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By Root 1857 0

young people at his Hotel Theresa office, Malcolm urged them to think for themselves, applauding those who were committed to nonviolence but also insisting that “if black people alone are going to be the ones who are nonviolent, then it’s not fair.” He presented the OAAU as “a new approach,” rejecting traditional integrationist and separatist strategies in favor of “making our problem a world problem.” The plight of Mississippi could not be overcome by focusing narrowly just on its problems. “It is important for you to know that when you’re in Mississippi, you’re not alone. . . . You’ve got as much power on your side as the Ku Klux Klan has on its side.” Malcolm promised to send some of his militant followers to aid the freedom fighters. “We will organize brothers here in New York who know how to handle these kind of affairs,” he vowed, “and they’ll slip into Mississippi like Jesus slipped into Jerusalem.”

On Sunday, January 3, the OAAUʹs evening program at the Audubon Ballroom featured color films taken by Malcolm during his travels. Despite freezing weather, the program attracted a crowd of seven hundred. Two days later Malcolm visited Montreal for an unusual reason: he was to appear on the CBC television program Front Page Challenge. With a format similar to the 1950s U.S. television show What’s My Line?, guests answered questions from masked panelists, who attempted to guess their identities. Malcolm’s panelists were Gordon Sinclair, Betty Kennedy, and Charles Templeton. Why would he go on a television game show? Perhaps it was another means to generate funds for his family. Or perhaps it was a way to display his softer personality to a mass audience.

He also continued to expand his rhetoric on the internationalist connections between Asia, Africa, and black America. As the featured speaker at the Militant Labor Forum at Palm Gardens on January 7, he noted that Vietnamese rice farmers had successfully fought “against all the highly mechanized weapons of warfare” of the United States. China’s explosion of a nuclear bomb, he declared, “was a scientific breakthrough for the oppressed people of China.” The communist Chinese displayed “their advanced knowledge of science to the point where a country which is as backward as this country keeps saying China is, and so behind everybody, and so poor, could come up with an atomic bomb. I had to marvel at that.” He tied these developments to the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Moise Tshombe, Malcolm explained, was an “agent of Western imperialism” in Africa, and he pointed out that in 1964 both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, after years of effort, had successfully overthrown colonial powers, becoming independent Zambia and Malawi respectively. Taken together, these international events were all driven by the same global political forces, and African Americans’ issues had to be addressed within that same dynamic context.

Over the next few days, Malcolm wrote a series of letters to consolidate the OAAU as an international movement. From Carlos Moore, an anti-Castro black Cuban who had nevertheless assisted Malcolm during the week he was in Paris, Malcolm solicited help in starting an office there. In a friendly letter to Maya Angelou, Malcolm praised her critique against talking “over the head of the masses,” telling her that she was able to communicate with “plenty of [soul] and you always keep your feet firmly on the ground. This is what makes you, you.ʺ Without overt appeals, Malcolm’s letter so flattered Angelou that it accelerated her decision to give up her teaching position in Ghana immediately to join this man in whom she had placed her faith and hopes.

On January 17, Malcolm showed up at a Harlem public vigil of one thousand people, standing in heavy snow, demanding school desegregation. Though he was constantly on the watch for NOI attacks, he seems to have decided that significantly large crowds presented a stronger deterrent to violence. In this case, he may have also been persuaded by the fact that most of the protesters were white, which made an attack