BY SAM MANUEL  
Readers of all ages and generations will find the new, expanded edition of Malcolm X Talks to Young People published by Pathfinder Press an important contribution to their political education. Speaking on a number of different platforms, Malcolm urges young people to "see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself." If you do that, he says, "you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself."

The book adds material to Pathfinder’s earlier edition of the title, first published in 1965. It includes for the first time the full text of Malcolm’s presentation to a debate at Oxford University in December 1964--an event that was televised to an audience of millions by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Also newly incorporated is "Two interviews," a 1966 Militant article by Jack Barnes, who the previous year had helped to conduct the Young Socialist interview that is printed here (see excerpts on facing page.)

An expanded collection of photographs provides a graphic presentation of major political events that had an impact on Malcolm’s thinking--among them the struggle against white minority rule in southern Africa, the independence struggle in the Congo, the victorious Algerian revolution, the socialist revolution in Cuba, and the heroic fight of the people of Vietnam against U.S. imperialism.

The footnoted references substantially aid in making the time period accessible to readers of all generations. Editor Steve Clark has added a preface that provides a political biography of the revolutionary leader.

Pathfinder launched the new book at the same time as Casa Editora Abril, the publishing house of the Union of Young Communists in Cuba, released Malcolm X habla a la juventud, the Spanish-language edition. The two publishers are organizing a combined presentation of the two editions at February’s international book fair in Havana.

The Spanish-language book will provide useful insights about U.S. imperialism to workers and youth throughout Latin America who have begun to fight back against the deepening social crisis there--a crisis wrought by the plunder of the continent by the imperialists, who use the mechanism of the unpayable foreign debt to suck out the wealth created by working people. It will also enable them to see the potential for allies in struggle right in the bowels of the U.S. beast, and the need and possibilities of revolutionary change in the United States.

Young people in Latin America are not the only ones who will find Malcolm X Talks to Young People to be a valuable political resource. The book is an effective handbook for all those--whatever their age or national origin--who seek to follow Malcolm’s example and join in the worldwide fight for revolutionary change.  
 
Confidence in young fighters
In the last years of his political life Malcolm took every opportunity to talk with young fighters in this country and around the world. His confidence in the new generation of young Blacks in the south, raised in the heat of the battle to overthrow Jim Crow segregation--and in young fighters from Vietnam to Algeria--runs through the pages of this book.

When asked if he would take time to meet and talk with a group of young civil rights activists from McComb, Mississippi, he answered that it would be "the greatest honor that I ever had experienced."

Malcolm met the 37 high school-age youth at the offices of the Organization of Afro-American Unity--the organization he helped to found--in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa. They had come to New York City on an eight-day trip sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). McComb was where the committee had begun its voter registration project in 1961, which had included Mississippi’s first sit-in to desegregate public facilities.

For the voter registration efforts, SNCC mobilized thousands of civil rights activists, many of them college students from the north. During the 1964 effort, known as "Freedom Summer," racists had targeted McComb, bombing or setting fire to more than 15 churches, homes, and businesses there.

Malcolm looked to young people around the globe to play a leadership role. "It is the teenagers abroad, all over the world, who are actually involving themselves in the struggle to eliminate oppression and exploitation," he said in the Young Socialist interview. "And here in this country, it has been my own observation that when you get into a conversation on racism and discrimination and segregation, you will find young people are more incensed over it--they feel more filled with an urge to eliminate it."

Like many Blacks in this country, Malcolm began his political activity in the fight against racism. He quickly learned that an effective fight against racism cannot be fought within the confines of the United States. This uncompromising stance inoculated him against any drop of American patriotism.

"I’m not an American," he told a large crowd at the University of Ghana, who broke into applause. "I didn’t go there of my own free choice. If I were an American there would be no problem, there’d be no need for legislation or civil rights or anything else.... I’m one of the victims of Americanism."

He stressed the unified character of the fight of Blacks in this country against racial oppression and the struggle of the African nations against colonial and imperialist exploitation. Speaking at the London School of Economics in February 1965, Malcolm explained that "from ‘54 to ‘64 was the era of an emerging Africa, an independent Africa. And the impact of those independent African nations upon the civil rights struggle in the United States was tremendous."  
 
Image of Africa
"The American racists know they can rule the African in America, the African-American in America, only as long as we have a negative image of ourselves. So they keep us with a negative image of Africa. And they know that the day that the image of Africa is changed from negative to positive the attitude of twenty-two million Africans in America will also change."

"In my opinion," he told the McComb students, "the greatest accomplishment that was made in the struggle of the Black man in America in 1964 was the successful linking together of our problem with the African problem, or making our problem a world problem. Because now, whenever anything happens to you in Mississippi, it’s not just a case of just somebody in Alabama getting indignant. With the attention of the African nations drawn toward Mississippi there are repercussions all over the world.

"I wanted to point this out to you, because it is important for you to know that when you’re in Mississippi you’re not alone," he said.

In keeping with his thoroughgoing internationalism, Malcolm placed the fight for Black rights in the United States in the context of the worldwide fight against imperialism from Mississippi to the Congo to Vietnam. In speech after speech he opposed the military aggression of the United States, Belgium, France, and the other imperialist powers, strongly condemning the assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and the subsequent barbaric assault on the Congo organized by Washington.

Speaking of the imperialist-backed Moise Tshombe to the McComb students, he said, "And here Tshombe is a killer, a murderer--of Patrice Lumumba. They put him over the government in Léopoldville ...saying he’s the only one that can restore peace to the Congo. Imagine this, he’s a murderer. It’s like saying Jesse James is the only one can run the bank."

"Probably there is no better example of criminal activity against an oppressed people than the role the U.S. has been playing in the Congo," he said in the Young Socialist interview. "You can’t overlook the fact that Tshombe gets his money from the U.S. The money to hire mercenaries--these paid killers imported from South Africa--comes from the United States. The pilots that fly these planes have been trained by the U.S. The bombs...come from the U.S."

Malcolm X was an early opponent of the U.S. war against the people of Vietnam. He saw the fight in Mississippi, in the Congo, and in Vietnam as fronts in the same battle.

In the London School of Economics speech he predicted that the Western powers would be "bogged down in the Congo" the same as in South Vietnam. He explained that "The French were deeply entrenched in Vietnam for a hundred years or so. They had the best weapons of warfare, a highly mechanized army, everything that you would need. And the guerrillas come out of the rice paddies with nothing but sneakers on and a rifle and a bowl of rice.... You know what they did in Dien Bien Phu. They ran the French out of there."

Among the questions Malcolm addressed with the visiting students was the tactic of nonviolence.

"If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I’ll be nonviolent," he said. "If they make the White Citizens’ Council nonviolent, I’ll be nonviolent.... I don’t think it’s fair to tell our people to be nonviolent unless someone is out there making the Klan and the Citizen’s Council and these other groups be nonviolent," Malcolm said.

"I have never said that Negroes should initiate acts of aggression against whites, but where the government fails to protect the Negro he is entitled to do it himself. He is within his rights," Malcolm argued pointedly in the Oxford debate. "I have found the only white elements who do not want this advice given to undefensive Blacks are the racist liberals."

Malcolm also addressed the need for Blacks to break from political allegiance to the major capitalist parties, including the Democratic Party, which had gained the electoral support of the majority of the Black voting population. Heading into the 1964 elections Blacks in Mississippi who had been excluded from the Democrats’ segregated delegate selection process held an alternative integrated delegates’ conference. Forming the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), they challenged the "regular" delegates from Mississippi.

As millions watched MFDP leader Fannie Lou Hamer’s address to the convention credentials committee on television, President Lyndon Johnson had the press cut away to an "emergency" speech of his own.

In a compromise the MFDP was offered two token seats with no voting rights. Its delegation declined the deal.

The MFDP announced its own candidates for the November elections and conducted a Freedom Election open to all Mississippi residents, registered or not. After the election the MFDP and other civil rights organizations demanded that Congress refuse to seat the winners in the election in Mississippi, from which Black voters had been excluded.

Malcolm supported this demand and insisted that Democratic Party leaders make their stance known publicly before the January 4 Congressional session.  
 
Democrats in NY just as responsible
But, he said to the young civil rights activists, "I must point out that those who are depriving you of your rights in Mississippi aren’t all in Mississippi. You got these New York Democrats who are just as much responsible. The mayor of this city is a Democrat. The senator, you’ve heard of him, Robert Kennedy, he’s a Democrat. The president of the country is a Democrat. The vice president is a Democrat. Now don’t you tell me anything about a Democrat in Mississippi who is depriving you of your rights, when the power of the Democratic Party is in Washington, D.C., New York, and in Chicago."

Malcolm X Talks to Young People ends with excerpts from a talk by Barnes on behalf of the Young Socialist Alliance at a memorial meeting organized by the Militant Labor Forum in 1965, two weeks after Malcolm’s assassination. On several occasions the revolutionary leader had spoken at meetings sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum.

Barnes spoke for a generation of revolutionaries and many others to come who were shaped by Malcolm’s influence. "Our job," said Barnes, "is to teach the revolutionary youth of this country to tell the difference between the nationalism of the oppressed and the nationalism of the oppressor, to teach them to differentiate the forces of liberation from the forces of the exploiters; to teach them to hear the voices of revolution regardless of the forms they take; to teach them to differentiate between the self-defense of the victim and violence of the aggressor; to teach them to refuse to give an inch to white liberalism and to reach out to Malcolm’s heirs, the vanguard of the ghetto, as brothers and comrades."

Malcolm’s ability to do that springs from every page of Malcolm X Talks To Young People.
 
 
Related articles:
Malolm X: ‘youth more filled with urge to eliminate oppression’  
 
 
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