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As early as 1959, Malcolm X began reaching out to mainstream civil rights leaders and black elected officials such as Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., in the effort to build a national black united front. In September, 1960, Malcolm X meets with Cuba's Fidel Castro, during the latter's visit to the United Nations. In February, 1961, he leads a demonstration at the United Nations to denounce the assassination of the Congo's Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Many white Americans, particularly college students, became fascinated with this articulate and uncompromising voice of black militancy. Soon Malcolm X became a highly sought-after campus speaker, lecturing at Harvard Law School in March 1961, and many other institutions. Malcolm X's high public profile brought him under intense surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies. It also created growing hostility and resentment among NOI leaders closest to Elijah Muhammad, who now feared that Malcolm X had grown too powerful to control. Coverage of Malcolm X in Muhammad Speaks begins to decline, and virtually disappears throughout 1963. Malcolm X at the same time learns that rumors concerning Elijah Muhammad's adulterous relations with a large number of NOI female members are true, and attempts to minimize the damage to the sect's credibility. A close analysis of the actual content of Malcolm X's public lectures, sermons and media interviews between 1960 and 1963, reveals many more similarities to his post-NOI views than contrasts. Malcolm X's general objective was to transform how black people saw themselves as actors in the making of their own history. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant describe this process as the creation of "new racial subjects." The black freedom movement of the 1960s, they observe, "redefined the meaning of racial identity, and consequently of race itself, in American society." Malcolm linked the anti-colonial revolutions in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean with the struggle by African Americans for self-determination inside the U.S. One striking example of this occurred in December 1957, when Malcolm X organized and hosted an international meeting that included representatives from Ghana, Iraq, Egypt and Morocco. Malcolm X was sharply critical of King's philosophy of nonviolence, and ridiculed the 1963 March on Washington, D.C. as nothing but "a picnic, a circus." Yet he made numerous efforts at the same time to dialogue with the liberal integrationist leaders, in public forums as well as private meetings. In the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Malcolm X remarked to the media that the chief executive's murder was a case of "the chickens coming home to roost," symbolizing white America's orientation toward violence and hatred. Taken completely out of its context, the press distorted the statement to once again demonize Malcolm X. Elijah Muhammad used the public controversy as a pretext to eliminate his powerful protégé from the NOI. Malcolm X was ordered first to submit to a "ninety day period of silence." As the disciplinary period came to an end in early March 1964, it had become clear that the NOI would never accept Malcolm X back into the organization.
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