In his “Message to the Grassroots” speech, Malcolm X made a point of delineating the differences between Black revolutionaries and the leaders he saw heading the Civil Rights Movement revolution.
Malcolm thought Civil Rights Movement leaders were headed down the wrong path: not trying to truly alter Black lives, just rework them.
“A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise,” he told the audience at his November 10, 1963, speech at the King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan.
“Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way,” he said. “And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, ‘I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.’ No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Reverend Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.”
Radical statements like these made Malcolm X iconic and it’s the reason he remains a pinpoint for activists who want to empower Black communities. Malcolm’s “Message to the Grassroots” speech is where he talked about the difference between the “house negro” and the “field negro,” and where he discussed the importance of the Bandung Conference and the alliances it established between Asian and African nations.
To commemorate the 60th anniversary, activists and organizers will come together at the same King Solomon Baptist Church (6100 14th Street in Detroit) this Friday, November 10, from 6 to 9 p.m. to discuss the famous speech and its continuing impact.
Speakers including Luke Tripp of Detroit’s historic League of Revolutionary Black Workers; Zayid Muhammad of Brooklyn’s Malcolm X Commemoration Committee (MXCC); Don Freeman of the Revolutionary Action Movement; scholar-activist Akinyele Umoja, the author of “We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement”; reparations movement lawyer Nkechi Taifa; and lawyer-scholar Charles Simmons, will join Rev. Charles E. Williams II, pastor of King Solomon Church, to talk about the imprint Malcolm’s speech made on the concept of Black nationalism.
On Saturday, November 11, at 5 p.m., the MXCC will present a special, live virtual conversation with William Sales, professor and author of “From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-America Unity.” The discussion will be carried on MXCC’s Facebook and YouTube channels.
“Malcolm must be appreciated as a paradigm shifter,” MXCC’s Muhammad told the AmNews. “He was the revolutionary voice of the Black radical tradition who almost single-handedly forced a shift within the so-called Civil Rights Movement. He laid down the gauntlet to the movement––particularly to young people––not to be co-opted by philanthropy and denied the chance to place our struggle in the broader space of the global revolutionary struggles of those epic times.
“He must also be appreciated for the original Pan Africanist that he was, linking our particular struggle here in the U.S. to those struggles on the African continent. ‘Message to the Grassroots’ captured all of that. His call for a broad-based, united front at that moment is as timely today as it was 60 years ago as we face the prospects of an emerging fascism that seeks to undo the modest gains of that time.
“Finally, the ‘Message to the Grassroots’ foreshadowed the Pan African character of his organization, the Organization of Afro American Unity. It was to be an organization of Afrodescendants from all corners of the globe. He was especially concerned with uniting Afrodescendants from throughout the Western hemisphere. ‘Any person of African descent anywhere in the Western Hemisphere is an Afro American,’ he posed pointedly with the launch of the OAAU in New York on June 28 the following year.”