Malcolm X's Suffrage In America

The right to suffrage in America intends to provide the full rights and liberties of a full-fledged citizen. These rights and liberties as expressed in the Constitution are reserved for people that fit this definition, and the ingroup hasn’t always been so loosely defined. In fact, ascertaining the right to suffrage has been used throughout history with the intention of empowering an elite, ruling class group of citizens, generally White Americans, and stifle the power of a racial and/or social group, including African Americans. The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution sought to rectify the injustices resulting from the system of slavery, in which members of the ruling class of citizens owned people of color and held them …show more content…
During his prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X took what people perceived as a radical stance towards achieving civil rights, in contrast to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who sought to achieve civil rights through a system of civil disobedience. Malcolm X’s rhetoric resounds loudly in reference to the legacy of W.E.B DuBois, as it strikes of the same belief in full irrevocable rights for Black people. The right to suffrage still being stifled by the Jim Crow laws within the South, Malcolm X would give an ultimatum with his sentiments expressed in his 1964 speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet”, in which X described the necessity of the power associated with suffrage. “Its gotta be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you’re afraid to use an expression like that, you should get on out of the country; you should get back in the cotton patch; you should get back in the alley. They get all the Negro vote, and after they get it, the Negro gets nothing in return.” When speaking of the lack of acquired power, X would argue that the politicians and parties entrusted with the vote, do little to represent it, showing the priority of and the power associated with it. The vote becomes a ploy to present to black people, with little enforcement or advocation. X in this speech argues that the fight for the power of the vote should matter so much to black people that they decide to collectively come together and use their collective power to bring about change. The right to vote has been increasingly established but the fight for the power associated with the vote is ongoing. Malcolm X urged black people to find new allies and people to embark in this fight with, and recommended speaking of the injustices done to suppress black people, to the extent of human rights violations,

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