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lynch mobs, it was viewed as a potentially dangerous situation. “I’m for justice,” he told the reporters. “When the law fails to protect Negroes fromwhites’ attacks, then those Negroes should use arms, if necessary, to defend themselves.” Another reporter wanted to knowwhy MalcolmX always had to “stir up” blacks. It was a question that seemed almost ludicrous to Malcolm X, who spent most of his life among people whose poverty and misery had gone virtually unnoticed by much of white America. He wearily answered, “It takes no one to stir up the sociological dynamite that stems from unemployment, bad housing, and inferior education already in the ghettos. This explosively criminal condition has existed for so long it needs no fuse; it fuses itself.” Few of the reporters seemed to notice during the interview that Malcolm X had undergone a dramatic transformation in his thinking. He had initially become a public figure as a clergyman of the Nation of Islam, a black religious movement that emerged in the United States during the 1930s. Members of the Nation of Islam follow some teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, the seventh-century founder of

Scan here for an excerpt from Malcolm X’s May 21, 1964, press conference:

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C I V I L R I GH T S L E A D E R S : MA LCO L M X