Rhetorical Analysis On Malcolm X

lollipop from a black child, at which point the black child stops crying and goes out to fight the white boy), and they will then proceed to keep rising up against those white people until they have absolutely nothing, and have learned a lesson to never mess with any black people ever again (in the article, the black child beats the white child to “within an inch of his ass-cracker life”). This exaggerates Malcolm X’s real words, which were more to the effect of “By any means necessary”, in order to achieve humour. However, the article does not only make fun of Malcolm X. The final paragraph is supposed to be a quote of what the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the time of the event said about the speech: “…it would appear that, after four centuries of abuse, broken promises and subjugation, American negroes are not only dissatisfied; they’re starting to get really angry.” This statement accuses white Americans of being ignorant towards the struggle for racial equality between them and African-Americans, as well as to why they are rising up.
It implies that white Americans did not understand the situation completely: they just did not realise that black people were equal to them and therefore were very confused when the black people began to fight for equality.
The article is useful because it gives an historian an idea of how the civil rights struggle is viewed today by black people as opposed to white people – albeit an exaggerated one. African-Americans view Malcolm X as their hero or saviour for leading them, to an extent, out of their oppression from whites. White Americans view Malcolm X as a radical leader who encouraged violence and anger towards white people for how they had treated black Americans for so long. The source is limited because it is not from the actual time, and it is a satirical view on the whole situation and Malcolm X, so it is not what Malcolm X really said, it is only based on what he implied (which is hugely
exaggerated). (SOURCE C)
In conclusion, Malcolm X was a hero who was an integral part of leading black Americans out from the oppression that they had lived under for so many centuries before. Although his methods of doing this were radical and seen as terrible in that they were so violent, he was only doing what was necessary in order to achieve racial equality and civil rights for Americans of all races, and therefore better America as a nation. He lived by the motto of Black Nationalism: “By any means necessary”, which had indeed become necessary because the Civil Rights Movement, which had been going on for over a decade by the 1960s, had not gained enough attention in order for real change to start happening. Malcolm X may have been violent, and his methods may have been radical and seen as unnecessarily harsh, but this helped African Americans greatly in achieving more equality to whites and gaining the world’s attention in order to do this. Malcolm X was a hero.