“I’ve told how debating was a weekly event there, at the Norfolk prison colony. My reading had my mind like steam under pressure… ONCE MY FEET GOT WET, I WAS GONE ON DEBATING. Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I’d track down and study everything I could find on it. I’d put myself in my opponents’ place, and decide how I’d try to win if I had the other side; I’d figure a way to knock down all those points.”
-The Autobiography of Malcolm X
More than any other African American leader of his era, Malcolm X used public debates to confront whites, advance and defend his own views, and challenge competing civil rights organizations, representatives and tactics. Between March 1960 and December 1964, he engaged in more than twenty formal debates and participated in numerous panels and interviews in which he was pitted against his fellow panelists (and frequently the moderator as well).(1) Even Malcolm X’s individual speech appearances, which were often oppositional in character and quite specific in their refutation of claims and positions advanced by others, may best be viewed as moments in a larger debate involving non-proximate adversaries (Branham, 1994, p. 2).
Malcolm X was a brilliant debater, adept at dismantling the positions of his opponents, converting their arguments to his own advantage and, most importantly, casting the issues of dispute in utter and compelling clarity. He effectively challenged assumptions regarding goals and tactics of the struggle for human rights that had been taken for granted by many of his opponents and listeners. “Within a few years” of his introduction to debate in Norfolk Prison Colony, writes George Breitman, “he was to become the most respected debater in the country, taking on one and all – politicians, college professors, journalists, anyone – black or white, bold enough to meet him” (1965, p. 5). Yet despite their importance to his public advocacy, the debates of Malcolm X have received little scholarly attention. Few of his debates were recorded or transcribed; fewer still have been published. Current anthologies of Malcolm X’s speeches include no complete texts of his debates. No comprehensive listing of the dates, opponents and topics for his debates has previously been available. The blizzard of biographies and critical studies of Malcolm X that have appeared in the decades since his death has produced isolated anecdotes of his debates, but not a single sustained analysis of his debate career or the reasons for the extraordinary emphasis he placed upon debating in his public appeals.
For Malcolm X, debate was a unique and valuable form of public address. His use of debate was a deliberate rhetorical choice, through which he believed that his positions might be advanced most persuasively to the largest possible audience (Branham, 1995). He confronted highly educated and sometimes nationally recognized adversaries in a format that accorded him relatively equal standing and some assurance that his views would receive consideration and response. Occurring in a period of apparent consensus on the means and ends of the civil rights movement, the public debates of Malcolm X effectively shattered the myth of Black unanimity and enacted the confrontation and resistance that formed the basis of his appeal.
Excerpted from Robert J. Branham’s article “‘I was gone on debating’: Malcolm X’s prison debates and public confrontations.”
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