He said, “My friends, Islam is the religion taught by all of the prophets: Noah, Lot, Abraham, Moses, and even Jesus. In his debate at Yale Law School, Malcolm X proposed Islam as a solution to the country and world’s ills. Malcolm decried America’s “great loss of prestige” in the world despite the “advice of her expert advisors,” and noted the decline of British global influence: “when the sun rises, we can hardly find the British Empire.” He noted the oversized influence the American president exerts upon the world, noting that America’s “president is almost like a ‘god,’ for he has in his hands almost every other country on this earth” and thus the “eyes of even the foreign nations are turned toward the American elections” as they too must know “what type of man will be the next ‘god.’” If there was to be a savior, he asked, would such a man of God “be someone from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Howard, or Tuskegee?” White or black? Theologian or preacher? Who best to deliver the world from “such propaganda, mass lies, mass suspicion, mass confusion, mass dissatisfaction, mass unrest, mass hatreds…and the ingredients for such mass bloodshed.” Malcolm stated his purpose for speaking at Yale Law School directly: “We have accepted your invitation to come here to Yale University Law School this evening to let you know first-hand why 20 million so-called Negroes cannot integrate with white America, why white America, after 100 years of religious hypocrisy and political trickery will never accept us as first-class citizens here.” Malcolm appealed for African-Americans to be given the “right to hold their heads up, and to live in dignity like other human beings.” Long before intersectionality was a buzzword, he traced how racism drove and shaped postcolonial conflicts in Congo, Algeria, South Africa, China, Cuba, and Panama.Īt Yale Law, speaking to future foreign policy makers and legislators, Malcolm assailed America for its failure on the domestic and global stage to solve the race problem, and blamed this failure on western diplomats, learned politicians, theologians, legal experts, sociologists, and civil rights leaders. While Herb would argue for pushing change through litigation, legislation, and registration, Malcolm would call for reparations, land, and a return to the soul. But we’re going to be respectful of each other.” In our current anti-intellectual moment marked by vapid vitriol and toxic rage, such an expression of solidarity with an adversary seems counter-intuitive and strange. You’re going to be the State Department, and I’m going to be the War Department. After looking under all the stalls to make sure no one was listening, he said, “You hit ‘em high, and I’ll hit ‘em low. Minutes before the debate began, Malcolm followed Herb into the men’s room to talk strategy. What united them, however, was that both men welcomed the presence of the opposition at their events – unimaginable in today’s highly partisan political circus. America is sick.” By chance, on that very same day, Vice-President Nixon spoke with a much smaller crowd on the New Haven Green about getting tough with dictators like Castro and Khrushchev “whose objective is to conquer the world by any means if necessary.” Separated by just a few blocks in geography, Malcolm’s call for the complete separation of the races and Nixon’s strong man capitalist politics were gulfs apart. When Malcolm took his place in the hallowed halls of Yale Law School before a standing-room-only audience on Oct 17th, 1960, he declared: “The western world is sick. Castro thought being situated in Harlem would help him convince black Americans to support the new Cuba and his plans for liberating Afro-Cubans from their oppression. Castro had agreed to move to the hotel uptown on Malcolm’s suggestion, after a spat about the bill at the Hotel Shelburne in midtown. In September 1960, the month before Malcolm came to speak at Yale Law School, Malcolm was rubbing elbows with Fidel Castro at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where Castro also met with Nikita Khrushchev, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Jawaharlal Nehru.
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