Malcolm X

"Some of you think you've come to a circus to watch a dancing bear," said the moderator cynically. Perhaps some had, but Malcolm X was no dancing bear, no exotic specimen of a Near-Eastern religion, no man to be clinically observed. Flanked by three docile bodyguards Malcolm baffled his Leverett House audience with an oddly-paced blend of demagoguery and rationality, haughtiness and humor, sham history and acute analysis, utopian policies and realpolitik.

"What is logical to the oppressor is not logical to the oppressed," said Malcolm, and Negroes and whites alike could sense his disenchantment, feel his frustration. "Politicians come into a Negro community, make promises and then turn their backs," said Malcolm, and the audience could understand. "America is no longer a dream but a nightmare; there is a new tendency for Negroes to grapple with realities," said Malcolm, and all could respond, could know that he was speaking of real wrongs.

Merciless in his depiction of existing injustice and the Negroes' sense of outrage, Malcolm's stimulus evoked a sympathetic response. "You expect me to stand up here and say what you'd say. But I'd be out of my mind," he said candidly, and the Harvard audience, expecting slogans but sensing frankness, listened.

Malcolm was frank, alluringly frank, about some things. He challenged the audience with his views of political bankrupcy, the need for violent self-defense by Negroes in the South, and the hypocrisy of white liberals. "White liberals don't want to bus their children into Negro schools, but they do, for fear they will be called racists. What we need is sincere communication with white men who see that integration won't work." Appealing alternately to the sympathy and honesty of his audience, Malcolm argued for racial separatism, non non-violence, a militant, realistic Negro youth.

But despite his demands for realism and his caustic description of "the problem," Malcolm began to bluster when he sought answers. Arguing that Negro voting power is responsible for placing the present administration in office, he urged Negroes to apply pressure, forgetting an earlier statement that "politics couldn't solve anything."

Negroes must stress human rights not civil rights and should take the issue not to Washington but to the U.N. "The only way that Uncle Sam can stop the African nations from coming here is to pass some civil rights legislation," he warned. It is a measure of his appeal that as he became more grandiose, no one laughed.

Describing the black nationalism of the newly created Moslem Mosque, Inc., Malcolm became vague. He ticked off categories, social, political, and economic, with the precision of an academican but he hardly sketched in the blanks. Black natonalism is for him less ideology than psychology, less a program than an attitude.

"Black nationalis must teach men to believe in themselves, so that they do not try to enter the white community and be white," Malcolm said. But, while denying the possibility of integration, Moslem Mosque, Inc., will participate this summer in civil-rights demonstrations in the South. Whether the new self-defense tactics will cause bloodshed is a question which troubles whites. But the role of a separatist group in the integration movement, and in this country is the question as yet unresolved by Malcolm X.