Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [169]
Another radical constituency in Detroit intensely interested in Malcolm was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Its key figure, who would subsequently help shape Malcolm’s intellectual legacy through the publication of several books by and about him, was George Breitman. The editor of the SWPʹs newspaper, The Militant, Breitman also initiated the successful Friday Night Socialist Forum hosted at Wayne State University in the 1960s. The SWP also supported efforts to establish the Freedom Now Party, an independent black third party formed in Michigan. Consequently, when Malcolm accepted an invitation to address the Reverend Cleage’s Grassroots Conference, he may not have realized that thousands of his local supporters considered themselves more militant than he was. They, too, rejected the gradualism of the NAACP and SCLC and the nonviolent activism of Rustin and Farmer, and were sharply critical of the Negro bourgeoisie. With the collapse of McCarthyism and the most extreme forms of government harassment, American leftists and socialists were eager to participate in the national struggle for blacks’ rights. They looked to Malcolm X as a possible leader of that new movement.
When, on the evening of November 10, Malcolm walked up to the King Solomon Baptist Church’s pulpit, he saw a sea of two thousand mostly black faces. He probably had not intended to break new political ground. Certainly he had not planned to repudiate his allegiance to the NOI. Yet as he delivered his “Message to the Grassroots” address, his life was fundamentally changed—not unlike King’s, in the aftermath of “I Have a Dream.” In his address, Malcolm incorporated sections from recent speeches, especially “The Farce on Washington,” but he also drew parallels between the black freedom struggle in the United States, the Bandung Conference, and anti-colonial movements across Asia and Africa. He drew a sharp distinction between what he called a “Negro revolution” versus a black one. A true revolution, he declared, was represented by the Chinese communists—“There are no Uncle Toms” in China, he said—and by the Algerian revolution against French colonial rule. The “Negro revolution,” based on nonviolent direct action, was no revolution at all:
Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on a wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Rev. Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing “We Shall Overcome”? You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. . . . If you’re afraid of black nationalism you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.
In the second half of his address came the dichotomy of the house Negro and the field Negro. Malcolm ridiculed the “modern house Negroes” such as King and Wilkins, casting himself as a modern-day slave rebel. He denounced the March on Washington as a “sellout.” “And every one of those Toms was put out of town by sundown,” he added, to gales of laughter. The major Negro endorsers of the march should even receive Academy Awards “for the best supporting cast.” As he finished, the response was electrifying: people cheered and waved their hands. The talk had some obligatory references to Muhammad, but these were deleted from the tape recording several months later, when “Message to the Grassroots” was released as a record. The enthusiasm was provoked by the crowd’s recognition that Malcolm appeared to have broken free politically. Grace Lee Boggs, who was sitting next to the Reverend