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By Root 1893 0

us.” Muhammad instructed him to “speak only what you know they have heard me say or that which you yourself have heard me say.” Malcolm was forbidden to express his independent opinions, even on questions that had no relationship with the NOI. The aging patriarch sought to reclaim his right to be the sole interpreter of Muslim teachings. “Make the public seek me for the answers,” he wrote. “Do not you see how I reject the devils on such subjects, by telling them I will say WHERE when the Government shows interest?” The NOI was a religious movement, not a political cause; Malcolm no longer had the authority to address issues like a separate black state or to speak about current events of a political nature, unless Muhammad gave his permission. Yet, of course, any discussion of black Americans’ affairs inevitably centered on the struggle for civil rights; Muhammad was making Malcolm’s position untenable.

An opportunity soon arose to test Muhammad’s boundaries. On March 7, Cornell University invited Malcolm and CORE executive director James Farmer to debate the theme “Segregation or Integration?” During the previous year, Farmerʹs Freedom Riders had grabbed national headlines with their challenges to segregated bus systems in the South, and the promise of real gains to be made through concerted activism gave him a strong chip to play against Malcolm. In his opening remarks, Malcolm emphasized that black Americans were part of the “non-white world.” And just as “our African and Asian brothers wanted to have their own land, wanted to have their own country, wanted to exercise control over themselves,” it was reasonable for black Americans to desire the same. “It is not integration that Negroes in America want, it is human dignity.” Once more, he attacked integration as a scheme benefiting only the black bourgeoisie:

We who are black in the black belt, or black community, or black neighborhood can easily see that our people who settle for integration are usually the middle-class so-called Negroes, who are in the minority. Why? Because they have confidence in the white man . . . they believe that there is still hope in the American dream. But what to them is an American dream to us is an American nightmare, and we don’t think that it is possible for the American white man in sincerity to take the action necessary to correct the unjust conditions that 20 million black people are made to suffer, morning, noon and night.

But Farmer, like Rustin, was not intimidated, aggressively going after the conservatism and weaknesses in the NOIʹs program. “We are seeking an open society . . . where people will be accepted for what they are worth, will be able to contribute fully to the total culture and the total life of the nation,” he declared. Racism was America’s greatest problem. Turning to Malcolm, he asked, “We know the disease, physician, what is your cure? What is your program and how do you hope to bring it into effect?” Malcolm had been long on rhetoric but short on details. “We need to have it spelled out,” Farmer pressed him. “Is it a separate Negro society in each city? As a Harlem [or] a South Side Chicago?” He also effectively countered Malcolm’s claim that only the black middle class favored integration by pointing out that the majority of student Freedom Riders were from working-class and low-income families. In fact, Farmer argued, the opposite was true: black entrepreneurial capitalists favored Jim Crow, because it created a self-segregated black consumer market without white competition; it was usually the black middle class that opposed desegregation. Malcolm sensed that he was losing the debate and, to score points, resorted to mentioning that Farmer was married to a white woman.

Unlike the NAACP representatives that Malcolm had previously debated, Farmer was able to explain the tactics of the Black Freedom Movement in clear, everyday terms. To Malcolm’s claim that desegregated lunch counters were unimportant, for instance, he had a sensible response: “Are we not to travel? Picket lines and boycotts brought Woolworth