Inside the Civil Rights Movement: a Conversation With Julian Bond

I never met Malcolm X for longer than a period of ‘Hello, how you doing? Good to see you.’ So I can’t say I knew him in a real sense of the word, but I was around him on a couple of occasions and had seen him operate and watched him operate and grew to understand that here’s a man who had a real idea of how to go about things, how to plan, how to go from here to there, in a way that, I think, younger people didn’t quite know. So he was just such a remarkable man, it was a thrill to be around him. One of the great things that I remember about Malcolm is him saying to the crowd, not to me, but to the crowd he said, “Man, those people in the Southern movement make me look funny” he said “they’re really on to something.” So you know, you appreciate that kind of pat on the back--like another one we got from President Kennedy. You get those on the White House tapes. He’s talking to his advisors during the Birmingham Campaign complaining about something that had happened in Birmingham the night before and he says, “Those SNCC people are sons of bitches.” I love that. More