Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [196]
A little more than a week before his scheduled departure, the MMI held an evening forum at the Audubon, featuring Malcolm and North Carolina civil rights leader Willie Mae Mallory. Mallory’s participation directly associated Malcolm with the incendiary exile Robert Williams, author of Negroes with Guns and an early proponent of black armed self-defense. Malcolm insisted that the Black Freedom Movement had to refocus from a quest for “civil rights” to a demand for “human rights,” as defined by international law. Again, he stressed the necessity of the vote. The New York FBI office estimated the audience at five hundred. “He cited past lynchings of Negroes in America in accusing the government of genocide,” it reported.
On April 8, at New York’s Palm Gardens, Malcolm delivered a lecture that sharply broke with the NOI mold. The public lecture had been sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum, the nonpartisan outreach group of the SWP. In theory he was speaking to an eclectic group of nonaligned activists, independent Marxists, and black nationalists, but in reality it was a mostly Marxist audience with many of Malcolm’s core followers also in attendance.
Malcolm was also preparing his associates for his extended leave, authorizing James 67X to serve as the MMIʹs acting chairman and to answer all communications and correspondence. Despite all the last-minute arrangements that needed his attention, he agreed to fly to Detroit once again to address a GOAL (Group on Advanced Leadership) rally. The speech would pressure his already tight schedule, but he recognized that Detroit offered a fertile ground for the message he had been cultivating in “The Ballot or the Bullet.” In the years since he had delivered his monthlong series of sermons at Mosque No. 1 in 1957, the city had continued to develop as a national center for black working-class militancy. Black membership in the city’s chapter of the United Auto Workers union had exploded, and as in many other Midwestern cities, the heavy industrial base and de facto segregation produced a mass of militant workers living in impoverished, rundown ghettos. Already the seeds had been planted for the violent discontent that would seize the city by the end of the decade. Malcolm had registered the broad impact of Detroit in his “Message to the Grassroots” address in November 1963, but now his renewed emphasis on class exploitation and the plight of the black working class made for an even more natural fit with the mood of the city’s black community. As he sought a larger national constituency, he could ill afford to pass up a high-profile speaking engagement before such a promising audience.
GOAL booked the King Solomon Baptist Church in the Northwest Gold-berg neighborhood for Malcolm’s speech, but when the church leaders discovered that Malcolm would be the featured speaker, an ad hoc coalition of black ministers tried in vain to block his appearance. Despite their efforts, more than two thousand people came out to listen. Drawing on many ideas from the speeches in New York and Cleveland, Malcolm offered perhaps the most refined version of “Ballot” he would ever give; the audio recording that has survived of this speech shows Malcolm at the height of his powers as an orator. In this version, he moved the section on black nationalism front and center, giving one of the most trenchant exegesis of this political philosophy ever set down. Speaking in the urgent tones and pulsing rhythms of a jazz musician, Malcolm told the crowd that he was “a black nationalist freedom fighter.” Again he urged his supporters “to leave their religion at home in the closet,” because the goal was to unite all African Americans regardless of their religious views behind the politics of black nationalism. As in his Cleveland address, Malcolm placed great importance on blacks’ electoral empowerment. “[If] Negroes voted together,” he insisted,