God's Judgement Of White America

Ronald Reagan once said, “Government’s first job is to protect the people, not run their lives.” In all three short works, including “Life as a Terrorist” by William T. Vollmann, “God’s Judgement of White America” by Malcolm X and “ON the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau, Reagan’s statement was supported. The statement was supported by use of personal experience, as seen in Vollman’s and Thoreau’s work or by observation of a bigger movement as seen in Malcolm X’s speech. In “Life as a Terrorist” by William T. Vollmann, he explained what is was like to be a terrorist suspect in the Unabomber and Amerithrax investigations. Vollman was an American novelist who traveled internationally and wrote historical books. Both of these

Malcolm X talks about how the government interfered during the civil rights movement in his speech “God’s Judgement of White America.” In it he explains how he thinks that America is coming to her judgment day and will soon collapse if she doesn’t make up for enslaving blacks. Even when blacks start to fight for equal rights, Malcolm X believes that the government is behind it all and controlling the leaders. He calls these leaders “Six puppets who have been trained by the whites in white institutions and then placed over our people as ‘spokesmen’ for our people” (3). The six people he is referring to are James Farmer, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Phillip Randolf, Ray Wilkins and Whitney Young all of whom were key members in the fight for equal rights. He believed that these people were not actually fighting for equal rights but merely repeating anything that the government told them to say. The same government who “In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negroes … are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power” (6). The parties are not fighting for equal rights for the people’s well being but rather a way to gain popularity and stay in power. In this case the government begins to overstep their boundaries by helping in a movement for all the wrong reasons and in the end changed the very nature of the