Customer Reviews

Wisdom of Malcolm X

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This is a collection of Malcolm X's earliest speeches before he broke away from Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam. The speeches are very inflammatory but there is much wisdom in some of what he says, particularly the part about blacks being relegated to inferior housing, education and jobs.

I definately do not agree with much of he said back then, but I like listenting to him. He had a way of articulating the pains and frustrations of blacks like no other. There are communications professors who to this day study Malcolm X's speeches. Most who listen to him will not agree with much of what he says, but there is wide consensus that he was a highly effective public speaker. He had such a way with words that he was hard to simply write off and ignore.

Malcolm X never went to toastmasters or had any other formal training in public speaking. He was a self-taught man who had less than a high school education. His only education was from the school of hard knocks, yet he would put most public speakers of today to shame.

As far as I can tell, being somewhat of a "Malcolmologist," this appears to be a speech recorded around August of 1963 in Harlem. As the previous poster noted, this is indeed rather inflammatory. He talks about white children being born "deformed or dead" as God's punishment for their treatment of Black people, and this is one of the milder lines! He does make some interesting comments about why ghetto conditions are the way they are ("The vicious cycle of Ignorance, poverty, and death").

Basically, this shows the kind of thing Malcolm preached before his leaving Elijah Muhammad and making more reasoned statements and anaysis of race relations. So on one level, this is an interesting artifact of an early example of Malcolm X thought. I would, however, not recommend this for listeners who are inclined to take this kind of message literally or who are very sensitive.

It must be considered that the conditions Black people faced at that time would make it inevitable that some people would respond with this level of bitterness and hatred and that not everyone would be inclined to go the route of Martin Luther King, so it's also interesting for sociological reasons.