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on Political Ideologies,” did not reflect its content, which covered much of the same ground as his other recent addresses. He condemned the Tshombe regime, the Johnson administration’s links to it, and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, suggesting the United States was “trapped” there. When asked about his disputes with Elijah Muhammad, he responded with a soft, theological argument: “Elijah believes that God is going to come and straighten things out. . . . I’m not willing to sit and wait on God to come. . . . I believe in religion, but a religion that includes political, economic, and social action designed to eliminate some of these things, and make a paradise here on earth while we’re waiting for the other.”

The students affiliated with SNCC who attended his lecture invited him to visit Selma, then the headquarters of the national campaign for black voting rights, and only one hundred miles west in the heart of the Black Belt. Malcolm could not refuse. The beauty of the Selma struggle was its brutal simplicity: hundreds of local blacks lined up at Selma’s Dallas County building daily, demanding the right to register to vote; white county and city police beat and arrested them. By the first week in February thirty-four hundred people had been jailed, including Dr. King. Under cover of darkness, terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan harassed civil rights workers, black families, and households. On February 4, Malcolm addressed an audience of three hundred at the Brown’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Significantly, while the event had been arranged through SNCC, after some negotiations it was formally cosponsored by King’s SCLC. Malcolm’s sermon praised King’s dedication to nonviolence, but he advised that should white America refuse to accept the nonviolent model of social change, his own example of armed “self-defense” was an alternative. After the talk he met with Coretta Scott King, stating that in the future he would work in concert with her husband. Before leaving, he informed SNCC workers that he planned to start an OAAU recruitment drive in the South within a few weeks. In this one visit, he had significantly expanded the OAAUʹs purpose and mission, from lobbying the UN to playing an activist role in the grassroots trenches of voting rights and community organizing.

Back in New York, he purchased air tickets for London, with stops in Paris and Geneva, for what would be his final trip out of the country. He planned to attend the first Congress of the Council of African Organizations, held in London on February 6-8, and then to move on to Paris to work with Carlos Moore in consolidating the OAAUʹs presence there. Arriving in London, he gave interviews to the New China news agency and the Ghanaian Times. As had happened so many times before, the good rapport he had developed with movement activists in Selma and Tuskegee quickly disappeared in favor of more radical sentiments. He told the Chinese media that “the greatest event in 1964 was China’s explosion of an atom bomb, because this is a great contribution to the struggle of the oppressed people in the world.” He deplored the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “nothing but a device to deceive the African people,” and characterized U.S. racism as being “an inseparable part of the entire political and social system.” And his opposition to the Vietnam War was escalating: the basic choice America had was “to die there or pull out. . . . Time is against the U.S., and the American people do not support the U.S. war.”

In his interview with the Ghanaian Times, he promoted the call by Nkrumah for the establishment of an African union government. Those leaders who reject the creation of a union, he declared, “will be doing a greater service to the imperialists than Moise Tshombe.” Once again Malcolm the visionary anticipated the future contours of history, with the creation of the African Union a half century later. Addressing the conference on February 8, he encouraged the African press to challenge the racist stereotypes and distortions of Africans in the Western