"I heard Malcolm X speak when I was a student at Brandeis University, and it was one of the most enlightening moments of my life. I was attending a university which was predominately white. As a matter of fact, I had spent two years in a high school that was predominantly white. And I had come to feel very alienated in a way that I could not even articulate myself, because we had not yet developed the language that allowed us to talk about the way racism functions in those kinds of unspoken situations. So that I had been attending this university, doing well and feeling OK. But, at the same time, feeling very alienated, feeling OK in my academic life but feeling very alienated. Because I didn't see myself anywhere. I didn't see myself in the courses that I taught. I didn't see myself in the faculty members. I didn't see myself in the students. And so when Malcolm came and spoke and affirmed what it was to be Black and talked about the quest for Black equality in a very passionate and militant way, it made me feel good. It made me feel OK. It made me feel that as a human being I was as important as were all of the white people sitting around me. As a matter of fact, at that particular time, Malcolm spoke to the white audience, and in a very-I would say-negative kind of way. He spoke, he astonished the largely white audience, because he called them all kinds of names and ran down the list of their historical crimes. And you know, while I wonder what good evoking guilt really does in terms of creating the right kind of basis for, of a movement, I can say, at that time, it made me feel good, because he said a lot of the things that I probably would have wanted to say if only if I had been in possession of the language that would have allowed me to say them at that time…the response of the predominantly white audience, at that address given by Malcolm X was utter shock, as a matter of fact. They applauded very amply after he spoke, but I think that they simply could not deal with the fact that here was a Black man that had the courage to stand up and not, you know, only criticize the system of racism but talked about white people and the historical crimes for which they are responsible in a way they had never heard before. I don't think they took him as serious as he should have been taken. Because at that particular time he was not seen as the spokesperson for a movement that would be able to make good on the words that were coming across during that speech. But I think that later on they probably recognized, as I did, that what Malcolm was doing was representing patterns of political thought that would later become accepted by large numbers of people in this country and would mark the beginning of an entirely new approach to the movement for Black liberation in this country."