On February 15, 1965, five days before his assassination, Malcolm X delivered one of his most explosive speeches. His home had just been firebombed. He openly accused Elijah Muhammad, denounced collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, and laid out a radical geopolitical vision: the struggle of African Americans was part of a global revolution against an international Western power structure. This speech marked a major strategic break and announced the international dimension of the Black struggle.
On February 15, 1965, Malcolm X announces a global Black revolution
Many of you probably know that tonight we were supposed to present a program that we believed would benefit the struggle of our people in this country. But because of events beyond our control, we think it is better to postpone the presentation of the program we had planned until a later date.
Sunday morning, around three o’clock, someone threw bombs into my house.
Normally, I would not get excited over a few bombs, but the people who threw them did not just throw them into rooms where there was no one, but even into rooms where three of my daughters sleep. A six-year-old daughter, a four-year-old daughter, and a two-year-old daughter. And since I am absolutely certain that the people who threw the bombs knew my house well enough to know where everyone slept, I cannot bring myself to the point where I could, in any way, be merciful or conciliatory toward anyone capable of stooping so low. Especially when I heard on the news today that Joseph, a brother whom I found in a garbage can in Detroit in 1952 (that’s where I found him), said that I had bombed my own house.
You see, that does not surprise me, because I know that ever since many of us left the Muslim movement, its intelligence and morality have gone bankrupt. Its intelligence and morality have gone bankrupt.
And now they are using the same tactics used by the Ku Klux Klan. When the Klan bombs your church, they say you did it yourself. When they bomb a synagogue, they say the Jews bombed their own synagogue. That is a Klan tactic. And I am going to tell you why the Black Muslim movement is now using against Black people the same tactics that, until now, had been the exclusive method of the Ku Klux Klan.
I also want to point out that I am not speaking about the Muslims to make white people happy. Because I do not believe in allowing anyone to use me against someone else. I am telling you these things because I have reached a point where I think Black people in this country need to know what is going on. And I am speaking about an organization I helped build, an organization I helped organize. I know its characteristics. I know its potential. I know its patterns of behavior. I know what it can do and what it cannot do. One of the things it can do is bomb your house and try to kill your baby.
Before getting into the subject, I would also like to point out that, as many of you know, last Tuesday, or last weekend, I was invited to address the first congress of the Council of African Organizations in London. They held a four-day congress on the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th, and they invited me to deliver the closing address and inform delegates from various African organizations located across Europe about the struggle of the Black man in this country in his quest for human rights and human dignity. And in connection with that invitation, I had also received an invitation to visit Paris from the African American community there, which was sponsoring a gathering in collaboration with the African community. I was supposed to go there Tuesday as well to speak to them and inform them about the state of development, or lack of development, of our progress in this country regarding human rights.
As many of you know, when I arrived in Paris, the man told me I could not enter; one man. A Frenchman. They gave me no explanation other than this: they… we have our own… They would not even allow me to telephone the American embassy. And they tried to imply that the American embassy was behind it, which; I told them I did not know de Gaulle had become a satellite of Lyndon B. Johnson. I knew Kennedy had made satellites out of Khrushchev and half of these other countries (and Great Britain), but I did not think France was a satellite of the United States.
Well, that made them angry because they like to be independent, you know; or pretend to be independent. But they would not let me in. They would not let me call the American embassy.
And later, when I returned to London; and by the way, when I got back to London, there were about twenty delegates representing some twenty different African organizations waiting at the airport, prepared to raise hell if anything had happened. As it turned out, I re-entered England without incident and immediately contacted the brothers and sisters in Paris by telephone. And they indicated that they had encountered difficulties, first from communist trade union workers. Now note this carefully: communist trade union workers prevented them from renting their hall, and when they tried to secure another hall, the same communist group used its influence to stop them from getting that one as well.
Eventually, when they did get a hall, it became obvious that someone powerful enough had influence over the French government. And I might add that while I was being detained by French authorities, every time I made a request, before saying yes or no, they called the French Foreign Ministry. So they were taking orders from someone high up in the French Foreign Ministry who did not want me entering France. And there is a reason for that. I do not blame them, because (and I said this to the people over there), I said maybe my plane landed in the wrong country and I was really in South Africa. This cannot be Paris, this must be Johannesburg. And they turned red. And you know how red they can get. One of them was pink.
The same thing happened in England, as many of you probably read in the Sunday Times and the Tribune. There was great fear in England about me speaking to the West Indian community. And that is because England sees a very serious color problem developing, since many of our people are migrating there from the British West Indies. France, quietly (even though it is not said publicly), also sees a very serious color problem developing because of migration into France from the French West Indies. And along with these Black people coming into France from the French West Indies, others from the British West Indies going into England, plus Asians from Commonwealth territories and Africans from French Equatorial Africa into France and British possessions into Great Britain, there is a growing number of dark-skinned people increasing the Black population of France and Great Britain. And this deeply worries them; the only difference between there and here being that no dark-skinned people in France have ever tried to unite dark-skinned people together. Nor has that happened in England. So you can somewhat understand what they fear.
No effort had ever been made to unite the African American or Black American community with the West Indian community, and then unite both with the African community, and then unite them with the Asian community. That had never been done, either in England or in France.
But when I was in France in November for just a few days, I managed to bring together some African Americans living there, and they formed a branch of the OAAU, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. And as soon as they formed this branch, they started working together with African organizations and became a force to be reckoned with. And that is what the French government did not want.
The same thing in Great Britain. The West Indian community is very restless or rather, yes, restless and dissatisfied. And they too are trying to organize or find someone who can bring them together. And this has created tremendous fear and concern in England. And the effect of that is that it sometimes causes them to act in very foolish ways.
Now, to leave that for a moment, as you remember, when I was in Mecca in September, I wrote a letter that was published in the New York Times in which I stated that it was my intention, upon returning, to expose Elijah Muhammad as a religious fraud. That is what I wrote.
Now, while I was in Mecca among Muslims, I had the opportunity to meditate, reflect, and see things with great clarity; far greater clarity than I can see them here, tangled up in the confusion we constantly face. And I had decided, yes, that I was going to tell Black people in the Western Hemisphere, whom I had played a major role in misleading into Elijah Muhammad’s hands, exactly what kind of man he was and what he was doing.
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Notes and references
- Malcolm X, “There’s a Worldwide Revolution Going On”, speech delivered in New York, February 15, 1965. Full transcript preserved by the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University.
- Malcolm X, Letter from Mecca published in the New York Times, April 1964 (written after his pilgrimage to Mecca).
- Organization of Afro-American Unity, founding program, 1964, archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library).
- Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam (1934–1975). See: Nation of Islam Papers, University of Illinois Chicago.
- Ku Klux Klan activities in Alabama during the Selma campaign (1965). See: U.S. Senate, Hearings on the Ku Klux Klan, 1965.
- Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 presidential campaign speeches; promises related to fighting the Klan. LBJ Presidential Library archives (Austin, Texas).
- Selma to Montgomery marches, March 1965, Alabama. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior.
