Nevertheless, he also intended to form a secular organization which
could appeal to a wide variety of persons, and form the center of a
new black militancy. Before any of these activities could get under
way he was killed. Malcolm X was gunned down by four blacks, probably
associated with the Black Muslims, while addressing a meeting in New
York City early in 1965.
To Malcolm X the Civil Rights Movement was in need of a new
interpretation. The degree of segregation existing in schools and in
the rest of society, he contended, had actually increased in the
decade since the Supreme Court decision in 1954. It seemed to him to
be particularly true in the case of the de facto segregation practiced
in the North. The spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, he pointed out,
had been one of asking and pleading for rights which should have
belonged to Afro-Americans by birth:
"I said that the American black man needed to recognize that he had a
strong, airtight case to take the United States before the United
Nations on a formal accusation of 'denial of human rights'--and that
if Angola and South Africa were precedent cases, then there would be
no easy way that the U.
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