Malcolm X speaks in Detroit - February 1965 - Part Two

TITLE: Malcolm X speaks in Detroit - February 1965 - Part Two

AUTHOR: Malcolm X

SOURCE: Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library

PERMISSION: Educational use permitted.

‍

Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925. His given name was Malcolm Little, but he changed his surname in 1952 when he joined the Nation of Islam. A week before he was assassinated, and hours after his home was firebombed, Malcolm X gave the following speech in Detroit.

This audio recording of Malcolm X's full speech as been downloaded from the C. Eric Lincoln Collection of the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff LIbrary.

‍

Important timestamps are as follows:

59:23 - "In hating Africans, and hating the African, we ended up even hating ourselves without even realizing it. Because you can't hate the roots of a tree and not the tree. You can't hate your origins and not end up hating yourself."

1:06:20 - "Immediately everything was Peace Corps, Crossroads, we've got to help our African brothers. Pick up on that. Can't help us in Mississippi. Can't help us in Alabama or Detroit out here in Dearborn, where some real Ku Klux Klan live."

1:14:48 - "The masses of our people still have bad housing, bad schooling, and inferior jobs - jobs that don't compensate with sufficient salary for them to carry on their life in this world. So that the problem for the masses has gone absolutely unsolved."

1:19:05 - "But 1965 will be the longest and hottest and bloodiest year of them all. And it has to be, not because you want it to be or I want it to be or we want it to be, but because the conditions are still here."

1:25:56 - "We also formed a group known as the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which is designed to fight all the negative political, economic, and socia conditions that exist in our neighborhoods...One of our first programs is to take our problem out of the civil rights context and place it at the international level of human rights, so that the entire world can have a voice in our struggle. If we keep it at civil rights, then the only place we can turn for allies is within the domestic confines of America. But when you make it a human rights struggle, it becomes international. And then you can open the door for all types of advice and support from our brothers in Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere."

1:26:53 - "Our internal aim is to become immediatey involved in a mass voter registration drive. But we don't believe in voter registration without voter education."

1:28:39 - 1:30:49 - Ossie Davis eulogizing Malcolm X at X's funeral in Harlem.