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Malcolm X did not become a socialist. But he was a revolutionary, and that meant he had to look at how the oppressed and exploited could overthrow the system that holds them down. He said, "You have whites who are fed up. you have blacks who are fed up... "When the day comes when the whites who are really fed up...learn how to establish the proper type of communication with those blacks who are fed up and they get some coordinated action going, you'll get some changes. And it will take both. it will take everything that you've got."

He believed such unity was desirable but very difficult to achieve. The first step, he said, was to build a militant black organisation. The anti Vietnam war movement and the black ghetto uprisings in the late 1960s showed the possibility for unity between blacks and whites. No one knows how Malcolm's ideas would have developed had he witnessed that. We do know he had no time for the idea that an "enlightened elite" could reform racism away or that the mass of black people should put their faith in the handful accepted into the establishment.

He said, "It's impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg. The system in this country cannot produce freedom for the Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period."