Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [120]
One other aspect of Malcolm’s address that was especially effective in appealing to civil rights organizers and leftists was proletarian appeal. He claimed that Muhammad and the Nation represented blacks who were unemployed, impoverished, and angry. The majority of urban blacks were confined to the ghetto, where they were subjected to police brutality; indeed, law enforcement authorities functioned like an occupying army under colonial conditions. In effect, Malcolm was using the analogy of postcolonial Africa to define the political conflict between black leaders in the United States. Although Frantz Fanon’s writings would not be known or translated in the United States until the late 1960s, Malcolm’s analysis anticipated Fanon’s famous “Wretched of the Earth” thesis. By the end of the great debate, despite the older man’s point-scoring, however, it was Malcolm who was largely setting the agenda now, capturing the militancy of most college students, black and white. As one bewildered faculty member at the debate admitted, “Howard will never be the same. I feel a reluctance to face my class tomorrow.”
Malcolm’s oratory brought him not just to the heights of esteemed black institutions, but to landmark locales in the upper-crust white world as well. On March 24 of the following year, he was invited to debate the black attorney Walter C. Carrington at the Harvard Law School Forum. The excitement generated by Malcolm’s appearance was so intense that at the last minute the venue was changed from Lowell Hall to Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest auditorium. There, on the stage that had hosted American presidents and foreign heads of state, Malcolm presented the NOI program to a record-breaking crowd. “Allah is now giving America every chance to repent and change before He destroys this wicked Caucasian world,” he declared. He went on to argue that desegregated public facilities and integrated schools were not enough. America’s twenty million blacks “number a nation in their own right.” For that nation to be successful, blacks “must have some land of our own.” Louis X, who had come out for the debate from the Boston mosque, recalled Malcolm’s powerful presence onstage. The white audience at Harvard, he remembered, was enamored with this black man who could handle their questions with ease. If Malcolm’s abrupt shift from political and international themes to jeremiads about the coming destruction of white civilization seemed jarring, this hodgepodge construction was not of his design; Elijah Muhammad, ever vigilant about Malcolm’s growing platform, would often dictate parts of his speeches; the Harvard debate was probably no exception. Chicago headquarters also insisted that Malcolm’s lectures be audio-recorded, with copies forwarded to them, so that both Muhammad and John Ali could monitor the addresses.
Through the spring of 1961, Malcolm’s campus speaking engagements took him far and wide, rarely failing to generate controversy or to prompt blistering debates about free speech. In California, for instance, students at UC Berkeley were scheduled to hear Malcolm, but the university administration banned the lecture, which had to be relocated to the local YMCA. On April 19, Malcolm was back in the Ivy League, at Yale, to debate Louis Lomax, and four days later he appeared on the NBC television program Open Mind as part of a panel that included the conservative George Schuyler and the writer James Baldwin. When host Eric Goldman introduced Malcolm as the NOIʹs “number two man,” at the first opportunity Malcolm denied that such a position existed. More important, the show’s taping marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Malcolm and Baldwin.
Although most of Malcolm’s public lectures were now aimed at university audiences, he also tried to establish an interfaith dialogue between the Nation and African-American Christians. As the Nation continued to deny the necessity of politics, it became even more important to establish its legitimacy within the black community as a real religious organization; acknowledgment