The audiotape of Malcolm X's 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn't stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.
"No one had listened to this in 50 years," Burnley said. "There aren't many recordings of him before 1962. And this is a unique speech -- it's not like others he had given before."
In the May 11, 1961 speech delivered to a mostly white audience of students and some residents, Malcolm X combines blistering humor and reason to argue that blacks should not look to integrate into white society but instead must forge their own identities and culture.
At the time, Malcolm X, 35, was a loyal supporter of the black separatist movement Nation of Islam. He would be assassinated four years later after leaving the group and crafting his own more global, spiritual ideology.
The legacy of slavery and racism, he told the crowd of 800, "has made the 20 million black people in this country a dead people. Dead economically, dead mentally, dead spiritually. Dead morally and otherwise. Integration will not bring a man back from the grave."
In his speech, Malcolm X outlined Black Muslims' beliefs and argued that black Americans cannot wait for white Americans to offer them equality.
"No, we are not anti-white," he said. "But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people."
Rediscovery of the speech could be the whole story. But Burnley found the young students in the crowd that night proved to be just as fascinating.
Read more here: Brown University student uncovers lost Malcolm X speech
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