Lost Malcolm X Speech Found

A 22-year-old Brown University student was digging in the school’s archives and found a pristine recording of a little-remembered visit by the civil-rights leader Malcolm X more than 50 years ago. The speech is notable for being blistering in its humor and hardline that blacks should not integrate with whites. Slavery, he told a crowd of 800, “has made the 20 million black people in this country a dead people ... Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.” The May, 1961 visit was prompted by an article in the student newspaper, whose editor was a young man named Richard Holbrooke, who would go on to become the leading American diplomat. “No, we are not anti-white,” Malcolm X said, four years before he would be assasinated. “But we don’t have time for the white man.”