In my last column, I offered some important thoughts from a landmark speech by Malcolm X. Here are some additional quotes from “The Ballot or the Bullet,” delivered on April 3, 1964 at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland.
Malcolm X warned his audience that neither political party had the interest of black people in mind. When you read his words, you get the feeling that not much has changed in the nearly 50 years that have passed since he spoke them:
“I’m no politician. I’m not even a student of politics. I’m not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I’m one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism. And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat, or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy; all we’ve seen is hypocrisy.”
On the black vote, I couldn’t say it any better:
“You’re the one who put the present Democratic administration in Washington DC. The whites were evenly divided. It was the fact that you threw 80 percent your votes behind the Democrats that put the Democrats in the White House. When you see this, you can see that the Negro vote is the key factor. And despite the fact that you are in a position to be the determining factor, what do you get out of it? The Democrats have been in Washington DC only because of the Negro vote. They’ve been down there four years, and after all other legislations they wanted to bring up ,they brought it up and gotten it out of the way, and now they bring up you. You put them first, and they put you last ‘cause you’re a chump, a political chump.”
He doesn’t stop there
“Anytime you throw your weight behind the political party that controls two-thirds of the government, and that party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election time, and you’re dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that Party, you’re not only a chump, but you’re a traitor to your race.”
Then he weighed in on voting rights:
“I was in Washington a couple weeks ago while the senators were filibustering, and I noticed in the back of the Senate a huge map, and on this map it showed the distribution of Negroes in America, and surprisingly the same senators that were involved in the filibuster were from the states where there were the most Negroes. Why were they filibustering the civil rights legislation? Because the civil rights legislation is supposed to guarantee voting rights to Negroes in those states, and those senators from those states know that if the Negroes in those states can vote, those senators are down the drain.”
Near the end of his speech he concluded the best strategy for change was to appeal to the United Nations
“We have injected ourselves into the civil rights struggle, and we intend to expand it from the level of civil rights to the level of human rights. As long as you’re fighting on the level of civil rights, you’re under Uncle Sam’s jurisdiction. You’re going to his court expecting him to correct the problem. He created the problem. He’s the criminal. You don’t take your case to the criminal; you take your criminal to court. When the government of South Africa began to trample upon the human rights of the people of South Africa, they were taken to the U.N.”
Not long after this historic speech the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed , banning discrimination based on race, gender and ethnicity. Malcolm X was killed February 21, 1965.
