In the May 11, 1961, speech delivered to a mostly white audience of students and some residents, Malcolm X combines blistering humor and reason in arguing that blacks should not look to integrate into white society but must forge their own identities and culture.
At the time, Malcolm X, 35, was a loyal supporter of the black-separatist movement Nation of Islam. He would be assassinated four years later after leaving the group and crafting his own more global, spiritual ideology.
The legacy of slavery and racism, he told the crowd of 800 at Brown, "has made the 20 million black people in this country a dead people. Dead economically, dead mentally, dead spiritually. Dead morally and otherwise. Integration will not bring a man back from the grave."
Malcolm X was prompted to visit Brown by an article about the growing Black Muslim movement published in the Brown Daily Herald. The article by Katharine Pierce, a student at Pembroke College, then the women's college at Brown, was first written for a religious studies class. It caught the eye of the student paper's editor, Richard Holbrooke.
Holbrooke would become a leading U.S. diplomat, serving as ambassador to Germany soon after its reunification, ambassador to the United Nations, and President Obama's special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan before his death in 2010 at 69.
But in 1961, Holbrooke, 20, was eager to use the student newspaper to examine race relations on an Ivy League campus with only a handful of black students. Pierce's article ran in the newspaper's magazine and made its way to Malcolm X. His staff and Holbrooke worked out details of the visit weeks in advance.
In his speech, Malcolm X outlined Black Muslims' beliefs and argued that black Americans could not wait for white Americans to offer them equality.
Richard Nurse, one of three black students in his Brown class in 1961, came to the speech with his mind made up against Malcolm X.
"I very strongly believed in integration," Nurse said in a telephone interview from his New Jersey home. ". . . Here I was at this Ivy League university. But he confounded me a little bit. I had never heard a black man in public speak as forcefully as Malcolm X did that night. It was cataclysmic."
Nurse, now 72 and retired from teaching at Rutgers University, said the speech didn't cause him to change his views. But he said he understood Malcolm X's message better years later when, in the Army, he was barred from all-white USO clubs and movie theaters in the South.
"Now things have changed to the point where that kind of notion [separatism] is no longer even considered," he said.
