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By Root 1888 0

everywhere, had to register as voters. Gone was the old Nation of Islam claim that participation in the system could have little effect. Now Malcolm called for a united black front that would seek to wrest control of blacks’ economic and political future. “Unity is the right religion,” he insisted. “Black people must forget their differences and discuss the points on which they can agree.” He also questioned the ability of the civil rights movement to compensate blacks for “three hundred ten years of unpaid slave labor.” What was most significant was his shift from the use of violence to achieve blacks’ objectives to the exercising of the electoral franchise. By embracing the ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, even if this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of his rhetoric.

The next day he sat down for an interview with the Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party. For decades, the SWP had promoted revolutionary black nationalism. Leon Trotsky himself had believed that Negro Americans would be the vanguard for the inevitable socialist revolution in the United States. Malcolm’s separation from the Nation of Islam and his endorsement of voter registration and mass protest by African Americans seemed to Trotskyists a move toward socialism.

By the time Malcolm arrived at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland on April 3 to address a major public rally hosted by the local CORE chapter, he had refined “The Ballot or the Bullet” into a formidable piece of oratory. Much of the Cleveland CORE group had embraced Malcolm as a movement leader, and a crowd of between two and three thousand people, including many whites, packed the church. The format of the evening’s program was a dialogue between Malcolm and his old friend Louis Lomax. Lomax spoke first, presenting a pro-integrationist civil rights message that won respectful applause from the audience. Malcolm’s talk drew from his recent Audubon addresses, yet ultimately cohered into something greater, a fierce commentary on the lay of the land. On the one hand, the speech caught the mood of black America as it slowly shifted from a belief in the efficacy of nonviolence into a general state of dissatisfaction and impatience with the civil rights movement. In early 1964, as SNCC and CORE began to take more militant positions, the atmosphere of race politics grew heavier with the possibility of violence; indeed, within six months race riots would break out in black neighborhoods throughout the Northeast. “Now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today,” Malcolm told the crowd, “who just doesn’t intend to turn the other cheek any longer.” In raising the specter of the “bullet,” he acknowledged that it would take great effort to pull the country from the path to catastrophe. Yet in discussing the “ballot,” he held out hope that such a change was possible.

The first part of Malcolm’s lecture made an appeal for black unity despite ideological quarrels. “If we have differences,” Malcolm argued, “let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the man.” This sentiment directly contradicted the “Message to the Grassroots,” which had ridiculed King and other civil rights activists. For Malcolm, a precondition for unity was finding a secular basis for common ground, which is why he also strove to decouple his identity as a Muslim cleric from his political engagements. “Just as Adam Clayton Powell is a Christian minister,” Malcolm observed, he himself was a Muslim minister who was committed to black liberation “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm then pivoted to denounce both major political parties as well as the U.S. power structure, which continued to deny most blacks a real chance at voting. Malcolm had come to see the vote as a necessary tool if black Americans were to take control of the institutions in their communities. He reminded his audience of the power that a black voting bloc could have in a divided country, claiming that “it was the black man