic of his early career activism centered around religion as a primary avenue of anti-racism within the systemically racist prison system. Following X’s release from prison, his first major exploit within the NOI would be in the form of participation in a documentary produced by journalist Michael Wallace named The Hate That Hate Produced, in which Wallace sought insight into what he saw as the hateful beliefs of the Black Nationalist movement. Wallace’s documentary, which aired in 1956, launched the prominently featured X into national notoriety. In it, commenting on whether the NOI preached hate against white people, X claimed to not recognize “any historic example where [...] [white people] have, collectively, as a people, done good,” highlighting a belief in the white-black dichotomy that demonstrated a simple concept of racism his later career experiences would force him to evolve beyond.

Lessons in Bandung

X’s ideas regarding race and revolution would soon begin to shift due to his various international travels - in the first of which he attended the Bandung Conference. In April of 1955, heads of state from a coalition of recently decolonized third-world countries gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to discuss the formation of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM), a proposed pact to resist alignment with the bipolar powers of the U.S. and Soviet Russia; attending countries spanned Asia and Africa and were represented by delegations led by prominent heads of state like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru. Following his rise through the ranks of the NOI, X was invited to attend the conference.

X’s attendance at the Bandung Conference prompted him to reconceptualize racism as an aspect of global colonialism and the US’s domestic policy as an aspect of its international colonial agenda; thus, he adapted his rhetoric to advocate for global unity as opposed to dogmatic separatism in the struggle against colonial oppression. Specifically, Bandung began to erode X’s binary view of racial struggle, and recontextualized his understanding of racism within the U.S. as part of the wider colonial system of the world. Premier Zhou Enlai of China’s delegation address, which cited several struggles for sovereignty across Afro-Eurasia as part of the same conflict, encapsulated the thesis of the conference:

The struggle of the Egyptian people for the restoration of their sovereignty over the Suez Canal Zone, the struggle of the Iranian people for the restoration of sovereignty over their petroleum resources, and the demand for the restoration of the territorial rights of India over Goa and of Indonesia over West Irian, have all won sympathy from many countries in Asia and Africa. [...] This proves that the peoples of our Asian and African countries understand each other and have sympathy and concern for one another.

Zhou, speaking about the same struggles against oppression for national, and indeed racial, self-determination, mirrored the struggle X saw black Americans face, but framed as part of a struggle against white colonialism across Eurasia. Thus, speaking on his experience at the conference in his 1965 speech The Oppressed Masses of the World Cry Out for Action Against the Common Oppressor, X proclaimed that Bandung represented “one of the first and best steps toward real independence for nonwhite people,” because it provided a space for “the people of Africa and Asia and Latin America [to get] together,” highlighting his newfound belief in united global anti-colonialism. Moreover, X believed that the Bandung Conference was successful specifically in its exclusion of white people and inclusion of every other race, which is why in his 1963 speech Message to the Grassroots he advocated against Black Nationalism and instead for unity both between Asian and African civil empowerment movements and among black people in the US, identifying the colonial power as the omnipresent “common oppressor, [...] common exploiter, and [...] common discriminator”.

First Tour Abroad

Despite the influence of Bandung, X would continue his activism on behalf of the dogmatically Black Nationalist NOI, until, in July of 1959, X embarked on his second round of international travel as an ambassador for the NOI, touring Sudan, Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. This tour reshaped his understanding of the Black diaspora within the U.S. as part of a wider African world, inspiring his advocacy of pan-Africanism. Whereas Bandung brought Asians and other peoples of color into X’s consideration of global colonialism, X’s 1959 tour instilled in him a cognizance that racial identity was not fixed in the first place but relative: in an interview with historian Manning Marable, X reflected upon his visit to Egypt that the Egyptians he saw “ranged [in skin color] from regal black to rich brown,” and thus that while black Egyptians were all his “brothers of color,” they “could be [considered] white or Mulatto in another [country]”. This realization inspired his newfound conceptualization of the American black diaspora not as an independent entity fighting an oppressive white establishment but as a critical part of the pan-African global diaspora which, despite their differing skin color, faced oppression from the same white-dominated global institutions. One way this new concern with African politics would materialize was in X’s rhetoric: in his 1964 speech At the Audubon, X argued that Africa was invaluable in the great power conflict of the Cold War in its control of the Suez and Gibraltar trade routes and the continent’s rich natural resource exports, and thus African states must unite in its resolution to resist alignment with either side to maintain its geopolitical agency. Moreover, X’s 1959 tour challenged his belief in the Yacub story and convinced him to reject Black Separatism and embrace universal inclusion as the solution to the problem of race. Reporting to Marable that he had often been embarrassed during his travels by his lack of knowledge regarding “True Islam,” X was prompted to reconsider his views regarding the NOI’s strict doctrine against unity and grassroots activism. Writing for the Egyptian Gazette in 1964 in an article entitled Racism: the Cancer that is Destroying America, X stated that “[his] religious pilgrimage to Mecca has given [him] a new insight into the true brotherhood of Islam, which encompasses all the races of mankind” and thus that “the African struggle for liberation is a matter of human rights,” as opposed to a binary conflict between white and black. This reorientation would result in the souring of relations with the NOI; in a 1965 interview on CBC Frontpage, X repudiated the separatist state the NOI advocated for, stating that he “[did not] believe in any form of segregation” and that he had begun “doubting [Elijah Muhammed’s] action in bringing his solution [to racism] to reality”.

A Cuban Dance

In the immediate wake of his return from Africa in April of 1959, however, X was still a dedicated, albeit skeptical, member of the Nation. By late 1959, NOI leaders, including X, had “[grown] increasingly enamored with the successes and ideals of third world revolutionaries” beyond Africa; specifically, many within the NOI “saw in the Marxist struggle a better way of defining and addressing racial conflict,” particularly in an era of McCarthyism. During this time, the US’ tensions with Fidel Castro’s Cuban regime was reaching its height. While Castro, with his radically internationalist Marxist vision, took the opportunity to engage in ideological exchange with other grassroots movements in the U.S. – for example welcoming Robert Williams of the civil rights movement on a tour of Cuba – the NOI “held fast to its strict doctrine of separatism,” watching from a distance as it “had little to contribute to the dialogue over how to best change the existing order”. X himself, however, was more than comfortable rejecting the NOI’s dogma and engaging with Castro himself in various ways. For example, in September 1960, while on a diplomatic visit to New York City for international meetings at the United Nations headquarters, X met Castro upon the former’s invitation at Hotel Theresa in Uptown New York with his diplomatic delegation after the U.S. Department of State pressured Hotel Shelburne, where Castro was originally scheduled to stay, into canceling his booking.

While the exact details of what was said during the meeting were not documented, the motivations for the meeting were clear for Castro, and the outcome transformative for X. Castro leveraged his meeting with X, which was widely covered by national news, as a play of publicity to expose what historian Garrett Felber called the US’s ideological “Achilles Heel” during the Cold War – racial bigotry. While Castro’s anti-racism could only be described as half-hearted at best, as evidenced by the fact that his entire 80-person delegation to the U.S. was white, his conversation with X in New York, along with X’s study of the Cuban revolutionary regime, inspired X to fully commit to a reinvented view of the US’s place in the world.

X’s interactions with Fidel Castro from 1959 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 furthered X’s rhetoric regarding the United States’ role within the world as a colonial force and taught him that to understand the U.S.’ global influence was critical to understanding the state’s role in domestic racism. While X had, through his visit to Africa, begun seeing the black diaspora in the U.S. through a pan-African lens, his rhetoric by 1959 had yet to reflect a similarly globalized view of the US’s police state. The influence of Castro’s ideas, which positioned the US, along with the neoliberal West, as a global military state driven by profit, changed that fact. In his Audubon speech, X lamented that “in America, [black activists] have always thought that [they] were struggling by [them]selves,” and that such struggle takes place “only because [they] don’t yet know where [they] fit in the scheme of things,” referring to the US’s place in the world as an oppressor; “when you and I are inside of America [...] she looks big and bad and invincible,” posited X, but approaching the state in any other context reveals the revolutionary methods most effective to dismantling systems. This rhetoric reflected X’s newfound Marxist ideology in that he began analyzing the profit motive of and specific methods of violence used by the Military Industrial Complex. For example, critiquing the US’s violent neoliberalism in his 1965 speech A Global Rebellion of the Oppressed Against the Oppressor, X repudiated the classification of racial conflict as a problem of “Black Against White” or as a “purely American problem” as “incorrect,” instead arguing that the Western world has “deliberately subjugated the Negro for economic reasons”. More specifically, in his Oppressed Masses speech, X’s critique of Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe – that his pro-Western and often violent military junta was “propped up by American dollars” via the hiring of South African mercenaries – demonstrated X’s recognition of the economic nature of the US’s global military supremacy and soft power influence which, in X’s eyes, allowed it to act as a brutal global police force. Moreover, his analysis of the Congolese state also reflected a Marx-esque critique of the U.S. media’s role in fueling the Military Industrial Complex. In his Audubon speech, he argued that depictions of Congolese “black women and children [...] being blown to bits by airplanes” from the U.S. are excluded from the press media simply because “they are American planes,” making any military action “humanitarian” in the eyes of the American public. That X took on a distinctly anti-U.S. stance in his rhetoric reflected a critical shift in how he conceptualized the place his activism had in the world - whereas his separatist belief had been grand in its religious scope yet limited in its real reach, his new rhetoric sought to deconstruct oppression as global, systemic, and profit-motivated, and pushed him further away from the simplistic and dogmatic violence the NOI advocated for.

The Hajj

On March 8, 1964, after years of deteriorating relations with the NOI and specifically Elijah Muhammed for what X perceived as a rigid view of social justice that no longer reflected his ideology, X announced his departure from the NOI. In April of that year, X, motivated by a desire to participate in a Hajj - the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca - embarked on his second round of international travel, an experience which fully cemented the influence from his first visit to Africa.

Malcolm X’s Hajj in 1964 and his subsequent travels leading up to 1965 in Europe fully severed his connection with beliefs of the Nation of Islam in favor of traditional Islamic faith, a change which reinforced his belief that race was relative and that oppression was the fault of a system instead of of any one group, prompting him to realist political activism. An April 1964 letter written while in Egypt to American biographer and journalist Michael S. Handler, in which X reported having “eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass and slept on the same rug, while praying to the same God, with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blonde, and whose skin was the whitest of white,” yet from whom he felt the “same sincerity [he] felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana” revealed X’s receding hatred of white people due to his sense of newfound religious spiritualism. While his prior international experiences had prompted him to develop a wider view of whom he considered to be the victims of systemic violence, his 1964 trip was the final nail in the coffin for his belief in race as an indicator of any inherent tendency to enact violence. Moreover, this Islam-rooted inclusivity found its way into X’s views on race as a construct. For example, in a later letter to Handler, written in September of 1964, X argued that “True Islam removes racism, because people of all colors and races who accept its religious principles and bow down to the one God, Allah, also automatically accept each other as brothers and sisters, regardless of differences in complexion,” a sentiment that starkly contrasted his earlier rhetoric, where he made categorical divides between the white and black races. Importantly, X did not let his rejection of the race binary negate his belief that global systems of oppression were racialized; in speeches made after this 1964 trip, X began referring to all people of color across the world as “black,” indicating his continued belief that systems of violence still separated the white race as an oppressor from every other race. Indeed, in his 1965 Oppressed Masses speech, which he delivered to the African Student Union at the London School of Economics, X argued that while being Muslim prevented him from “seeing people by the color of their skin,” America does not “believe in [the] brotherhood [necessary for societal buy-in to Islam],” and thus that he must be a “realist” in his approach to deconstructing racial divide. To X, racism was a system and a logic of dominance, and being a “realist” meant seeking a way out of that system; while religious revival was one option to him, X also began to fully appreciate the power of politics as he came to see the empowerment people of African descent when not in a country like the U.S. where political systems are designed to repress them. His new engagement with on-the-ground politics came in contrast with his earlier staunch opposition to engaging with institutions like the U.S. government that he believed were run on the power of white supremacy.

Indeed, prompted by his learning from his Africa trip, X would seek to reconcile his visionary rhetoric with real political activism. For example, in June 1964, after his return from Africa, X founded the Organization for African American Unity (OAAU), inspired by the existing Organization of African Unity (OAU) – which was enshrined in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as a political union for pan-African self-government. As historian Garrett Felber explained in his essay Harlem is the Black World, the OAAU, in its short term goals of addressing local, community-based issues like “rallying residents against police brutality, establishing a ‘Liberation School’, offering child care and self-defense classes, and launching political education and vote registration drives,” united a “larger vision of Pan-Africanism and human rights” with X’s experience in activism at the community level.

Moreover, X’s realist politics extended to the international scale. For example, during his trip, in July 1964 in Cairo, Egypt, Malcolm argued to the delegates of thirty-four African nations that “the United States government [was] morally incapable of protecting the lives and property of 22 million Afro-Americans,” attempting - albeit unsuccessfully - to convince them to sign a UN referendum condemning the US’s domestic human rights violations in the hopes that it would prompt greater funding to community initiatives helping African Americans, demonstrating X’s belief in the geopolitical power to undo the colonial system that African states wielded should they become united.

X’s internationalist view inspired by his engagement in African politics also reshaped X’s view on the domestic civil rights movement. Beginning in 1964, X stopped referring to “civil rights,” instead choosing to advocate for “human rights.” X explained the difference in a 1965 interview: “we believe that our problem is one, not of violation of civil rights, but a violation of human rights. Not only are we denied the right to be a citizen in the United States, we’re denied the right to be a human being.” In other words, X believed that one cannot speak of civil rights before first being recognized as a human by their government. Importantly, it was his visit to Africa which inspired this shift. As fellow activist and long-time friend Yuri Kochiyama explained in a 2006 interview, X saw that “African people don’t have to wait ‘til some president of another country, […], would give civil rights [sic]” as their governments – many of which were struggling to rid themselves of colonial influence -- viewed them as inherently entitled to such rights insofar as they had the human right to dignity, and thus that human rights were prerequisite to civil rights.

Moreover, during his interactions with African political figures to the end of convincing them to sign his referendum, X demonstrated a newfound willingness to curb his own blunt radicalism to appeal to those who had the political power to help him achieve his goals. For example, speaking to Seyyid Omar al Saghaf, Saudi Arabia’s Vice Minister of foreign affairs, X said that “[X was] not anti-american, un-american, seditious, nor subversive” and that “[he doesn’t] buy the anti-capitalist propaganda of the communists, nor [...] the anti-communist propaganda of capitalists”; Given the radically anti-US stance X’s rhetoric would reflect even in his later speeches from 1965, this interaction is likely less an indication of a shift to a moderate stance, but more an indication of his willingness to be politically adaptive given his view of anti-oppression as a political exploit instead of a purely ideological one.

Revolution is People

Equipped with a renewed and grand understanding of racial struggle at the global level, and an understanding of pan-Africanism as a tool for political change, X returned to the U.S. from his Hajj in May of 1964, after which he would produce some of rhetoric that define his legacy beyond the black nationalist ideas of his career prior to 1955. But, before then, X had a friend to make, and an important takeaway to learn: while Fidel Castro was perhaps the most politically notorious of X’s acquaintances, a Japanese American Woman by the name of Yuri Kochiyama was one of equal influence on X’s politics. Born in 1921 in to Middle Class Issei (first generation Japanese Immigrant) parents, Kochiyama was incensed to a life of activism during the Second World War when [her] family was forcibly relocated to a[n] [internment] camp in Arkansas, where she witnessed the capacity of a society separated based on race to dehumanize and denigrate the politically vulnerable. Throughout her life, Kochiyama advocated for nuclear disarmament (helping pass the landmark 1988 Civil Liberties Act), supported the Puerto Rican independence movement, and -- most relevantly – joined the struggle for African American rights under the mentorship of Malcolm X. The two met in 1964 – prior to X’s departure to Mecca -- at a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) protest in Brooklyn, during which they exchanged brief remarks about the merits and drawbacks of advocating for racial integration, sparking a letter correspondence and eventually a close friendship featuring an abundance of ideological exchange.

In various ways, this friendship strengthened X’s commitment to each new aspect of his activism. First, while his experiences in Bandung and on his first tour of Africa showed X the importance of different political groups’ political unity, Kochiyama’s identity demonstrated the importance of personal empathy in creating such unity. Kochiyama’s recounting of the story of her realization of the prevalence of racism directed at Black Americans revealed that her empathy and sense of personal responsibility primarily incited her activism. Kochiyama had been working her first job as a waitress; she recounted:

It was the first time I’m working with just black people, mostly the waitresses, so they were women, but there were waiters, too. And I finally, I asked... two of the guys were from the South. And so I mentioned to them that I lived a year and a half in Mississippi, and at a USO which serviced everybody, but no black soldiers came in. And so they said, “What was the address?” I gave the address, I couldn’t forget, 222 Pine, he said, “That’s the main drag. No black soldiers, even wearing a uniform, can go in anywhere on the main drag.” They could not go on Pine Street or Main Street. I was shocked. Then, for the first time, it made me think more what America was about, the segregation. Then I got really interested and wanted to find out everything I could about what black people have gone through. And it made me ashamed when I could think of Asians were just as racist as whites towards blacks, anyway. That changed me.

Kochiyama was the first person X had met who had little personal stake in his movement (at least superficially – Asian Americans obviously had much to gain from a less racist America, but rarely perceived this fact to be true), yet provided the unity it so needed in abundance simply because of her care for her coworkers, and for her sense of responsibility to remedy the racial attitudes of other Asian Americans; in other words, Kochiyama was living proof that care and reciprocity are the lifeblood of social movements.

In late 1964, Kochiyama and her husband hosted a reception for X to meet “atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) who, as part of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki World Peace Mission Study, were on a walking tour of the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union to push for nuclear disarmament.”42 There, X, Kochiyama, and leaders from the Japanese group discussed the immorality of the “bombs of racism, […] connecting US intervention in a non-white country with racism at home” While X had already demonstrated a concept of American racism affecting people from other countries and of different races, the only non-Americans he had been personally acquainted with were international heads of state like those he had met at Bandung. X’s speaking to regular Japanese people, many of whom possessed visible and permanent injuries from surviving an atomic bomb, represented one of the first times he had personally connected with an on-the-ground victim of the racist military industrial complex he had come to despise.

At the same meeting, Kochiyama introduced X to anti-racist activists who were not black nationalists like he had been for much of his career, including white allies, civil rights movement advocates, and Puerto Rican independence advocates. As Kochiyama recounted, “people didn’t know whether they should go up to him and ask if they could shake his hand” given how different his ideology was to theirs. However, X eventually was “wonderful to each one” and demonstrated “how glad he was to meet all these people.” This experience allowed X to consolidate on a personal level with people he would have considered political enemies as part of the NOI. Perhaps Kochiyama’s work in showing X the importance of interpersonal connection and empathy in anti-racism was part of why X focused so much on solutions to racism that targeted bettering individual communities rather than seeking to topple the racist system itself, such as the OAAU, which Kochiyama eventually joined.

Moreover, Kochiyama’s work independent of X’s mentorship served as a proof of concept for each of the lessons X had learned throughout his career, in turn reinforcing his belief that internationalism, decolonialism, and methods like community work and direct action were superior doctrines of activism than black nationalism. After her attending the OAAU’s Liberation School, “the anti-imperialist views Malcolm X had instilled in Yuri inspired her support for the Puerto Rican independence movement,” as a part of which she famously led an occupation protest at the Statue of Liberty in 1977. That Kochiyama’s political goals were superficially different from X’s, but thrived off of the same revolutionary doctrines furthered X’s resolve in said doctrines.

The Ballot or the Bullet

While X’s rhetoric on the dynamics of global oppression approached it’s final form from 1964 to 1965, he still had much to learn in the way of revolutionary politics. Specifically, through the influence of the Kenyan Mau Mau revolutionary movement, X sought to reconcile his belief violence against black folk was structural and entrenched with a revolutionary method accessible to the common person. In December 1964, X heard of the Mau Mau revolutionary group at a rally held in the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem, New York, where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s freedom singers performed a praise of Kenyan revolutionaries’ attaining Kenya’s independence from the British on 12 December 1963. Subsequently, X began letter correspondences with Mau Mau leaders, and began studying the history of the group. The Mau Mau were a dramatically controversial movement: while unmistakably violent and demonized by Western media, many radicals like Malcolm X praised them precisely for their revolutionary methods. In his Audubon speech, X argued that the U.S. needed “the same type of Mau Mau here that they had over in Kenya,” identifying the Mau Mau’s most valuable trait as having realized that “the only thing standing in the way of the independence of the African in kenya was another African,” in that Africans and African Americans who supported moderate methods such as caucusing were ineffective absent greater structural change. Indeed, X echoed this sentiment in his 1964 speech The Ballot or the Bullet, delivered at Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, where he proclaimed that “You and I in America are faced not with a segregationist conspiracy, we’re faced with a government conspiracy,” arguing that to be content simply voting was not enough to engage with democracy, as neither major political party were interested in advocating for black people.

X’s proposal for methods to make such structural change was inspired by the Mau Mau, was twofold, and was eponymous with his aforementioned speech: the ballot or the bullet.

On one hand, X supported non-traditional voting as a way to make systematic change. Speaking at the Ford Auditorium in Detroit in April of 1965 on the OAAU’s voter education project, X announced that he hoped to become “involved in a mass voter registration drive” for black community members in Harlem, but that he did not believe in voter registration without first educating voters in “the science of politics,” specifically through independent caucusing, leveraging the vote to empower grassroots politicians and to seek control of the “politics of your own community”. Moreover, in his 1965 speech entitled Learn How to Think, X advocated for the OAAU’s organization of “demonstrations and picketing, but not the kind that plays by the rules of the establishment” - specifically the kind that permitted the use of the threat of violence and the occupation of spaces without permits, demonstrating X’s simultaneous belief in the power of politics and his rejection of the US’s mainstream political systems.

On the other hand, however, X was also unafraid to advocate for violent revolution, albeit with far more nuance than the self-defensive, reactionary violence the NOI had supported. In his 1964 speech entitled The Black Revolution, which he delivered to a three-quarters white audience at the Militant Labor Forum in New York City, he threatened that the violent struggle his “brothers and sisters in Africa [...] [and] Latin America” had engaged in against their former colonizers was imminently approaching the U.S.. Whereas his radical advocacy of violence prior to 1955 was motivated by a simple hatred for the white race, his rhetoric in 1964 isolated the efficacy of violence in the absence of any other effective method to dismantle an oppressive system that was designed to self-perpetuate.

The Politics of True Revolution

Ultimately, perhaps one of X’s final speeches before his death on February 21, 1965, delivered at the Corn Hill Methodist Church in Rochester, New York, reflected best his fully formed vision for revolution; in stark contrast with what X, as a religious fanatic in the NOI, had told Michaell Wallace in the latter’s documentary, he called for a global revolution, in the in the aftermath of which there will be “a society in which everyone can live as human beings” regardless of skin color, and where “[blacks and whites] will eventually meet down the road,” demonstrating his coming to prioritize human rights at an international scale over the binary race war proposed by the NOI, and his adoption of a nuanced revolutionary method. As historian Carl Oglesby writes in his article in the New Left Reader entitled “I Don’t Mean Bananas,” “[X’s] political method had presupposed [...] the unity of nationalism and radicalism” since the beginning of his career - unity which eventually evolved into one “which therefore connected Mississippi with the Congo and Africa with Asia and which understood a viable politics for black Americans to require both a demand for African Hood and a conception of pro-African Hood as an explicitly anti-imperialist stance.” Malcolm X’s legacy today is incredibly controversial and complex, but peeling back the layers of extremism reveals a visionary who’s understanding of violence and revolution that far transcended his time. More importantly, it reveals the story of a man who taught himself to undo resentment, to broaden his perspective, and to truly consider his worldview in the face of an upbringing that taught him to hate. In a modern America, where change is driven by movements of democratic will, X’s remarkable life should serve as an example of how a genuine willingness to learn can inspire the compassion and illumination that moves people.