"I was gone on debating": Malcolm X's prison debates and public confrontations.

• Author: Branham, Robert J.

More than any other African American leader of his era, Malcolm X used public debates to confront whites, advance and defend his own views, and challenge competing civil rights organizations, representatives and tactics. Between March 1960 and December 1964, he engaged in more than twenty formal debates and participated in numerous panels and interviews in which he was pitted against his fellow panelists (and frequently the moderator as well).(1) Even Malcolm X's individual speech appearances, which were often oppositional in character and quite specific in their refutation of claims and positions advanced by others, may best be viewed as moments in a larger debate involving non-proximate adversaries (Branham, 1994, p. 2).

Malcolm X was a brilliant debater, adept at dismantling the positions of his opponents, converting their arguments to his own advantage and, most importantly, casting the issues of dispute in utter and compelling clarity. He effectively challenged assumptions regarding goals and tactics of the struggle for human rights that had been taken for granted by many of his opponents and listeners. "Within a few years" of his introduction to debate in Norfolk Prison Colony, writes George Breitman, "he was to become the most respected debater in the country, taking on one and all - politicians, college professors, journalists, anyone - black or white, bold enough to meet him" (1965, p. 5). Yet despite their importance to his public advocacy, the debates of Malcolm X have received little scholarly attention. Few of his debates were recorded or transcribed; fewer still have been published. Current anthologies of Malcolm X's speeches include no complete texts of his debates. No comprehensive listing of the dates, opponents and topics for his debates has previously been available. The blizzard of biographies and critical studies of Malcolm X that have appeared in the decades since his death has produced isolated anecdotes of his debates, but not a single sustained analysis of his debate career or the reasons for the extraordinary emphasis he placed upon debating in his public appeals.

For Malcolm X, debate was a unique and valuable form of public address. His use of debate was a deliberate rhetorical choice, through which he believed that his positions might be advanced most persuasively to the largest possible audience (Branham, 1995). He confronted highly educated and sometimes nationally recognized adversaries in a format that accorded him relatively equal standing and some assurance that his views would receive consideration and response. Occurring in a period of apparent consensus on the means and ends of the civil rights movement, the public debates of Malcolm X effectively shattered the myth of Black unanimity and enacted the confrontation and resistance that formed the basis of his appeal.

Malcolm X's extraordinary career as a public debater and orator, as well as his public advocacy for the Nation of Islam, began in the debating program of the Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts. In this essay I will first examine the evolution and philosophy of the prison debate programs in which Malcolm X participated and offer an account of his experiences as a member of the internationally renowned Norfolk debating team. I will then discuss the importance of debate in Malcolm's X's later career as a public figure, providing a comprehensive record of his known debate appearances and an analysis of his methods and tactics. I will explore the rhetorical choice of debate as a preferred form of public address used by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam to convey their beliefs to disparate audiences.

DEBATE BEHIND BARS

Malcolm X's prison experience was never far from his thought or speech in later life. "The most important strand of experience in the fiber of Malcolm's life," writes Harry Flick, "was his imprisonment" (p. 22). Prison was the site of his religious conversion and self-education; it also shaped his understanding of power and oppression. "To understand a prison and the life of the interned, before and after his incarceration behind closed walls, is to understand how Malcolm came to view and portray the black experience within a larger white milieu" (Flick, 1979, p. 23). Malcolm X's speeches, writings and debates are replete with references to imprisonment; all Black Americans, he argued, serve a life sentence in the maximum security ward of white oppression.

Because prison remained Malcolm X's operative metaphor for the environment in which he lived and spoke after his release, it is important to understand what it means to speak within a literal prison. In an environment of near-total control and regimentation, speech and debate activities are rare and significant acts of self-determination and resistance. In both prison and society at-large, Malcolm X invested great significance in the power of confrontational speech to enact personal and social transformation.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Malcolm X's participation in prison debate is that such a program existed at all. Malcolm X's prison debating experience occurred during a relatively brief period in the history of American penology in which rehabilitation was widely accepted as the goal of imprisonment, prisoner education was viewed as the best means by which to promote rehabilitation, and training in speech and debate was understood to be fundamental to prisoner education.

All three views differed radically from the theories and practices that had previously dominated the penal system, and to which much of the penal system has since returned. For more than a century and a half, U.S. prisons operated on the principle that there should be no communication between prisoners (Reagen and Stoughton, 1976, pp. 4-5). This rule was enforced through solitary confinement or the "silent system," in which prisoners performed forced labor in each other's company, but were forbidden from speaking (Ackroyd, 1990, p. 377). The prisoner locked in silence, wrote Charles Dickens in 1842, "is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair" (pp. 100-101). The imposition of silence was designed partly to insulate inmates from the evil influences of their fellow prisoners. However, it was also part of a system of total control that strove to produce docile and obedient prisoners, submissive to the authority of prison officials. The suppression of speech limited self-expression. Regimentation and uniformity were the pervasive conditions of prison life (Friedman, 1993, p. 80).

The prison reform movement of the 1870s represented the first organized challenge to this model of prison administration and prisoner behavior. The First National Prison Congress, held in Cincinnati in 1870, recommended in its Declaration of Principles that "organized persuasion be made to take the place of coercive restraint, the object being to make upright and industrious freemen rather than orderly and obedient prisoners" (Grunhut, 1972, p. 91). But reform efforts to establish programs of prisoner education were opposed by those who feared that "educated criminals were more dangerous" (Chenault, 1951, p. 224). As late as the mid-1920s, fewer than 20% of U.S. prisons had any sort of school programs (Reagen and Stoughton, p. 42).

The reformers' view of the criminal as "an unfortunate victim of society," environmentally conditioned to crime, gained scientific and popular support during the 1920s and the Great Depression (Doering, 1940, p. vi). Learned behavior, it was reasoned, could be unlearned, and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, such as the abilities to speak and debate, might enable the former criminal to function legally and productively in society upon release. Pioneer prison speech educator Chester Owens, whose direction of the debate program at New York's Woodbourne Institution began in 1938, insisted that "the acceptance of the invitation to 'Come, let us reason together' has shown itself, through debate, to be a vital part in the rehabilitation of inmates" (1939, p. 8). It was hoped that by experience in debating, prisoners would learn to express themselves and resolve disputes with words, rather than violence (Perry, 1991, p. 122).

Speech and debate activities were included in many proposals for prison reform. The influential German Prison School Order of 1924 recommended "discussions, debates and papers as means of directed self-instruction" (Grunhut, p. 233). In the United States, the 1933 report of the Englehardt Commission promoted prisoner re-socialization through "varied impressional and expressional activities," including the development of training and organizations for inmate speech and debate (Reagen and Stoughton, p. 43). By 1936, Sanford Bates, head of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, observed the sea-change in American penology regarding prisoners' speech: "The rule of silence does not prevail in the prisons of America today; The prisoner thinks and also speaks for himself" (p. 229).

Although strict silence was no longer enforced in most U.S. penal institutions in the twentieth century, organized speech and debate activities represented a rare opportunity for prisoners to communicate in the midst of "an environment where the flow of messages is severely restricted" (Corcoran, 1985, p. 53). Debate accorded some measure of power, standing, and expression in a system in which these otherwise were denied. For African American inmates, whose access to educational and speaking opportunities outside of prison was restricted by segregation, prison debate programs from the 1930s through the 1950s provided training and fora for verbal engagement with white adversaries otherwise difficult to obtain.

It was in the extraordinary debating program of the Norfolk Prison Colony that Malcolm X gained the training and experience in public speaking that would...