Malcolm X demanded equality before any reconciliation with whites

Evidence

One year earlier, Malcolm X had stood before a meeting of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) at a Methodist church in Cleveland. “How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours?” he asked, speaking of the Civil Rights Act, which was making its way through Congress at the time. “You haven’t even made progress, if what’s being given to you, you should have had already. That’s not progress.” Malcolm X and others remained skeptical of all the progress rhetoric. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1283 (#expands, via linked claim)

Like most African Americans, President Obama worries that honest and direct conversations about race might produce feelings of guilt or a sense of accusation. But here I think Malcolm X got it right: “Stop sweet talking them. Tell them how you really feel. Tell them what kind of hell you’ve been catching. And let him know that if he’s not ready to clean up his house—if he’s not ready to clean up his house, he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire and burn down.” In other words, we should remind America that chickens do, in fact, come home to roost. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 254 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

On March 26, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X came to watch the debate over the civil rights bill, meeting for the first and only known time at the US Capitol. Malcolm had recently been pushed out of the corrupted Nation of Islam. When he left Washington, he started warning American racists of the “ballot or the bullet.” At a church in Detroit on April 12, 1964, Malcolm offered his plan for the ballot instead of the bullet: going before the United Nations to charge the United States with violating the human rights of African Americans. “Now you tell me how can the plight of everybody on this Earth reach the halls of the United Nations,” Malcolm said, his voice rising, “and you have twenty-two million Afro-Americans whose churches are being bombed, whose little girls are being murdered, whose leaders are being shot down in broad daylight!” And America still had “the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world … with the blood of your and mine mothers and fathers on his hands—with the blood dripping down his jaws like a bloody-jawed wolf.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 970 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Malcolm X rejected civil rights gains as non-progress because they restored nothing new — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 1283; Christian-framed civil rights discourse mobilized America where Malcolm X could not — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 708; Malcolm X rejected both nonviolence and Christianity as paths to freedom — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 1045 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Malcolm X rejected civil rights gains as non-progress because they restored nothing new #expands (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1283
• Glaude endorses Malcolm X’s demand for unvarnished black speech over racial etiquette #corroborates (0.82) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 254
• Malcolm X proposed charging the US with human rights violations before the UN. #exemplifies (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 970
• Malcolm X rejected both nonviolence and Christianity as paths to freedom #expands (0.78) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1045
• Malcolm X made Islam nationally visible and converted public Islam to anti-racist theology #expands (0.78) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 187
• Malcolm X’s doctrinal shift softened his racial stance toward mainstream Sunnism. #complicates (0.75)
• Christian-framed civil rights discourse mobilized America where Malcolm X could not #qualifies (0.72) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 708
• Whites support racial equality in principle but resist the policies implementing it #qualifies (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3332