Vol. 76/No. 7      February 20, 2012

Below is an excerpt from By Any Means Necessary, a book of speeches and interviews by Malcolm X from the last year of his life. The excerpt is from a speech Malcolm gave at the second rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, N.Y., July 5, 1964, shortly after the U.S. Congress adopted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Copyright © 1970 by Betty Shabazz and Pathfinder Press.

BY MALCOLM X  
On Thursday of this week, or I think it was Friday, there was a great hullabaloo made over the recent passage of the civil rights bill. On the front pages of all the newspapers the day after it was supposedly signed so that it was in effect, they had pictures of little black boys sitting in barbershop chairs letting white barbers cut their hair. And this was hailed as a great victory. Pick up on that.

In 1964, when oppressed people all over this earth are fighting for their place in the sun, the Negro in America is supposed to stand up and cheer because he can sit down and let a white man mess up his head.

At the same time that so much hullabaloo was being made over the passage of the civil rights bill, if you read closely between the lines, a little black boy in Georgia was found hung on a tree. A 1964 June lynching. Nothing was said in the paper, no hullabaloo was made over that. But here’s a little fourteen-year-old black boy in Georgia lynched, and to keep you and me from knowing what was taking place, they showed another picture of a little black boy letting a white man cut his hair.

This is the trickery that you and I are faced with every day in this society. They on the one hand try and show us how much progress we’re making. But if we look through all of that propaganda we find that our people are still being hung, they’re still disappearing, and no one is finding them, or no one is finding their murderers.

And at the same time also that so much hullabaloo was being made over this new civil rights legislation, a bill went into effect known as the no-knock law or stop-and-frisk law, which was an anti-Negro law. They make one law that’s outright against Negroes and make it appear that it is for our people, while at the same time they pass another bill that’s supposedly designed to give us some kind of equal rights. You know, sooner or later you and I are going to wake up and be fed up, and there’s going to be trouble. There’s got to be trouble.

While they were making so much hullabaloo again over the passage of these new civil rights bills or legislation, they could not deny the fact that all these new laws are aimed at the South. None of them are aimed at the North. Nothing in this legislation is designed to straighten out the situation that you and I are confronted with here in New York City. There’s nothing in the bill that will stop job discrimination in New York, that will stop housing discrimination in New York, that will stop educational discrimination in New York. There’s nothing in the bill that will stop the police from exercising police state tactics in New York. There’s nothing in the bill that touches on your and my problem here in New York City. Everything in the bill deals with our people in the South.

We are interested in our people in the South. But we have to question whether or not this bill, these laws, will help our people in the South when ten years ago the Supreme Court came up with a law called the desegregated school law, or something to that effect, which hasn’t been enforced yet. And you and I would be children, we would be boys, we would be mental midgets, if we let the white man even make us think that some new laws were going to be enforced in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Texas while the Supreme Court law has not yet been enforced in New York City. You’d be out of your mind to even look happy. And you’d be way out of your mind to make them think that you’re happy.

No, when you and I know that these political tricks are being pulled, if you and I don’t let it be known that we know it, why, they’ll keep on with their skullduggery and their trickery, and they will think that the problem is being solved when actually they’re only compounding it and making it worse. If they can’t enforce laws that are laid down by the Supreme Court, which is the land’s highest court, do you think that they can enforce some new laws in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia? And if they can’t enforce these new laws, then why do they pretend? Why come up with the bill? What is all this hullabaloo for? It’s nothing but twentieth-century trickery, some more of the same old legislative trickery that you and I and our mothers and fathers have been handed for the past fifty, sixty, or one hundred years.

Prior to one hundred years ago, they didn’t need tricks. They had chains. And they needed the chains because you and I hadn’t yet been brainwashed thoroughly enough to submit to their brutal acts of violence submissively. Prior to a hundred years ago, you had men like Nat Turner, that Brother Benjamin was talking about, and others, Toussaint L’Ouverture. None of them would submit to slavery. They’d fight back by any means necessary. And it was only after the spirit of the black man was completely broken and his desire to be a man was completely destroyed, then they had to use different tricks. They just took the physical chains from his ankles and put them on his mind.

And from then on, the type of slavery that you and I have been experiencing, we’ve been kept in it, year in and year out, by a change of tricks. Never do they change our condition or the slavery. They only change the tricks. This is done from the White House right on down to the plantation boss in Alabama and Mississippi. Right on down from the White House you are tricked, right on down to the plantation boss in Mississippi and Alabama. There is no difference between the plantation boss in Mississippi and the plantation boss in Washington, D.C. Both of them are plantation bosses. What you experience in this country is one huge plantation system, the only difference now being that the President is the plantation boss.
 
 
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