Malcolm X: “Message to the Grass Roots”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Malcolm X's “Message to the Grass Roots” was delivered in Detroit in a Christian church and addressed to an audience of African Americans, many of whom came to hear him reflect on the results of the nonviolent movement dedicated to secure the freedom and equality of his people. He was famous for his direct, blunt statements: “America's problem is us,” he tells his audience, emphasizing that African Americans cannot begin to act properly until they confront racism by recognizing that to be black is to be rejected in the United States. This uncompromising view is what led him to reject his last name, calling it a slave name because it was a name forced upon his family by whites, just as the word Negro, in his view, was a white invention. What hinders African Americans, he reiterates, is their blackness. Any other differences between blacks and blacks or blacks and whites hardly matter. Life for African Americans would not get better, he implies, until they came to realize that their blackness is their bond, which should cause them to unite.

Blacks did not like to acknowledge their history as slaves, he argues, and yet the crucial fact is that they were brought to this country in bondage by its very founders. (There were, in fact, no slaves on the Mayflower and only a handful of African American servants through the first decades of the 1600s. But he was perhaps making a broader point that slavery existed at the beginning of settlement in North America.) Slavery, in other words, was built into the origins of the nation. His uncompromising conclusion was that the white man is the enemy. Only time would tell whether he was wrong, he concedes. What he knew, however, was history, which suggested that only when people of color unite could they solve their problems—as they attempted to do at the Bandung Conference, a 1955 meeting of delegates from twenty-nine Asian and African states in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss the effects of colonialism and cold war tensions on the East. But this unity was achieved only by excluding whites from participating. No matter their places of origin, all those at the Bandung Conference understood that white Europeans had colonized them and that whites had always been a factor in destroying the unity of people of color. Until the “dark man” realized that he belonged to a family of dark peoples oppressed by whites, the dark man would never be free.

What is more, Malcolm X points out in this speech that freedom would probably have to be obtained through revolution, which meant violence, as it did in the American, French, and Russian revolutions. Blacks would have to bleed for their freedom instead of bleeding for the white man's wars. Black churches, he concludes, were being bombed in the South, and yet blacks were afraid to shed blood in their own cause.

Like so many of Malcolm X's speeches, this one challenges his audience to take action by critically examining the black community's failings. African Americans have as much right to defend themselves as other nations have, including the new (at that time) African states. Countries such as Kenya and Algeria obtained their independence through violent revolution. Malcolm X argues that they are a model for black militancy. Rather than accept the terms and ideology of their colonial oppressors, these new African countries were determined to establish their own governments. African Americans should expect to do nothing less.

From this militant position, Malcolm goes on to reject the civil rights revolution. He implies that its goals are too modest, for it is not good enough to be able to coexist on the same level with whites in public spaces. Without land and control over their own lives in the form of their own government, blacks would never be self-determining. Thus he equates “Negro” with a white-dominated sense of “revolution,” one that does not challenge the white power structure or result in fundamental freedoms for blacks. Whites knew that blacks would never be free if they did not follow the worldwide revolutions occurring in Asia and Latin America. Malcolm X contends that blacks wanted exactly what whites wanted when making revolutions: a sense of nationality and unity.

But as much as Malcolm X attacked white supremacy, he also attacked traditional black civil rights leaders—those who counseled people not to become involved in black nationalism. These conventional leaders were afraid of revolution and were attempting to instill the same fears in Malcolm X's audience. In effect, in this speech he accuses the mainstream civil rights leadership of being house slaves, those members of the slave community who were closest to whites and imbibed white values. He refers to these black collaborators with the white power structure as “Uncle Toms,” the character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin whose name became synonymous with black subservience to whites.

As a Black Muslim, Malcolm X preached that Christianity was a slave religion emphasizing suffering and the need to bleed rather than rebel. Christian black civil rights leaders, he says, have capitulated to whites, preaching that it is virtuous to turn the other cheek. Instead, Malcolm X argues for the superiority of the Muslim religion, which teaches self-defense and striking out for one's rights. Those black Christian preachers who taught nonviolence were traitors to the black cause. Indeed, they have been groomed by whites to stifle the strivings of the black community just as slave masters housed and indoctrinated their house slaves into the values of white supremacy. Malcolm X suggests that such leaders actually prided themselves on their influence with white people. In effect, they were the dupes of whites.

At this point, Malcolm engages in a full assault on the history of white oppression and the black collaboration in slavery as well as the role Christianity has played in subduing African Americans. By calling his audience “sheep,” he also extends blame to blacks as a whole. They have not fought for their freedom and independence. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., is treated as a failure with a bankrupt organization, who did not succeed as a leader in areas of the South where he campaigned for desegregation. Other civil rights leaders are seen as fallen idols in Malcolm X's scornful analysis. Only when violence and the threat of more violence caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy did the white power structure begin to take the black revolution seriously. But as usual, that revolution was co-opted, infiltrated by several white leaders, so that in the end revolutionary action became impossible.

Malcolm X explains this adulterating of black revolution in a vivid metaphor:

It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream; you make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it'll put you to sleep. This is what they did with the march on Washington.

He concludes by suggesting that the 1963 March on Washington that King led was nothing more than a spectacle, a show, a movie with black leaders ultimately playing the part the “white power structure” had organized for them. He questions the black leadership's level of commitment, and he challenges his audience to make history the only way it can be made: by exercising their power at the grass roots.