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Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest

“The Ballot or the Bullet”

by Carl Rollyson, PhD

Date: 1964

Author: Malcolm X

Genre: Speech

Summary Overview

Malcolm X’s speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” delivered on April 12, 1964, in Detroit, Michigan, is one of the provocative—and some would say inflammatory—speeches through which the man born Malcolm Little gained great fame in his own lifetime. In speeches such as this, Malcolm X created the persona of an angry black man, critical of mainstream civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X rejected the doctrine of nonviolence and the Christian tradition that inspired King and many of his followers. It seemed especially sinister to some that he advocated African American self-defense “by any means necessary” (a term he used in several speeches). While Malcolm X initially scorned the tactics of nonviolence and advocated self-defense in a revolutionary cause, at the same time—as is evident in his speech “The Ballot or the Bullet”—he was seeking ways to unite all African Americans in recognizing their oppression and urge them to create their own strong, self-governing communities.

Defining Moment

During the early 1960s, the African American civil rights movement began the process of moving in different directions. To the approach of the NAACP, using the court system to enforce equal rights and the peaceful, nonviolent philosophies and practices of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council were added an increasingly independent strand of the movement that, within a few years, would adopt the slogan “black power.” In general, the adherents of this segment of the movement were younger and, often, more politically radical.

Much was made of Malcolm X’s adherence to the theology of the Nation of Islam. Under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, the Black Muslims developed a religion that cast the white race as an evil oppressor of the black man. Integration of the races was deemed impossible, and therefore collaboration with whites was rejected because it could only abet the white power structure. The Nation of Islam, a separatist organization, was spurned by many—even within the black community—as outside the mainstream of American life and inimical to the dreams and ambitions of African Americans. It was in this context that Malcolm X made his appeal to black congregations. He did not minimize the theological differences between Black Muslims and Christian black leaders, but as in this speech, given at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and sponsored by the Congress on Racial Equality, he emphasized that as people of color African Americans could unite around a common experience of subjugation stemming from slavery. In other words, whatever might divide blacks in terms of religion and politics, the black nationalist movement held a set of principles that every African American could adopt.

Author Biography

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska. The family soon moved to Lansing, Michigan, where the six-year-old Malcolm’s father was killed in 1931—possibly murdered by members a local Ku Klux Klan group. A good student, Malcolm nevertheless got into trouble early and soon became involved with the numbers racket and drugs. It did not help that his mother was committed to a mental institution and that having lost both parents he was placed in foster care. Living with his sister failed to provide enough stability for the unruly teenager, and at the age of twenty-one he was sent to prison for burglary, larceny, breaking and entering, and carrying a firearm.

Prison life provided Malcolm with the time to reflect on his criminal behavior and absorb the teachings of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm came to see much of his lawbreaking as a response to a repressive white society, however he did not absolve himself of responsibility for his actions. Malcolm left prison with a new name, Malcolm X, jettisoning the last name he associated with his race’s slave heritage. He became a preacher for the Nation of Islam, which called upon African Americans to develop their own independence and not base their sense of self-worth on the dictates of the white power structure.

Although his rhetoric against whites could seem quite harsh, he could be hard on the black community and its leaders as well. His speeches bristle with dynamism that make change seem not merely desirable but inevitable. Not afraid to dramatize the consequences of racial strife, Malcolm X also called for African Americans to scrutinize their own collaboration in second-class citizenship. By noting just how far America had fallen short of its democratic ideals, he also drew the support of many white critics of society.

That Malcolm X eventually broke free from Elijah Muhammad, who had assumed leadership of the Nation of Islam in 1931, can be seen as an extension of his quest to develop a style of leadership entirely his own. His assassination on February 21, 1965, was viewed, in part, as the result of his unwillingness to submit to Elijah Muhammad’s authority.

Historical Document

So today, though Islam is my religious philosophy, my political, economic, and social philosophy is Black Nationalism.…If we bring up religion we’ll have differences…but when we come out here, we have a fight that’s common to all of us against an enemy who is common to all of us.

The political philosophy of Black Nationalism only means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community.…The time when white people can come in our community and get us to vote for them so that they can be our political leaders and tell us what to do and what not to do is long gone. By the same token, the time when that same white man, knowing that your eyes are too far open, can send another negro into the community and get you and me to support him so he can use him to lead us astray—those days are long gone too.

The political philosophy of Black Nationalism only means that if you and I are going to live in a Black community—and that’s where we’re going to live, ‘cause as soon as you move into one of their—soon as you move out of the Black community into their community, it’s mixed for a period of time, but they’re gone and you’re right there all by yourself again.…So the political philosophy of Black Nationalism only means that we will have to carry on a program, a political program, of re-education to open our people’s eyes, make us become more politically conscious, politically mature, and then we will—whenever we get ready to cast our ballot, that ballot will be—will be cast for a man of the community who has the good of the community of heart.

The economic philosophy of Black Nationalism only means that we should own and operate and control the economy of our community.…You can’t open up a black store in a white community. White men won’t even patronize you. And he’s not wrong. He’s got sense enough to look out for himself. You the one who don’t have sense enough to look out for yourself.…The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community. But you will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. No, you’re out of your mind.…

And you and I are in a double-track, because not only do we lose by taking our money someplace else and spending it, when we try and spend it in our own community we’re trapped because we haven’t had sense enough to set up stores and control the businesses of our community. The man who’s controlling the stores in our community is a man who doesn’t look like we do. He’s a man who doesn’t even live in the community. So you and I, even when we try and spend our money in the block where we live or the area where we live, we’re spending it with a man who, when the sun goes down, takes that basket full of money in another part of the town…

So our people not only have to be reeducated to the importance of supporting black business, but the black man himself has to be made aware of the importance of going into business. And once you and I go into business, we own and operate at least the businesses in our community. What we will be doing is developing a situation wherein we will actually be able to create employment for the people in the community.…

We’re all in the same bag, in the same boat. We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation—all of them from the same enemy. The government has failed us; you can’t deny that. Anytime you live in the twentieth century, 1964, and you walkin’ around here singing “We Shall Overcome,” the government has failed us.

This is part of what’s wrong with you—you do too much singing. Today it’s time to stop singing and start swinging. You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him to become the heavyweight champion of the world; swinging helped him become the heavyweight champion.…

And once we see that all these other sources to which we’ve turned have failed, we stop turning to them and turn to ourselves.…Before we can get a self-help program started we have to have a self-help philosophy.

Black Nationalism is a self-help philosophy. What’s so good about it? You can stay right in the church where you are and still take Black Nationalism as your philosophy. You can stay in any kind of civic organization that you belong to and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. You can be an atheist and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. This is a philosophy that eliminates the necessity for division and argument. ‘Cause if you’re black you should be thinking black, and if you are black and you not thinking black at this late date, well I’m sorry for you.…

As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action. They’ll have you sitting in everywhere. It’s not so good to refer to what you’re going to do as a “sit-in.” That right there castrates you. Right there it brings you down.…Well you and I been sitting long enough, and it’s time today for us to start doing some standing, and some fighting to back that up.

When we look…at other parts of this earth upon which we live, we find that black, brown, red, and yellow people in Africa and Asia are getting their independence. They’re not getting it by singing “We Shall Overcome.” No, they’re getting it through nationalism.…And it will take black nationalism…to bring about the freedom of 22 million Afro-Americans here in this country where we have suffered colonialism for the past 400 years.

America is just as much a colonial power as England ever was. America is just as much a colonial power as France ever was. In fact, America is more so a colonial power than they because she’s a hypocritical colonial power behind it.…What do you call second class citizenship? Why, that’s colonization.…They try and make you think they set you free by calling you a second class citizen. No, you’re nothing but a 20th-century slave.

Just as it took nationalism…to remove colonialism from Asia and Africa, it’ll take black nationalism today to remove colonialism from the backs and the minds of 22 million Afro-Americans here in this country.

And 1964 looks like it might be the year of the ballot or the bullet.…

Because Negroes have listened to the trickery, and the lies, and the false promises of the white man now for too long. And they’re fed up. They’ve become disenchanted. They’ve become disillusioned. They’ve become dissatisfied, and all of this has built up frustrations in the black community that makes the black community throughout America today more explosive than all of the atomic bombs the Russians can ever invent.…

And in 1964 this seems to be the year, because what can the white man use now to fool us after he put down that march on Washington? And you see all through that now. He tricked you, had you marching down to Washington. Yes, had you marching back and forth between the feet of a dead man named Lincoln and another dead man named George Washington singing “We Shall Overcome.” He made a chump out of you.…

And in 1964 you’ll see this young black man, this new generation asking for the ballot or the bullet. That old Uncle Tom action is outdated. The young generation don’t want to hear anything about the odds are against us. What do we care about odds?

When this country here was first being founded there were 13 colonies.…The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation, so some of them stood up and said “liberty or death.” Though I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan, the white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot, and George Washington, wasn’t nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.

Liberty or death was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful when the sun—the sun would never set on it. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire “liberty or death.”

And here you have 22 million Afro-American black people today catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw.…I’m here to tell you in case you don’t know it—that you got a new…generation of black people in this country who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds.…

This is the year when all of the white politicians are going to come into the Negro community. You never see them until election time. You can’t find them until election time. They’re going to come in with false promises, and as they make these false promises they’re gonna feed our frustrations and this will only serve to make matters worse.…

I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy.…We don’t see any American dream; we’ve experienced only the American nightmare. We haven’t benefited from America’s democracy; we’ve only suffered from America’s hypocrisy. And the generation that’s coming up now can see it and are not afraid to say it.…

If you go to jail, so what? If you black, you were born in jail. If you black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South.…

You’re in a position to determine who will go to the White House and who will stay in the dog house. You’re the one who has that power. You can keep Johnson in Washington D.C., or you can send him back to his Texas cotton patch. You’re the one who sent Kennedy to Washington. You’re the one who put the present Democratic Administration in Washington D.C. The whites were evenly divided. It was the fact that you threw 80 percent of your votes behind the Democrats that put the Democrats in the White House.

When you see this, you can see that the Negro vote is the key factor. And despite the fact that you are in a position…to be the determining factor, what do you get out of it? The Democrats have been in Washington D.C. only because of the Negro vote. They’ve been down there four years, and…all other legislation they wanted to bring up they brought it up and gotten it out of the way, and now they bring up you. And now, they bring up you. You put them first, and they put you last, ‘cause you’re a chump, a political chump.…

I was in Washington a couple weeks ago while the Senators were filibustering, and I noticed in the back of the Senate a huge map, and on this map it showed the distribution of Negroes in America, and surprisingly the same Senators that were involved in the filibuster were from the states where there were the most Negroes. Why were they filibustering the civil rights legislation? Because the civil rights legislation is supposed to guarantee voting rights to Negroes in those states, and those senators from those states know that if the Negroes in those states can vote, those senators are down the drain.…

These Northern Democrats are in cahoots with the Southern Democrats. They’re playing a giant con game, a political con game. You know how it goes.…One of them comes to you and makes believe he’s for you, and he’s in cahoots with the other one that’s not for you. Why? Because neither one of them is for you, but they got to make you go with one of them or the other.…

Now you take your choice. You going to choose a Northern dog or a Southern dog? Because either dog you choose I guarantee you you’ll still be in the dog house.

This is why I say it’s the ballot or the bullet. It’s liberty or it’s death.…A revolution is bloody, but America is in a unique position. She’s the only country in history in a position actually to become involved in a blood-less revolution.…All she’s got to do is give the black man in this country everything that’s due him—everything.

I hope that the white man can see this, ‘cause if he don’t see it you’re finished. If you don’t see it you’re going to be coming—you’re going to become involved in some action in which you don’t have a chance. And we don’t care anything about your atomic bomb;…it’s useless because other countries have atomic bombs. When two or three different countries have atomic bombs, nobody can use them, so it means that the white man today is without a weapon.…If you want some action, you gotta come on down to Earth. And there’s more black people on Earth than there are white people on Earth.…

The strategy of the white man has always been divide and conquer. He keeps us divided in order to conquer us. He tells you I’m for separation and you’re for integration to keep us fighting with each other. No, I’m not for separation and you’re not for integration. What you and I is for is freedom. Only you think that integration will get you freedom, I think separation will get me freedom. We both got the same objective. We just got different ways of getting at it.…

But when you go to a church and you see the pastor of that church with a philosophy and a program that’s designed to bring black people together and elevate black people—join that church.…If you see where the NAACP is preaching and practicing that which is designed to make Black Nationalism materialize—join the NAACP. Join any kind of organization—civic, religious, fraternal, political, or otherwise that’s based on lifting the black man up and making him master of his own community.…

Anything that I can ever do, at any time, to work with anybody in any kind of program that is sincerely designed to eliminate the political, the economic, and the social evils that confront all of our people, in Detroit and elsewhere, all they got to do is give me a telephone call and I’ll be on the next jet right on into the city.

Glossary

Cassius Clay: American boxer who later converted to Islam and adopted the name Muhammad Ali

filibustering: a way of obstructing a bill in a legislature by indefinitely prolonging debate

Johnson: President Lyndon B. Johnson

Kennedy: President John F. Kennedy

NAACP: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights organization

Patrick Henry: American Revolutionary, most famous for his statement “Give my Liberty, or give me Death!”

Uncle Tom: a central character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; a character symbolic of black subservience to whites

Document Analysis

Malcolm X begins this speech by clarifying that although he is, by religious belief, a Muslim, his political ideology is black nationalism which meant, above all, self-government—taking control of the black community’s resources. Malcolm X believed that a new era in African American experience had emerged, so that the black community would no longer defer to white leadership or to traditional civil rights leaders. In effect, he accuses the previous generation of black leaders of duplicity, seeming to act on behalf of African Americans while in fact serving only the interests of the dominant Caucasian culture.

In this speech he clearly suggests that by understanding how the black community has been serving interests of the white master class, they could ultimately achieve independence and equality through peaceful means (the ballot). But this could be achieved only through reeducation and control over both the politics and the economy of black communities. Malcolm X discusses the lack of black business owners in black communities and insists that blacks have to own their means of production, as Black Muslims had done in their own communities.

All African Americans were subject to the same fate: a government that had failed them. This failure was more than a political and economic catastrophe. When he speaks here of “social degradation,” he is describing a people who have been deprived of their self-respect. They could regain a sense of self-worth only by asserting authority over their own communities. Malcolm X references Cassius Clay, soon to take the name Muhammad Ali, a convert to the Nation of Islam. Like Clay, the African American community, Malcolm X says, should start “swinging,” that is, behave aggressively. Malcolm’s direct and even harsh words are a wake-up call, demanding that his listeners understand the failure of black leaders and the black community’s collaboration in its own oppression.

Malcolm X then criticizes the program of nonviolence led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Sit-ins, which often lead to arrests and police beatings of black demonstrators, are ineffective in Malcolm X’s opinion. He argues that despite their differences, member of the black community should be “thinking black”— holding a view of the common interests of African Americans in. To him the absence of a black nationalist mentality meant that his people would continue to be oppressed. A nonviolent philosophy of passive resistance, of sitting down, was to him a form of emasculation, depriving black men of their manhood and the black nation of its energy and conviction.

Referring to black independence movements around the world, Malcolm X notes that none have been achieved through nonviolent resistance, by singing or sitting in. Even though he suggests in this speech and in earlier public talks that violence seemed to be the only way to attain independence, freedom, and equality, this speech marks a departure in indicating that blacks might yet achieve autonomy and self-respect by exercising the ballot (the vote). Frustration in the black community was so profound and had built to such a peak that an explosion was ready to erupt with the force of an atomic bomb.

At the same time, Malcolm X attacks King’s historic March on Washington. It was not the ethic of nonviolence that would prevail but rather the aroused militancy of a new generation of blacks with a combustible energy that would ignite the nation if its force were not reflected in a new government obtainable through the ballot. True revolutionaries, he says, are not daunted by the odds against them. Malcolm X concludes that this new generation understood that blacks have experienced not the American dream but the American “nightmare,” and this is why the old generation of black leaders and their white liberal masters could no longer take the African American community for granted.

Malcolm X argues that if blacks united and used their political power to elect the next president and made him accountable to their support, then the ballot, not the bullet, might ultimately benefit black people. But they had to realize that they could not count on northern Democrats, who had collaborated with southern Democrats in oppressing African Americans. He cautions that these same politicians had to realize that their old tactics would not work: They could not simply placate blacks. Whites had to understand that worldwide they were outnumbered by people of color and that acknowledging and enforcing equal rights for black people was mandatory. If African Americans united around the black nationalist agenda, the white strategy to divide and conquer the black community would not succeed. For his part, Malcolm X pledges to collaborate with every organization regardless of its religious and political principles so long as it works to “eliminate the political, the economic, and the social evils that confront all of our people.”

Essential Themes

As his public speeches show his appeal was not merely to audiences of Black Muslims or those who might wish to convert to the Nation of Islam but to African Americans of all creeds. Malcolm X presented himself as an alternative to the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and other ministers steeped in the Christian tradition. While Malcolm X initially scorned the tactics of nonviolence and advocated self-defense in a revolutionary cause, at the same time—as is evident in his speech “The Ballot or the Bullet”—he was seeking ways to unite all African Americans in recognizing their oppression and urge them to create their own strong, self-governing communities.

As discussed above, in this speech, Malcolm X moves away from an emphasis on violent revolution and toward the exercise of peaceful political power. This sudden and seemingly bold departure from his previous argument in favor of revolution is, in fact, signaled near the beginning of the speech when he suggests that the consciousness of the African American community has been altered and that a process of reeducation is under way.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

1 

Abernethy, Graeme. The Iconography of Malcolm X. (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2013).

2 

Assensoh, A. B.; Alex-Assensoh, Yvette M. Malcolm X and Africa. (Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2016).

3 

Conyers Jr., James L.; Smallwood, Andrew P., eds. Malcolm X: A Historical Reader. (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2008).

4 

Goldman, Peter. The Death and Life of Malcolm X (2nd ed.). (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Rollyson, Carl. "“The Ballot Or The Bullet”." Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest, edited by Aaron Gulyas, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=DDProtest_0071.
APA 7th
Rollyson, C. (2017). “The Ballot or the Bullet”. In A. Gulyas (Ed.), Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Rollyson, Carl. "“The Ballot Or The Bullet”." Edited by Aaron Gulyas. Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.