BY STEVE CLARK  
Malcolm X seized every occasion to talk with young people. All over the world, it is young people "who are actually involving themselves in the struggle to eliminate oppression and exploitation," he said in January 1965, responding to a question from a young socialist leader in the United States.

They "are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist. And here in this country," he emphasized, "it has been my observation that when you get into a conversation on racism and discrimination and segregation, you will find young people more incensed over it--they feel more filled with an urge to eliminate it."

This conviction about the receptivity of youth to a revolutionary message runs throughout the four talks and the interview presented in this expanded second edition of Malcolm X Talks to Young People. This new edition includes material by Malcolm never before in print, a 1966 tribute to the revolutionary leader, as well as an expanded display of photographs. It is being produced together with a first-ever Spanish-language edition, entitled Malcolm X habla a la juventud, which is being released simultaneously by Pathfinder Press and by Casa Editora Abril, the publishing house of the Union of Young Communists in Cuba. Malcolm X Talks to Young People was first published in 1965 as a Young Socialist pamphlet, and then enlarged into a book in 1991.

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, a Baptist minister, was a follower of Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. His mother was originally from the Caribbean nation of Grenada. When Malcolm was six, after his family had moved to Lansing, Michigan, his father was murdered by a racist gang.

As a teenager Malcolm lived in Boston and New York, where he got involved in petty crime. In 1946 he was arrested and convicted on burglary charges, spending six years in a Massachusetts state prison. It was while behind bars that Malcolm began reading voraciously--world history, philosophy, language, science, literature, whatever he could find in the prison library. And it was there that he developed the attributes--confidence in his own self-worth, the discipline for hard work and concentrated study--that were the foundation stones of his later transformation into a revolutionary political leader.

Malcolm’s conversion to the Nation of Islam while in jail was not a political act, nor simply a religious one, in the way those terms are normally understood. It was the particular road along which he pulled his life back together, and became Malcolm X, after living for several years as a street hustler and small-time criminal. In his autobiography, he recounts unflinchingly "how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, to save me from being what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave, or, if still alive, a flint-hard, bitter, thirty-seven-year-old convict in some penitentiary, or insane asylum."

After being paroled in 1952, Malcolm was soon appointed by Nation leader Elijah Muhammad as one of its ministers, taking the name Malcolm X. He later served as editor of the Nation’s newspaper, its national spokesman, and head of its largest unit, New York City’s Mosque no. 7 in Harlem. By the opening of the 1960s, Malcolm was politically drawn more and more toward the rising struggles by Blacks and other oppressed peoples in the United States and around the world. He used his platforms in Harlem and Black neighborhoods across the country, as well as on dozens of college campuses, to denounce the policies of the U.S. government both at home and abroad. He campaigned against every manifestation of anti-Black racism and was outspoken in condemning the pillage and oppression of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America for the profit and power of the U.S. and other imperialist regimes.

"The black revolution is sweeping Asia, is sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America," Malcolm said in a November 1963 talk to a predominantly Black audience in Detroit. "The Cuban Revolution--that’s a revolution," he continued. "They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia, revolution is in Africa, and the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. How do you think he’ll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is?"  
 
Seeks ‘militant action’
By 1962 it was becoming more and more noticeable that Malcolm was straining against the narrow perspectives of the Nation of Islam, a bourgeois nationalist organization with a leadership bent on finding a separate economic niche for itself within the U.S. capitalist system. He described these growing tensions in a New Year’s Day 1965 talk to a group of high-school-age civil rights militants from McComb, Mississippi, which is included in this book. The Nation’s hierarchy, Malcolm said, blocked any initiatives by him or others to carry out "militant action, uncompromising action." In April 1962, for example, Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm to call off street actions he was organizing in Los Angeles to protest the killing of Nation member Ronald Stokes and the wounding of six other Muslims by city cops.

The conflicts that led to Malcolm being forced out of the Nation of Islam came to a head in 1963. In April Malcolm was called by Elijah Muhammad to his winter home in Phoenix, Arizona. There Malcolm learned from the Nation leader himself the truth of rumors then spreading in the organization that Muhammad had engaged in sexual relations with a number of young women belonging to the Nation of Islam then working as staff members. Several of them had become pregnant, and Muhammad had taken advantage of his authority in the Nation to have them subjected to humiliating internal trials and suspended from membership for "fornication."

Coming on top of Malcolm’s growing political clashes with the Nation hierarchy, the discovery of this corrupt and hypocritical behavior marked a turning point. "I felt the movement was dragging its feet in many areas," Malcolm said in a January 1965 interview with the Young Socialist magazine, printed here. "It didn’t involve itself in the civil or civic or political struggles our people were confronted by. All it did was stress the importance of moral reformation--don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t permit fornication and adultery. When I found that the hierarchy itself wasn’t practicing what it preached, it was clear that this part of its program was bankrupt."  
 
Break with Nation of Islam
In early March 1964, Malcolm announced his decision to break with the Nation of Islam. He and his collaborators initially organized themselves as the Muslim Mosque, Inc. But as Malcolm explained to the youth from McComb, Mississippi, he soon recognized that "there was a problem confronting our people in this country that had nothing to do with religion and went above and beyond religion"--a problem that, because of its magnitude, "a religious organization couldn’t attack." So in June he initiated the formation of "another group that had nothing to do with religion whatsoever"--the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), open to all Blacks committed to Malcolm’s revolutionary social and political trajectory.

During the final months of 1964 and early 1965, Malcolm won an increasingly wide hearing, not just across the United States but also on several continents among youth and other militants of various races and beliefs. He made two extensive trips to Africa and the Middle East, several short trips to Europe, and had scheduled more. One of the four talks in this collection was given in Africa and two in the United Kingdom.

The U.S. government took notice of the increased standing Malcolm was winning worldwide among radicalizing youth and workers. Previously classified government records released in the late 1970s confirm that the FBI had carried out systematic surveillance of him starting in 1953, shortly after he became a minister of the Nation of Islam. But this spying and harassment intensified, both in the United States and during his trips abroad, after Malcolm’s break with the Nation and founding of the OAAU. Moreover, declassified records of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro) document how the FBI used agents provocateurs to exacerbate murderous conflicts between groups involved in the Black liberation movement.  
 
‘Victims of Americanism’
During the last year of his life, Malcolm X spoke out more and more directly about the capitalist roots of racism, of exploitation, and of imperialist oppression. Malcolm never gave an inch to U.S. patriotism, let alone imperialist nationalism. Blacks in the United States are "the victims of Americanism," he said in his May 1964 talk at the University of Ghana, printed here.

Malcolm was an uncompromising opponent of the Democratic and Republican parties--the twin parties of racism and capitalist exploitation. Malcolm urged the McComb, Mississippi, youth not to "run around ... trying to make friends with somebody who’s depriving you of your rights. They’re not your friends. No, they’re your enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and you’ll get your freedom. And after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you."

In 1964 Malcolm refused to endorse or campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon Baines Johnson against Republican Barry Goldwater. "The Democratic Party is responsible for the racism that exists in this country, along with the Republican Party," he said in the Young Socialist interview. "The leading racists in this country are Democrats. Goldwater isn’t the leading racist--he’s a racist but not the leading racist.... If you check, whenever any kind of legislation is suggested to mitigate the injustices that Negroes suffer in this country, you will find that the people who line up against it are members of Lyndon B. Johnson’s party." It was also the Johnson administration, Malcolm often pointed out, that was presiding over the U.S. war against the people of Vietnam and the slaughter of liberation fighters and villagers in the Congo. The revolutionary integrity underlying this political intransigence in the 1964 elections set Malcolm apart from, and helped earn him the enmity of, just about every other leader of prominent Black rights organizations or the trade unions, as well as the vast majority of those who called themselves radicals, Socialists, or Communists.

Malcolm X stretched out his hand to revolutionaries and freedom fighters in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere. In December 1964 Malcolm, who had demonstratively welcomed Fidel Castro to Harlem four years earlier, invited Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara to speak before an OAAU meeting in Harlem. At the last minute Guevara was unable to attend but sent "the warm salutations of the Cuban people" to the meeting in a message that Malcolm insisted on reading himself from the platform.

On February 21, 1965--ten days after the final talk in this collection, presented at the London School of Economics--Malcolm X was assassinated. He was shot as he began speaking to an OAAU meeting at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. The following year three men, all members or supporters of the Nation of Islam, were convicted of the murder and each given a twenty-year-to-life sentence. One of them, the gunman arrested at the scene, had said from the outset that the two men convicted along with him were not guilty. In 1977 he signed affidavits stating that four other Nation supporters were the ones involved with him, but the case has never been reopened.  
 
‘Change this miserable condition’
As the interview and talks in these pages show, Malcolm came to recognize that what ties fighters against oppression and exploitation together is their shared revolutionary convictions, commitment, and deeds, not the color of their skin. When he spoke in December 1964 at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, Malcolm ended his presentation, printed here, by saying: "The young generation of whites, Blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it.... And I for one will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth."

In the United States, Malcolm X spoke on three occasions--in April and May 1964, and again in January 1965--to large meetings of the Militant Labor Forum in New York City organized by supporters of the revolutionary socialist newsweekly, The Militant. This was a departure for Malcolm. Even while still a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, he had spoken on campuses to audiences that were not predominantly Afro-American. Malcolm’s decision to accept the invitation to speak at the Militant Labor Forum, however, was the first time he had agreed to appear on the platform of a meeting outside Harlem or the Black community in any city.

Malcolm told the Young Socialist Alliance leaders who interviewed him a story about a conversation he had had with the Algerian ambassador to Ghana during a trip to Africa in May. The Algerian, Malcolm said, was "a revolutionary in the true sense of the word (and has his credentials as such for having carried on a successful revolution against oppression in his country)."

Malcolm said when he told the Algerian ambassador "that my political, social, and economic philosophy was Black nationalism, he asked me very frankly: Well, where did that leave him? Because he was white. He was an African, but he was Algerian, and to all appearances, he was a white man.... So he showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary.

"So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of Black nationalism," Malcolm said. "Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black nationalism? And if you notice, I haven’t been using the expression for several months. But I still would be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of the Black people in this country."

Malcolm X Talks to Young People closes with a tribute to this revolutionary leader by Jack Barnes, one of the young socialists who conducted that interview. The tribute was presented shortly after Malcolm’s assassination at a March 1965 memorial meeting hosted by the Militant Labor Forum at its hall in Lower Manhattan. Barnes, who was then national chairman of the Young Socialist Alliance, had met with Malcolm a second time a few days after the January 1965 interview, so Malcolm could approve the final text. An article by Barnes describing the interview and discussions, published in the Militant newspaper on the one-year anniversary of Malcolm’s death, has been added to this new edition.
 

Malcolm’s December 1964 presentation as part of a debate at Oxford University, which was televised to an audience of millions by the British Broadcasting Corporation, appears in full for the first time ever in this 2002 edition. We would like to thank Jan Carew for supplying a recording of Malcolm’s entire presentation; only the concluding portion had previously been available.

The May 1964 speech by Malcolm X at the University of Ghana first appeared in the book Where To, Black Man? An American Negro’s African Diary by Ed Smith (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967). Smith provided additional information about the Ghana trip, as did Alice Windom, who helped schedule Malcolm’s activities during his week-long visit there. Among the highlights were his meetings with the country’s parliament and Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, as well as a farewell dinner in Malcolm’s honor hosted by the Cuban embassy. Alice Windom supplied photographs from the Ghana trip, as well.
 

"One of the first things I think young people ... should learn how to do is see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself," Malcolm told the McComb students at the opening of 1965. "Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself."

This book shows how hard Malcolm X worked to do just that--to help young people step outside the bourgeois influences that surround them and come to decisions for themselves. What’s more, it demonstrates how important an element working with young people was in Malcolm’s own decision to commit his life to building an internationalist revolutionary movement in the United States, one that could join in the fight worldwide to wipe racism, exploitation, and oppression off the face of the earth.

September 2002  
 
 
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