Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [85]
both strategic and unique. For, although the Negroes are deprived of most of their voting powers yet their diluted vote will swing the balance of power in the Presidential or any other election in this country. What would the role and the position of the Negro be if he had a full voting voice? . . . No wonder, then, the freedom or equal rights struggle of the Negro people is so greatly feared. . . . If the present leaders of the so-called American Negro don’t unite soon, and take a firm stand with positive steps designed to eliminate immediately the brutal atrocities that are being committed daily against our people, and, if the so-called Negro intelligentsia, intellectuals and educators won’t unite to help alter this nasty and most degrading situation; then the little man in the street will henceforth begin to take matters into his own hands.
This is an extraordinary passage on several levels. First, it anticipates the presidential election of 1960, which Kennedy narrowly won with 72 percent of the black vote. Years before the successful passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Malcolm appears to be linking the general empowerment of African Americans to the struggle for voter registration and education. Years before King, Malcolm understands the potential power of black bloc voting. Second, it proposes a broad-based coalition of civil rights organizations and other groups—presumably including the NOI—to address the collective problems of blacks. Third, the final sentence of the passage implies a stark warning to the Negro intelligentsia and middle class that the truly disadvantaged among the black masses might, out of impatience or despair, rise up violently. This theme would become the basis for Malcolm’s most famous address, his “Message to the Grassroots,” delivered in Detroit on November 10, 1963. The speech also anticipates his April 3, 1964, “Ballot or the Bullet” speech that envisioned a bloodless revolution led by blacks exercising their democratic voting rights.
What was truly paradoxical about the August 10, 1957, address was that the NOI was at this time strictly opposed to its members becoming involved in electoral politics, or even registering to vote. What remained paradoxical about the Nation was that, despite being organized to achieve power, its core philosophy was apolitical. Temple members were never encouraged to register in civil rights demonstrations or disrupt public places by engaging in civil disobedience. They were hardly “revolutionaries.” Perhaps one explanation is Congressman Powell’s growing influence on Malcolm. Abyssinian’s fifteen-thousand-strong voting bloc illustrated just how powerful a single black institution could be in the context of New York City’s fractious politics. Malcolm may have floated these ideas as part of an attempt to change Elijah Muhammad’s rigid antipolitics position.
Finally, the speech’s flowing construction displayed Malcolm’s growing rhetorical confidence. Although the talk was formally hosted by the Nation of Islam, its focus and style were profoundly secular: Malcolm no longer saw himself exclusively as an NOI minister, but someone who could speak to black politics.
The FBI of course monitored this and later lectures. One of its spies advised the Bureau that in September Malcolm had been named acting minister of Detroit’s temple. The informant added that “Little is well liked in Detroit and the meetings at which he spoke were well attended.” Two months on, Wilfred X Little would become head minister of Temple No. 1. The Amsterdam News also followed Malcolm’s Midwest road tour, reporting back that he had “been a great hit with the general Detroit Public.” His speaking venues in that city were “packed to capacity,” and his evangelical drive, the paper noted, had produced major gains for the Nation.
Malcolm’s high-impact speaking schedule kept members flowing in and media interest high, but it also battered his already weakened body. For a month after the Detroit lectures, he got by on only two to four hours of sleep each