The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Worldwide, as Malcolm X saw it, white people were panicked that rising incomes in the Third World were leading to rapid population growth, thence to power, thence to revolution. In a speech he gave before a mostly white audience at a forum sponsored by the socialist newspaper The Militant, he treated rights and revolution as part of a seamless whole. “Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee,” he said. “Revolutions are never fought by turning the other cheek. Revolutions are never based upon love-your-enemy and pray-for-those-who-spitefully-use-you. And revolutions are never waged singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Revolutions are based upon bloodshed.” This was not necessarily meant to be a racist doctrine. Malcolm X urged sympathetic whites to turn the civil rights struggle into a struggle for human rights, which “opens the door for all of our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia, who have their independence, to come to our rescue.” Malcolm X made that speech a week after his only meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr. The two bumped into each other in the U.S. Senate while attending the debate on the civil rights bill and spoke for, literally, one minute. It has become common to present the two as having taken opposite approaches to civil rights. The motto of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights umbrella group King founded in 1957, was “To save the soul of America.” It summarizes well the role King plays in twent...