SOURCE: "Animal Imagery in the Rhetoric of Malcolm X," in Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4, June, 1988, pp. 435-51.

In the following essay, Flick and Powell explore Malcolm X's use of animal imagery in his rhetoric as a means of changing the prevailing conceptions held by black Americans about white Americans.

The history of the black man in America emanates from the edifice of slavery and its subsequent effects on both white and black Americans. Over the years a number of rhetors have analyzed such a situation for the purpose of identifying those rhetorical devices that had been employed to regulate blacks to a lifelong position of servitude in America. Rhetors noted the different devices that were employed to maintain and then tighten the shackles of slavery to the limbs of blacks as they migrated from the plantations of the old South to the urban centers of America...