By any means necessary is an English phrase or a translation of a French phrase that has been attributed to at least three famous sources. The earliest of these three sources is French leftist intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands where he used a French equivalent of the phrase. The second is Martinican anticolonialist intellectual Frantz Fanon who used another French equivalent of the phrase in his 1960 address to the Positive Action Conference in Accra, Ghana.[1] The English phrase entered American civil rights culture through a speech given by Muslim minister Malcolm X at the Organization of Afro-American Unity's founding rally on 28 June 1964 in Manhattan, New York.
The phrase is generally considered to mean to leave open the option of all available tactics, strategies or methods for attaining of achieving desired ends, including any form or degree of violence as well as other methods typically considered unethical or immoral. It is part of a broader political idea that radical social change or liberation cannot be obtained by limiting one’s means to that which are considered "acceptable", debatably encapsulated in the suggestion by Audre Lorde that "The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house"[2]
The phrase is also a translation of a sentence used in French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre's 1948 play Dirty Hands:
The phrase is a translation of a sentence used in revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon's 1960 address to the Positive Action Conference for Peace and Security in Africa in Accra, Ghana, "Why we use violence", defending armed resistance against the colonial French as part of the Algerian War:
It entered the popular culture through speeches given by Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), founder of Muslim Mosque, Inc. and Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), in the last year of his life. Its most prominent example was during the founding rally of the OAAU in 1964.
In the final scene of the 1992 movie Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela—then recently released after 27 years of political imprisonment—appears as a schoolteacher in a Soweto classroom reciting Malcolm X's speech. Yet Mandela informed director Spike Lee that he could not utter the famous final phrase "by any means necessary" on camera, fearing that the apartheid government would use it against him if he did. Lee obliged, and the final seconds of the film feature black-and-white footage of Malcolm X himself delivering the phrase.