Sunday, November 10, 1963: 'Message to the Grass Roots'

Considered to be one of the top hundred American speeches of the 20th century, Malcolm X's address unified many of the strands of black nationalism, Pan-Africanism and third-world revolutionary thought that had been emerging in his ideas for years. ... He claimed that a revolution centered on nonviolent activism was not revolutionary at all: "Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise." ... Ultimately, giving such a speech in Detroit, the center of labor activity and black working-class radicalism in the 1960s, opened Malcolm X to an entirely new audience from that of the Nation of Islam.

     --- From "The Portable Malcolm X Reader" (Manning Marable and Garrett Felber, 2013): @

     -- June 1963 photo from Corbis Images

* Transcript (from TeachingAmericanHistory.org): @

* Audio (from thespeechsite.com): @

* "Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements" (1965): @

* "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" (Manning Marable, 2011): @ and @

* "The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X" (Robert Terrill, 2010): @

* MalcolmX.com: @
* The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University: @
* "African American Political Thought: Confrontation vs. Compromise, from 1945 to the Present" (2003): @

* "Say It Loud! Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity" (2010): @

* "Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit" (Angela D. Dillard, 2007): @

* "Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit" (Suzanne E. Smith, 2001): @ 

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