Somehow I haven’t found some of the Malcolm X speeches which I seem to remember hearing in the past. This one is rightly famous, though. His raw deconstruction is a thing of beauty. It should resonate with any movement: women’s, gays’, or any colonized people’s.

As an aside: I remember the scene in his biography in which he and his gang were on trial, and he felt that the real motivation for the gathered, angry white men was their resentful bewilderment at why a beautiful white woman would hang out with Malcolm’s gang. Long after reading this, when I was watching Little Richard being interviewed on Tom Snyder’s show, I remembered Malcolm. Describing the underlying motive for the segregation era, Richard excalimed, “It was all about the women!”