Recommended Viewing (Really, Listening): Malcolm X, After the Bombing Speech

I hope you will take the time to check out this clip of Malcolm X's "After the Bombing" speech.  It's the last completed speech before his assassination.  It resonates a lot with today as he talks about the Harlem riots of the 60s in response to police abuse of power, and you can hear about Malcolm X's beliefs about violent action.  For me this speech is particularly important for our class in terms of what he says about the press and how "they psycho you."  Remembering our class definition of what it means to be a reader and a writer, that awareness that what we read affects and is affected by who we are, we can take especially to heart Malcolm X's caution:

When you begin to start thinking for yourself, you frighten them, and they try and block your getting to the public, for fear that if the public listens to you, then the public won't listen to them anymore. And they've got certain Negroes whom they have to keep blowing up in the papers to make them look like leaders. So that the people will keep on following them, no matter how many knocks they get on their heads following him. This is how the man does it, and if you don't wake up and find out how he does it, I tell you, they'll be building gas chambers and gas ovens pretty soon -- I don't mean those kind you've got at home in your kitchen.

We are constantly receiving stories, narratives, texts, and having self-awareness, what that text is trying to do to you, you can decide if and how you want to receive that narrative, what you want to do with it.      This is something that will serve you way beyond college.

This is the full speech from which I took the clip above.  To read the full text of the speech click here. (This website, Malcolm-x.org, is a remarkable resource for exploring the life and thought of Malcolm X).  After the Bombing Speech