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By Root 1936 0

. . . and eventually get some kind of independence.” The new generation rejected gradualism: “If something is yours by right, then you fight for it or shut up.” Next he addressed the problem of black cultural identity. “We in the West were made to hate Africa and to hate Africans.” West Indians in Britain, he said, “don’t want to accept their origin; they have no origin, they have no identity . . . they want to be Englishmen.” The same process of identity confusion occurred among African Americans. “By skillfully making us hate Africa . . . our color became a chain. It became a prison.” An appreciation of black culture would liberate blacks to advocate their own interests.

Finally, he returned to the concept of a two-stage African revolution—first gradual reform, then revolution. The same social process, he implied, might be at work in the United States. “The Black Muslim movement was one of the main ingredients in the civil rights struggle,” he claimed, remarkably, without referencing the massive evidence to the contrary. “[Whites] should say thank you for Martin Luther King, because Martin Luther King has held Negroes in check up to recently. But he’s losing his grip; he’s losing his control.”

For Malcolm, the strategic pursuit of Pan-African and Third World empowerment meant addressing new constituencies who looked to him for inspiration and leadership. South Asians and West Indians who experienced ethnic and religious discrimination in the English working-class town of Smethwick, for example, contacted him to solicit his support. The BBC, which at that time was filming a documentary on Smethwick, followed Malcolm around with a camera crew—although it was unsuccessful in its attempts to arrange a meeting between Malcolm and the right-wing Conservative Party member Peter Griffiths, who represented Smethwick’s parliamentary seat. After meeting with local minority leaders, Malcolm determined that town authorities were buying up vacant houses and selling them only to whites, thus restricting what houses were available for Asians and blacks. At a press conference in nearby Birmingham, he denounced the schemes to limit home sales and rentals in the town to non-Europeans. “I have heard that the blacks of Smethwick are being treated in the same way as the Negroes were treated in Birmingham, Alabama—like Hitler treated the Jews,” he charged. This was inflammatory enough, but as so often he took the argument even further, toward a call for violent revolution. “If colored people here continue to be oppressed,” he warned, “it will start off a bloody battle.”

A major national debate erupted, with the BBC roundly condemned for assisting Malcolm’s investigations. Even the Sun, at that time a liberal newspaper, editorialized that Malcolm’s visit had been a “deplorable mistake.” Cedric Taylor, the chairman of the Standing Conference of West Indian Organizations for the Birmingham district, condemned his visit. “Conditions here are entirely different from Alabama,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter. The West Indians in his town, he judged, were “not the sort of people who would want to follow Malcolm X.ʺ

Before leaving the UK, Malcolm was interviewed by a correspondent for the liberal South African newspaper Sunday Express. His rhetoric grew even more heated, as he urged blacks in Angola and South Africa to employ violence “all the way. . . . I don’t give the [South African] blacks credit in any way . . . for restraining themselves or confining themselves to ground rules that limit the scope of their activity.” He dismissed the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Chief Albert Luthuli as “just another Martin Luther King, used to keep the oppressed people in check.” To Malcolm, South Africa’s “real leaders” were Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress and Robert Sobukwe, founder of the Pan-African Congress. He then entertained the possibility of the OAAU taking up the cause of Australian aborigines. “Just as racism has become an international thing, the fight against it is also becoming international. . . . [Racism’s] victims were