3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

He summed up his speoch by doclaring that his organization, the Organization of
Afro-American Unity, believed that black people should no longer be victims. He wanted the
Ku Klux Klan to know that "bloodshed is a two-way street . . . dying is a two-way street,"
and "killing is a two-way street ." He concluded by evoking Shakespeare's Hamlet, who tried
to decide whether it was nobler "to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,' or
whether it was nobler "to take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them ."
Malcolm felt that Hamlet's soliloquy answered itself: fretting about whether one should use
slings and arrows could only bang suffeang. s e
Though many within the civil rights movement would disavow his involvement,
Malcolm X helped set the tone of protest, and dictated theory and tactics from the peaphery .
He advocated a kind of non-nonviolence, reflected in his praise of self-defense. But many
people, particularly in the mid-late 1960'x, heard his words not as an exhortation of self-
defense, but as a coded invitation to participate in aggression toward whites . That which did
not fit readily within the violent/nonviolent dichotomy, including Malcolm's insistence on
self-protection, was lost to a bifurcated view of not only the civil tights struggle but also
violence itself. Accordingly, a man like Jasper Brown, forced to protect himself, would
seem-to many whites, at least-to be less an American exercising his constitutional tight to
self-defense than a crazy black man threatening whites with a gun. Even more disturbing
than an individual acting alone would be those of blacks who heeded Malcolm's
advice: organizing to arm themselves for self-protection . One such group was the Deacons
for Defense and Justice.
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