American Quarterly

Fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition.

—Junior Murvin, “Police and Thieves”

On February 16, 1965, Malcolm X gave an address at the Corn Hill Methodist Episcopal Church in Rochester, New York. In his address, Malcolm insisted to his “brothers and sisters” that they see their struggle in the United States beyond a civil rights paradigm and link it to the African revolutions being waged against imperialism. He argued that the racial oppression and economic exploitation that Blacks faced in the US were not only “an American problem but a human problem. A problem for humanity.”¹ He urged the crowd to connect the specific issues they faced in their communities to the trials and tribulations of popular classes throughout the Third World. As Nikhil Pal Singh observes, “He would soon begin to advance the important proposition that the concerns of U.S. blacks could not be met within the framework of [End Page 181] American law and civil rights, but required United Nations intervention under the banner of human rights.”²

Malcolm X’s speech gave the crowd a brief, but concise, history of the global rise of racism and capitalist exploitation. From his discussion of colonialism and the rise of Europe as a world power, the assassination of democratically elected Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and the repression of the Congolese people, to the development of the UN Charter on Human Rights, his speech contextualized the material conditions of Blacks in the US. From this international context, Malcolm followed by addressing the Harlem rebellion, the violence of policing, and the racist “image making” of the media.³ The Harlem rebellion of 1964 was a response to the murder of James Powell, a fifteen-year-old Black teenager, by an off-duty New York police officer. According to Malcolm, the US media labeled those involved in the rebellion as “hoodlums,” “criminals,” and “thieves” due to the destruction of private property. By producing Black criminality, Malcolm argued, the US media made everyone in the Black community a criminal. “And as soon as this impression is given,” he noted, “then it makes it possible, or paves the way to set up a police-type state in the Black community, getting the full approval of the white public when the police come in, use all kind of brutal measures to suppress Black people, crush their skulls, sic dogs on them, and things of that type.”⁴

What is often missing in these images of Black criminality, Malcolm suggested, was the peoples’ legitimate response to state violence by the hands of what James Baldwin in 1966 referred to as an occupying force.⁵ Along with the media’s criminalization of the protesters, Malcolm also called out sociologists for aiding and abetting in this process:

And instead of the sociologists analyzing it as it actually is, trying to understand it as it actually is, again they cover up the real issue, and they use the press to make it appear that these people are thieves, hoodlums. No! They are the victims of organized thievery, organized landlords who are nothing but thieves, merchants who are nothing but thieves, politicians who sit in the city hall and who are nothing but thieves in cahoots with the landlords and the merchants.⁶

According to Malcolm X, sociologists were playing “the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty,” to use the words of Frantz Fanon, when it came to analyzing the racism and economic exploitation of...