[Alex] Haley felt he could make a solid case in favor of racial integration by showing what was - to white America - what was the consequence of their support for racial separatism that would end up producing a kind of hate, the hate that hate produced, to use the phrase that Mike Wallace used in his 1959 documentary on the Nation of Islam.

Malcolm X never renounced and never stepped away from a strong commitment to black nationalism and black self-determination. That's absolutely clear if you do any analysis of his speeches.

Elements within Malcolm's X own entourage, some of them were very angry with some of the changes that had occurred with Malcolm. One source of anger, curiously enough, was that - was the tension between MMI and OAAU, that the MMI, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated, these were women and men who had left the Nation of Islam out of loyalty to Malcolm, but then Malcolm continued to evolve rapidly.

There's a hidden history. You see, Malcolm X and [Alex ] Haley collaborated to produce a magnificent narrative about the life of Malcolm X, but the two men had very different motives in coming together.

The crisis of black politics can only be resolved through the development of multiclass, multiracial, progressive political structures.

The NYPD was ubiquitous. They were always around Malcolm X. Whenever Malcolm spoke, there would be one or two dozen cops all over the place.

I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm X came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective.