Malcolm X Quotes
It's got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you're afraid to use an expression like that, you should get back in the cotton patch, you should get back in the alley.
X, Malcolm. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. Edited by George Breitman, Grove Press, 1965, p. 31.
This was the speech that started the "Black Power" Movement. The rally was held in a city park to Protest the murder just 10 days before of the civil rights activist, James Meredith. It also marked the break between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the nonviolent movement lead by Martin Luther King. Because of that, the speech received so much publicity that "Black Power" became a significant political term instantly.
This was one of the first calls for a slave strike in America.
This phrase was also to be used over 100 years later by Malcolm X. See {624101} and {38291}.
His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising.
In the late 1830's a revolutionary political movement of small tenant farmers grew in upper New York State. There was much violence and anti-renters were hanged and jailed. After a few years they elected 14 members of the state legislature and had their fellows pardoned:
The reference is to the recently-passed Fugitive Slave Law, which many New Englanders, including Emerson, detested and vowed not to uphold.
Malcolm X was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a popular figure during the civil rights movement. He is best known for his time spent as a vocal spokesman for the Nation of Islam.
