Clarence Lang

Black people are leading the charge of finishing the work of reconstruction, right?

So this is in some ways the unfinished business of the late 19th century after the Civil War.

And that movement is largely guided by strategically, if not always philosophically, the notion of nonviolent mass direct action.

And so that's at its high tide.

And Malcolm, as he emerges as a national figure, becomes intentionally or otherwise a bit of a foil to the so-called nonviolent civil rights movement.

And so he does two things in this context.

He's one, speaking very boldly in a very unapologetic way against the contradictions of racism, white racism in the United States.

And in doing so, he's also positioning himself as a critic

of the mainstream ideas of the civil rights movement, a movement that's rooted in notions of liberal integrationism, which is very different from the standpoint that he's coming from as a black nationalist, where the idea is not to integrate, the idea is for black people to build their own sources of institutional strength

and collective interest, right, apart from that.

So he becomes a foil.

That's fueled in great deal by the media, right, because he and Martin Luther King Jr.

are very easy to kind of situate as contrast.

But it also grows out of the fact that there are some fundamental political differences in terms of the political perspective that he's coming from and what, at the time at least, was the mainstream ethos of the civil rights movement.

He's very quick with it.

And this is in part the sort of, if you will, the education that he got in prison in debate, right?

Or, and this is the sort of the background that's coming even from his hustling days where you had to be quicker on your feet in terms of action and speech because things could happen to you.

But I would like to make this point, right?

So even though he's a critic of the mainstream civil rights movement, there are some inconveniences that he's encountering.

So because he's such a tireless organizer and because he's having an impact well beyond the membership of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm is interacting with other black activists