Malcolm X: “The Ballot or the Bullet”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Much was made of Malcolm X's adherence to the theology of the Nation of Islam. Under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, the Black Muslims developed a religion that cast the white race as an evil oppressor of the black man. Integration of the races was deemed impossible, and therefore collaboration with whites was rejected because it could only abet the white power structure. The Nation of Islam, a separatist organization, was spurned by many—even within the black community—as outside the mainstream of American life and inimical to the dreams and ambitions of African Americans. It was in this context that Malcolm X made his appeal to black congregations. He did not minimize the theological differences between Black Muslims and Christian black leaders, but as in this speech, given at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and sponsored by the Congress on Racial Equality, he emphasized that as people of color African Americans could unite around a common experience of subjugation stemming from slavery. In other words, whatever might divide blacks in terms of religion and politics, the black nationalist movement held a set of principles that every African American could adopt.

Above all, black nationalism meant self-government—taking control of the black community's resources. Malcolm X believed that a new era in African American experience had emerged, so that the black community would no longer defer to white leadership or to “Negro” leaders working on behalf of the white power structure. The very term Negro was, in his view, a white invention, meant to segregate and dehumanize black people. In effect, he accuses the previous generation of black leaders of duplicity, seeming to act on behalf of African Americans while in fact serving only the interests of the dominant Caucasian culture.

Although Malcolm X often spoke in favor of bloody revolution, in this speech he clearly suggests that by banding together and understanding how the black community has heretofore served the interests of the white master class, African Americans could ultimately achieve independence and equality through peaceful means (the ballot). But this goal could be achieved only through reeducation and control over both the politics and the economy of black communities. He then describes a black community with businesses owned by others who did not live in the community. This paucity of black owners has led to powerlessness and poverty. Malcolm X insists that blacks have to own their means of production. This is what Black Muslims had done in their own communities, creating businesses that were black owned, that served the black community exclusively, and that invested the Nation of Islam's profits back into the community.

All African Americans were subject to the same fate: a government that had failed them. This failure was more than a political and economic catastrophe. When he speaks here of “social degradation,” he is describing a people who have been debased and deprived of their self-respect. They could regain a sense of self-worth only by asserting authority over their own communities. To do anything less would be to ignore reality, to be “out of your mind.” When he tells his audience “you do too much singing,” he is suggesting that it is time for action, not just words. African Americans have been passive. The new black hero at the time was Cassius Clay, soon to take the name Muhammad Ali, a convert to the Nation of Islam. Like Clay, the African American community, Malcolm X says, should start “swinging,” that is, behave aggressively. Malcolm's direct and even harsh words are a wake-up call, demanding that his listeners understand the failure of black leaders and the black community's collaboration in its own oppression. Until that complicity in evil is understood and acknowledged, the African American community could not progress toward liberty.

Malcolm X then takes direct aim at the philosophy and program of nonviolence led by Martin Luther King, Jr., a movement that urges blacks to “sit in” and sit down at restaurants and other public establishments that forbid blacks to enter or be served. These demonstrations in favor of integration, which often lead to arrests and police beatings of black demonstrators, are ineffective in Malcolm X's opinion. Black Muslims are a small minority within the black Christian community, but black nationalism, Malcolm X argues, is a self-help philosophy that all blacks can share. This is what he means by saying they all should be “thinking black.” To think black means to hold a view of the common interests of African Americans in controlling the economy and culture of their own communities. So self-evident was the need for black nationalism that Malcolm X states that he feels sorry for those who cannot accept it. To him the absence of a black nationalist mentality meant that his people would continue to be oppressed. A nonviolent philosophy of passive resistance, of sitting down, was to him a form of emasculation, depriving black men of their manhood and the black nation of its energy and conviction.

Referring to black independence movements around the world, Malcolm X notes that none have been achieved through nonviolent resistance, by singing or sitting in. African Americans were no different, in his view, from other colonial peoples. To be called a second-class citizen in America was the equivalent of being a colonial subject. The year 1964 was pivotal—a year in which blacks needed to make a choice: the ballot or the bullet. Even though he suggests in this speech and in earlier public talks that violence seemed to be the only way to attain independence, freedom, and equality, this speech marks a departure in indicating that blacks might yet achieve autonomy and self-respect by exercising the ballot (the vote). This sudden and seemingly bold departure from his previous argument in favor of revolution is, in fact, signaled near the beginning of the speech when he suggests that the consciousness of the African American community has been altered and that a process of reeducation is under way. Frustration in the black community was so profound and had built to such a peak that an explosion was ready to erupt with the force of an atomic bomb. This allusion to the cold war arms race—and to a period of history in which it seemed possible that America and the Soviet Union might blow each other up with their missiles and even destroy the world—was Malcolm X's bid to put black nationalism on a par with the major concern of his time.

At the same time, Malcolm X attacks King's historic March on Washington. It was not the ethic of nonviolence that would prevail but rather the aroused militancy of a new generation of blacks with a combustible energy that would ignite the nation if its force were not reflected in a new government obtainable through the ballot. To this new generation, it did not matter that whites outnumbered them or that they were part of the world's most powerful nation, which could crush them. This new generation of black militants could not be stopped any more than the white colonists who had attacked the British Empire could have been stopped. True revolutionaries, he says, are not daunted by the odds against them. Malcolm X concludes that this new generation understood that blacks have experienced not the American dream but the American “nightmare,” and this is why the old generation of black leaders and their white liberal masters could no longer take the African American community for granted.

Malcolm X argues that if blacks united and used their political power to elect the next president and made him accountable to their support, then the ballot, not the bullet, might ultimately benefit black people. But they had to realize that they could not count on northern Democrats, who had collaborated with southern Democrats in oppressing African Americans. He cautions that these same politicians had to realize that their old tactics would not work: They could not simply placate blacks. Whites had to understand that worldwide they were outnumbered by people of color and that acknowledging and enforcing equal rights for black people was mandatory. If African Americans united around the black nationalist agenda, the white strategy to divide and conquer the black community would not succeed. For his part, Malcolm X pledges to collaborate with every organization regardless of its religious and political principles so long as it works to “eliminate the political, the economic, and the social evils that confront all of our people.”