The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“You know, it was like having tea with a black panther.”

I had the impression it was difficult for him to take my hand, but, noblesse oblige, he did.

When he attacked the white man, Malcolm did for the Negroes what they couldn’t do for themselves—he attacked with a violence and anger that spoke for the ages of misery.

When he attacked the white man, Malcolm did for the Negroes what they couldn’t do for themselves—he attacked with a violence and anger that spoke for the ages of misery.

It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.

But, still later, I learned to hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me.

I remember being suddenly snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames.

I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man’s brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child.

I remember an old lady, grinning and saying to my father, 'You’re scaring these white folks to death!'

One day, like a storm, it will be here.

So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

With one twist of his big black hands he simply twisted off the head and threw the bleeding-necked thing back at my mother’s feet.

When we went by the casket, I remember that I thought that it looked as if my father’s strong black face had been dusted with flour, and I wished they hadn’t put on such a lot of it.

When we went by the casket, I remember that I thought that it looked as if my father’s strong black face had been dusted with flour, and I wished they hadn’t put on such a lot of it.

They acted and looked at her, and at us, and around in our house, in a way that had about it the feeling—at least for me—that we were not people.

In their eyesight we were just things, that was all.

They acted as if they owned us, as if we were their private property.

It’s a wonder we didn’t come to think of Not To Be Sold as a brand name.

“Malcolm, there’s one thing I like about you. You’re no good, but you don’t try to hide it. You are not a hypocrite.”

It’s like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He’s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.

It’ s like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He’ s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.

They were as vicious as vultures. They had no feelings, understanding, compassion, or respect for my mother.

We children watched our anchor giving way. It was something terrible that you couldn’t get your hands on, yet you couldn’t get away from.

A white man in charge of a black man’s children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery—however kindly intentioned.

It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers.

It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers.

He was so scared I was going to hurt him that he knocked me down fifty times if he did once.

The moment the bell rang, I saw a fist, then the canvas coming up, and ten seconds later the referee was saying “Ten!” over me.

They would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, as if I didn’t understand, or as if I wasn’t there.

They would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, the same way people would talk freely in front of a pet canary.

As the “nigger” of my class, I was in fact extremely popular—I suppose partly because I was kind of a novelty.

Even at our own school, I could sense it almost as a physical barrier, that despite all the beaming and smiling, the mascot wasn’t supposed to dance with any of the white girls.

Even at our own school, I could sense it almost as a physical barrier, that despite all the beaming and smiling, the mascot wasn’t supposed to dance with any of the white girls.

I was unique in my class, like a pink poodle.

I think the major impact of Ella’s arrival, at least upon me, was that she was the first really proud black woman I had ever seen in my life.

I think the major impact of Ella’s arrival, at least upon me, was that she was the first really proud black woman I had ever seen in my life.

I think the major impact of Ella’s arrival, at least upon me, was that she was the first really proud black woman I had ever seen in my life.

They made a striking contrast, the thin near-white woman and the big black one hugging each other.

I didn’t know the world contained as many Negroes as I saw thronging downtown Roxbury at night, especially on Saturdays.

A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger.

But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be.

No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.

Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them “better,” these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.

Foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen, Pullman porters, and dining car waiters of Roxbury acted, striding around as if they were wearing top hats and cutaways.

I spent the first month in town with my mouth hanging open.

Man, that cat still smelled country! Cat’s legs was so long and his pants so short his knees showed—an’ his head looked like a briar patch!

Shorty’s slave in the poolroom, he said, was just to keep ends together while he learned his horn.

A lot of cats who ain’ t planning to wash their hands, sometimes you can run up with a towel and shame them.

It’s a jive noise, that’s all. Cats tip better, they figure you’re knocking yourself out!

It’s a jive noise, that’s all. Cats tip better, they figure you’re knocking yourself out!

I would really make my shine rag sound like someone had set off Chinese firecrackers.

The band, the spectators and the dancers, would be making the Roseland Ballroom feel like a big, rocking ship.

I cupped my hand against the outside, and snatched it away. 'Damn right, it’s hot, that’s the lye,' he said.

The congolene just felt warm when Shorty started combing it in. But then my head caught fire.

But I don’t see how on earth a black woman with any race pride could walk down the street with any black man wearing a conk—the emblem of his shame that he is black.

It was as though somebody had clicked on a light. My long-suppressed African instincts broke through, and loose.

It was a sharkskin gray, with a big, long coat, and pants ballooning out at the knees and then tapering down to cuffs so narrow that I had to take off my shoes to get them on and off.

I was whirling girls so fast their skirts were snapping.

They soon had me ready to quit, with their accents so phonied up that if you just heard them and didn’t see them, you wouldn’t even know they were Negroes.

They soon had me ready to quit, with their accents so phonied up that if you just heard them and didn’t see them, you wouldn’t even know they were Negroes.

They soon had me ready to quit, with their accents so phonied up that if you just heard them and didn’t see them, you wouldn’t even know they were Negroes.

She whispered that she’d never lied to her grandma before, but she had told her she had to attend some school function that evening.

I’d nearly just think a maneuver, and she’d respond.

She was a big, rough, strong gal, and she lindied like a bucking horse.

I’ve faced armed detectives and gangsters less hostile than she was.

And even Duke Ellington half raised up from his piano stool and bowed.

But now, with the best-looking white woman who ever walked in those bars and clubs, and with her giving me the money I spent, too, even the big, important black hustlers and 'smart boys'—the club managers, name gamblers, numbers bankers, and others—were clapping me on the back, setting us up to drinks at special tables, and calling me 'Red.'

The next time I saw her, she was a wreck of a woman, notorious around black Roxbury, in and out of jail.

Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: ‘Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.’

Within the first five minutes in Small’s, I had left Boston and Roxbury forever.

Up and down along and between Lenox and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Harlem was like some technicolor bazaar.

In one night, New York—Harlem—had just about narcotized me.

But New York was heaven to me. And Harlem was Seventh Heaven!

I never would forget that—that I couldn’t have whipped that white man as badly with a club as I had with my mind.

My conk and whole costume were so wild that I might have been taken as a man from Mars.

My sharkskin gray 'Cab Calloway' zoot suit, the long, narrow, knob-toed shoes, and the four-inch-brimmed pearl gray hat over my conked fire-red hair; it was just about too much for Mrs. Swerlin.

Today, all these same immigrants’ descendants are running as hard as they can to escape the descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships.

Today, all these same immigrants’ descendants are running as hard as they can to escape the descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships.

My ears soaked it up like sponges when one of them, in a rare burst of confidence, or a little beyond his usual number of drinks, would tell me inside things about the particular form of hustling that he pursued as a way of life.

Evangelists who on Sundays peddled Jesus, and mystics, would pray a lucky number for you, for a fee.

It was known that if upset, they would break open your head and think nothing of it.

There seemed to be an understanding that these Negroes and the tough black cops never clashed; I guess both knew that someone would die.

All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.

To wolves who still were able to catch some rabbits, it had meaning that an old wolf who had lost his fangs was still eating.

These wives were so disagreeable and had made their men so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men.

This was my best early lesson in how most white men’s hearts and guts will turn over inside of them, whatever they may have you otherwise believe, whenever they see a Negro man on close terms with a white woman.

He had asked her, 'Why is a white girl like you throwing yourself away with a spade?'

It wasn’t that they were necessarily in love with the Negro, but they were in love with lust—particularly “taboo” lust.

I don’t see any reason why old Chicago Red would mind me telling that he is Redd Foxx.

In the next room, we could hear somebody getting whipped. Whop! Whop! He’d cry out, 'Please! Please don’t beat my face, that’s how I make my living!'

In the next room, we could hear somebody getting whipped. Whop! Whop! He’d cry out, “Please! Please don’t beat my face, that’s how I make my living!”

Later that same night, I knocked at his door and gave him back his money and asked him if I could lend him some.

He had smoked so many through the bone that he could just light a match before the empty bone, draw the heat through, and get what he called a 'contact' high.

He had smoked so many through the bone that he could just light a match before the empty bone, draw the heat through, and get what he called a “contact” high.

He had smoked so many through the bone that he could just light a match before the empty bone, draw the heat through, and get what he called a “contact” high.

This could be the beginning of an emotional and financial dependency, which Sammy knew how to develop until she was his virtual slave.

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures.

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures.

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures.

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures.

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures.

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures.

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures.

Most whites don’t give a Negro credit for having sense enough to fool them—or nerve enough.

Most whites don’t give a Negro credit for having sense enough to fool them—or nerve enough.

I started noising around that I was frantic to join…the Japanese Army.

I went in, skipping and tipping, and I thrust my tattered Greetings at that reception desk’s white soldier—“Crazy-o, daddy-o, get me moving.

He stared at me as if I were a snake’s egg hatching, fumbling for his red pencil.

I saw how when the eyes stared at the big black hole, the faces fell slack and the mouths sagged open.

Gladys saw how wild I was. She saw me headed toward a bad end.

Reginald only had to be certain that none of the customers to whom he sold ever saw that he was legitimate.

And we laughed about the scared little Chinese whose restaurant didn’t have a hand laid on it, because the rioters just about convulsed laughing when they saw the sign the Chinese had hastily stuck on his front door: 'Me Colored Too.'

And we laughed about the scared little Chinese whose restaurant didn’t have a hand laid on it, because the rioters just about convulsed laughing when they saw the sign the Chinese had hastily stuck on his front door: 'Me Colored Too.'

She knew as I did that when your best friend draws a gun on you, he usually has lost all control of his emotions, and he intends to shoot.

She knew from personal experience how crime existed only to the degree that the law cooperated with it.

Watching the moving traffic, I was soon able to spot the taxi, car, or limousine—even before it slowed down—with the anxious white faces peering out for the tall, reddish-brown-complexioned Negro wearing a dark suit, or raincoat, with a white flower in his lapel.

They stole off among taboo black people, and took off whatever antiseptic, important, dignified masks they wore in their white world.

But white society never thinks about challenging any Negro in a servant role.

But white society never thinks about challenging any Negro in a servant role.

To keep the lye from burning up my scalp, I had to stick my head into the stool and flush and flush to rinse out the stuff.

I never heard from him again…but I did hear that he was put in the ocean and I knew he couldn’t swim.

A .32-20 is a funny kind of gun. It’s bigger than a .32. But it’s not as big as a .38. I had faced down some dangerous Negroes. But no one who wasn’t ready to die messed with West Indian Archie.

The .32–20 moved, and Sammy froze. West Indian Archie told him, “I ought to shoot you through the ear.”

I’d also known of at least another dozen showdowns in which one took the Dead On Arrival ride to the morgue, and the other went to prison for manslaughter or the electric chair for murder.

Everyone, bartenders and customers, sat or stood as though carved, drinks in mid-air.

My gun was ready if I heard a mosquito cough.

He came slowly over toward me, and I knew if I sneezed, he’d blast me down.

Even Shorty, whose apartment I now again shared, wasn’t prepared for how I lived and thought—like a predatory animal.

That’s one automatic red murder flag to the white man, and his woman knows it.

A white woman might blow up at her husband and scream and yell and call him every name she can think of, and say the most vicious things in an effort to hurt him, and talk about his mother and his grandmother, too, but one thing she never will tell him herself is that she is going with a black man.

I didn’t lindy-hop any more now, I wouldn’t even have thought of it now, just as I wouldn’t have been caught in a zoot suit now.

This added to the rest of my reputation the word that I was 'trigger-happy' and 'crazy.'

I viewed narcotics as most people regard food. I wore my guns as today I wear my neckties.

Just as in New York, these were the rich, the highest society—the predominantly old men, past the age of ability to conduct any kind of ordinary sex, always hunting for new ways to be 'sensitive.'”, 3, "Just as in New York, these were the rich, the highest society—the predominantly old men, past the age of ability to conduct any kind of ordinary sex, always hunting for new ways to be 'sensitive.'

When other places had to be found and cased in the rich, white residential areas, Negroes hanging around would stick out like sore thumbs, but these white girls could get invited into the right places.

I pulled out my gun, shook out all five bullets, and then let them see me put back only one bullet.

“I’m doing this, showing you I’m not afraid to die,” I told them. “Never cross a man not afraid to die…now, let’s get to work!”

Snorers we loved; they made it real easy.

I had gotten to the point where I was walking on my own coffin.

I had gotten to the point where I was walking on my own coffin.

He stood back; he watched me as though I were a snake.

Before the judge entered, I said to one lawyer, “We seem to be getting sentenced because of those girls.” He got red from the neck up and shuffled his papers: “You had no business with white girls!”

He got red from the neck up and shuffled his papers: “You had no business with white girls!”

Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.

I would pace for hours like a caged leopard, viciously cursing aloud to myself.

I considered myself beyond atheism—I was Satan.

It was being mentioned all over the cell block by night that Satan didn’t eat pork.

Reginald knew how my street-hustler mind operated. That’s why his approach was so effective.

I never will forget: my mind was involuntarily flashing across the entire spectrum of white people I had ever known; and for some reason it stopped upon Hymie, the Jew, who had been so good to me.

When Reginald left, he left me rocking with some of the first serious thoughts I had ever had in my life.

This 'Negro' was taught to worship an alien God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slavemaster.

The very enormity of my previous life’s guilt prepared me to accept the truth.

I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.

On the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils—savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they walked on all fours and they lived in trees.

With little aprons to cover their nakedness, this devil race was marched off across the Arabian desert to the caves of Europe.

Picking a lock to rob someone’ s house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before.

I still marvel at how swiftly my previous life’s thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.

Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep.

I read descriptions of atrocities, saw those illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged off, never to be seen by their mothers again.

Ten guards and the warden couldn’t have torn me out of those books.

Imagine! Declaring war upon someone who objects to being narcotized!

I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?

I have lectured in Negro colleges and some of these brainwashed black Ph.D.’ s, with their suspenders dragging the ground with degrees, have run to the white man’ s newspapers calling me a “black fanatic.”

The black brother is so brainwashed that he may even be repelled when he first hears the truth.

My reading had my mind like steam under pressure.

It was right there in prison that I made up my mind to devote the rest of my life to telling the white man about himself—or die.

I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn’t black, and he wasn’t white.

I looked right into his face. I didn’t get frightened. I knew I wasn’t dreaming.

I believe, today, that it was written, it was meant, for Reginald to be used for one purpose only: as a bait, as a minnow to reach into the ocean of blackness where I was, to save me.

I don’t care how tough the convict, be he brainwashed black Christian, or a “devil” white Christian, neither of them is ready to hear anybody saying Jesus wasn’t white.

Time is more important to me than distance.

I live by my watch, keeping appointments. Even when I’m using my car, I drive by my watch, not my speedometer. Time is more important to me than distance.

Now I watched brothers entwining themselves in the economic clutches of the white man who went home every night with another bag of the money drained out of the ghetto.

I had never dreamed of anything like that atmosphere among black people who had learned to be proud they were black, who had learned to love other black people instead of being jealous and suspicious.

I experienced tinglings up my spine as I’ve never had since.

It was like an electrical shock. Not looking at me directly, he asked me to stand.

For me, my 'X' replaced the white slavemaster name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.

I found my poor, ignorant, brainwashed black brothers mostly too deaf, dumb, and blind, mentally, morally, and spiritually, to respond.

We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us!

If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I’d do it!

I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.

Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water, just show them the clean glass of water that you have.

“Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,” he said, “just show them the clean glass of water that you have.”

No heaven was in the sky, Mr. Fard taught, and no hell was in the ground.

They raged, even in his presence, 'Why should we bow down to someone who appears less qualified?'

I was his most faithful servant, and I know today that I did believe in him more firmly than he believed in himself.

It means that my worship of him was so awesome that he was the first man whom I had ever feared—not fear such as of a man with a gun, but the fear such as one has of the power of the sun.

I wish it was possible for me to show you the sea bottom in those days—the black bodies, the blood, the bones broken by boots and clubs!

He said that he hadn’t had enough pork chops and white women. I don’t know if he has yet, or not. I know that he’s married to a white woman now…and he’s fat as a hog from eating hog.

I heard the usual hustler fates of so many others. Bullets, knives, prison, dope, diseases, insanity, alcoholism.

Have you ever seen someone who seemed a ghost of the person you remembered?

I told Archie what I had thought in prison about him; that his brain, which could tape-record hundreds of number combinations a day, should have been put at the service of mathematics or science.

The black Christians we “fished” to our Temple were conditioned, I found, by the very shock I could give them about what had been happening to them while they worshiped a blond, blue-eyed God.

The white man has taught us to shout and sing and pray until we die, to wait until death, for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter, when we’re dead, while this white man has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!

The black man never will get anybody’s respect until he first learns to respect his own women!

I would rather have a mule I can depend upon than a race horse that I can’t depend upon.

We won’t cry—just as we don’t cry over candy. Just as this sweet candy will dissolve, so will our brother’s sweetness that we have enjoyed when he lived now dissolve into a sweetness in our memories.

We won’t cry—just as we don’t cry over candy.

To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or telling a hen not to cackle.

To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or telling a hen not to cackle.

When Sister Betty X told her foster parents, who were financing her education, that she was a Muslim, they gave her a choice: leave the Muslims, or they’d cut off her nursing school.

I wasn’t about to say any of that romance stuff that Hollywood and television had filled women’s heads with.

I just said it to her direct: 'Look, do you want to get married?'

I don’t know how many marriage breakups are caused by these movie- and television-addicted women expecting some bouquets and kissing and hugging and being swept out like Cinderella for dinner and dancing—then getting mad when a poor, scraggly husband comes in tired and sweaty from working like a dog all day, looking for some food.

I never will forget hearing one exclaim, 'You got him!' That’s like I was telling you, the nature of women.

When I saw our Brother Hinton, it was all I could do to contain myself; blood had bathed his head and face and shoulder.

When I saw our Brother Hinton, it was all I could do to contain myself. He was only semiconscious. Blood had bathed his head and face and shoulder.

Christian love is the white man’s love for himself and for his race.

He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion.

He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion.

For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, ‘Do you hate me?’

It was trickery and magic that told Negroes they were desegregated—Hooray! Hooray!—and at the same time it told whites ‘Here are your loopholes.’

This twentieth-century Uncle Thomas is a professional Negro…by that I mean his profession is being a Negro for the white man.

I’d walk into those studios. The devils and black Ph.D. puppets would be acting so friendly and “integrated” with each other—laughing and calling each other by first names, and all that; it was such a big lie it made me sick in my stomach.

The child stays within the mother until the time of birth! When the time of birth arrives, the child must be separated, or it will destroy its mother and itself.

It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy!

The white man was barred from attendance—the first time the American black man had ever dreamed of such a thing.

Found guilty, sentenced to death, he was dragged off shouting about all he had done 'for the nigra people.'

When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer pull wool over your eyes so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth!

But no other black leader in America has followers who will lay down their lives if he says so!

You don’t know nothing about your true culture. You don’t even know your family’s real name. You are wearing a white man’s name!

This slavemaster white man already has ‘integrated’ us until you can hardly find among us today any more than a very few who are the black color of our foreparents!

You never can know what anything can do—until it is set free, to act by itself!

He feeds those organizations! So he controls those organizations! He advises them—so he contains them!

But the white man’s “secret” spy often proved, first of all, a black man.

The addict had seen the Muslim drifting off to sleep leaning against a building, or stepping as high over a matchstick as if it were a dog.

Man, what’s a black man buying Whitey’s dope for but to make Whitey richer—killing yourself!

“Baby, knock that monkey off your back! Kick that habit! Kick Whitey off your back!”

Starting from kindergarten, they learned of the black man’s glorious history and from the third grade they studied the black man’s original language, Arabic.

Then I saw the cameramen’s guns; they were from the Arizona Intelligence Division.

Which of us, I wonder, knew more about that Harlem ghetto “sub-culture”? I, who had hustled for years in those streets, or that black snob status-symbol-educated social worker?

The white man’s brains that today explore space should have told the slavemaster that any slave, if he is educated, will no longer fear his master.

I would slide right over the reporter’s question to drop into his lap a logical-extension hot potato for him.

Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man’s back—and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches!

The white Southerner, you can say one thing—he is honest. He bares his teeth to the black man; he tells the black man, to his face, that Southern whites never will accept phony “integration.”

Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country—to clear the air of the racial mirages, clichés, and lies that this country’s very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years.

This pattern, this “system” that the white man created, of teaching Negroes to hide the truth from him behind a façade of grinning, “yessir-bossing,” foot-shuffling and head-scratching—that system has done the American white man more harm than an invading army would do to him.

One thing the white man never can give the black man is self-respect!

Imagine every day living a lie. Imagine hearing their own white husbands, their own white wives, even their own white children, talking about 'those Negroes.'

Their self-brainwashing had been so complete that not long after, in the gas chambers, a lot of them were still gasping, 'It can’t be true!'

What originally was planned to be an angry riptide, one English newspaper aptly described now as 'the gentle flood.'

Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “W e Shall Overcome…Suum Da y…” while tripping and swaying along ar m-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against?

My high school was the black ghetto of Roxbury, Massachusetts. My college was in the streets of Harlem, and my master’s was taken in prison.

“Do you know what white racists call black Ph.D’s?” He said something like, “I believe that I happen not to be aware of that”—you know, one of these ultra-proper-talking Negroes. And I laid the word down on him, loud: “Nigger!”

The white man seems tone deaf to the total orchestration of humanity. Every day, his newspapers’ front pages show us the world that he has created.

Awareness came surging up in me—how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, to save me from being what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave.

Awareness came surging up in me—how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, to save me from being what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave.

I had been a part of the tapping of something in the black secret soul.

I finally convinced Betty that if anything ever happened to me, the Nation of Islam would take care of her for the rest of her life, and of our children until they were grown. I could never have been a bigger fool!

I finally convinced Betty that if anything ever happened to me, the Nation of Islam would take care of her for the rest of her life, and of our children until they were grown. I could never have been a bigger fool!

I loved the Nation, and Mr. Muhammad. I lived for the Nation, and for Mr. Muhammad.

When I discovered who else wanted me dead, I am telling you—it nearly sent me to Bellevue.

I don’t think I could say anything which better testifies to my depth of faith in Mr. Muhammad than that I totally and absolutely rejected my own intelligence.

I went around knowing that I looked to them like a total fool, out there every day preaching, and apparently not knowing what was going on right under my nose, in my own organization, involving the very man I was praising so.

I learned from these former secretaries of Mr. Muhammad that while he was praising me to my face, he was tearing me apart behind my back.

“I’m David,” he said. “When you read about how David took another man’s wife, I’m that David.”

I never dreamed that they were going to try to make it appear that instead of inoculating against an epidemic, I had started it.

I said what I honestly felt—that it was, as I saw it, a case of 'the chickens coming home to roost.'

My head felt like it was bleeding inside. I felt like my brain was damaged.

I felt as though something in nature had failed, like the sun, or the stars.

That was how I first began to realize that I had believed in Mr. Muhammad more than he believed in himself.

It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in a prize ring—for the first time.

It was such a sad case of a brainwashed black Christian ready to do battle for the white man—who wants no part of him.

I began to see, wherever I went—on the streets, in business places, on elevators, sidewalks, in passing cars—the faces of Muslims whom I knew, and I knew that any of them might be waiting the opportunity to try and put a bullet into me.

He asked me what had been said, and I told him... this downtown 'leader' was standing, staring after that hustler, looking as if he’d just heard Sanskrit.

To survive, he is out there constantly preying upon others, probing for any human weakness like a ferret.

The black American today shows us the perfect parasite image—the black tick under the delusion that he is progressing because he rides on the udder of the fat, three-stomached cow that is white America.

If a black bloc committee told Washington’s worst “nigger-hater,” “We represent ten million votes,” why, that “nigger-hater” would leap up: “Well, how are you? Come on in here!”

The demanding voice of the black lobby should be in the ears of every legislator who votes on any issue.

I knew that no one would kill you quicker than a Muslim if he felt that’s what Allah wanted him to do.

I had brought Ella into Islam, and now she was financing me to Mecca.

People seeing you as a Muslim saw you as a human being and they had a different look, different talk, everything.

The feeling hit me that there really wasn’t any color problem here. The effect was as though I had just stepped out of a prison.

You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know.

I had never seen a black man flying a jet. That instrument panel: no one ever could know what all of those dials meant!

I can’t tell you the feeling it gave me. I had never seen a black man flying a jet.

I never had been in such a jammed mass of people, but I never had felt more alone, and helpless, since I was a baby.

Imagine, being a Muslim minister, a leader in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, and not knowing the prayer ritual.

All of the Muslims listening lighted up like a Christmas tree.

I was angry with myself for not having taken the time to learn more of the orthodox prayer rituals before leaving America.

All ate as One, and slept as One. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God.

In America, he would have been called a white man, but—it struck me, hard and instantly—from the way he acted, I had no feeling of him being a white man.

There had never before been in my emotions such an impulse to pray—and I did, prostrating myself on the living-room rug.

That morning was when I first began to perceive that 'white man,' as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions.

He also pointed out how color, the complexities of color, and the problems of color which exist in the Muslim world, exist only where, and to the extent that, that area of the Muslim world has been influenced by the West.

He said that if one encountered any differences based on attitude toward color, this directly reflected the degree of Western influence.

It was being circumambulated by thousands upon thousands of praying pilgrims, both sexes, and every size, shape, color, and race in the world.

Mecca is surrounded by the crudest-looking mountains I have ever seen; they seem to be made of the slag from a blast furnace.

There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans.

We were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the ‘white’ from their minds, the ‘white’ from their behavior, and the ‘white’ from their attitude.

Never would I have even thought of dreaming that I would ever be a recipient of such honors—honors that in America would be bestowed upon a King—not a Negro.

I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land—every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike—all snored in the same language.

“You…you…you—because of your dark skin, in America you, too, would be called ‘Negro.’ You could be bombed and shot and cattle-prodded and fire-hosed and beaten because of your complexions.”

“Why is the American black man so complacent about being trampled upon? Why doesn’t the American black man fight to be a human being?”

Well, if it was a frightening experience for him as nothing but a make-believe Negro for sixty days—then you think about what real Negroes in America have gone through for four hundred years.

I’ll never get over how the African displays his emotions.

I said that the white man’s efforts to make my name poison actually succeeded only in making millions of black people regard me like Joe Louis.

When I remember seeing black men operating their own communications agencies, a thrill still runs up my spine.

Right there at my Ghanaian breakfast table was where I made up my mind that as long as I was in Africa, every time I opened my mouth, I was going to make things hot for that white man, grinning through his teeth wanting to exploit Africa again.

“The word is not favored here, Mr. Malcolm X. The term Afro-American has greater meaning, and dignity.”

I’m not anti-American, and I didn’t come here to condemn America—I want to make that very clear! I came here to tell the truth—and if the truth condemns America, then she stands condemned!

“How can you condemn Portugal and South Africa while our black people in America are being bitten by dogs and beaten with clubs?”

I cried out of my heart, “Now, dance! Sing! But as you do—remember Mandela, remember Sobokwe! Remember Lumumba in his grave!”

Cassius momentarily seemed uncertain—then he spoke, something almost monosyllabic, like “How are you?”

But I was the “villain” they had come to meet.

In two weeks in the Holy Land, I saw what I never had seen in thirty-nine years here in America.

“Do you mind shaking hands with a white man?” Imagine that! Just as the traffic light turned green, I told him, “I don’t mind shaking hands with human beings. Are you one?”

“Do you mind shaking hands with a white man?” Imagine that! Just as the traffic light turned green, I told him, “I don’t mind shaking hands with human beings. Are you one?”

I remembered how years later, when I was in prison, I used to lie on my cell bunk—this would be especially when I was in solitary: what we convicts called 'The Hole'—and I would picture myself talking to large crowds.

I don’t go for non-violence if it also means a delayed solution. To me a delayed solution is a non-solution.

During his entire advance through history, he has been waving the banner of Christianity…and carrying in his other hand the sword and the flintlock.

A desegregated cup of coffee, a theater, public toilets—the whole range of hypocritcal “integration”—these are not atonement.

That discussion with the ambassador gave me a new insight—one which I like: that the white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly.

I said what I was against was strait-jacketed thinking, and strait-jacketed societies.

I’d watch the dangerous wolf closer than I would the smooth, sly fox.

I was no less angry than I had been, but at the same time the true brotherhood I had seen in the Holy World had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision.

Where the really sincere white people have got to do their “proving” of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is—and that’s in their own home communities.

Sometimes, I have dared to dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice—which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency—that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.

Even before I was a Muslim—when I was a hustler in the ghetto jungle, and then a criminal in prison, it always stayed on my mind that I would die a violent death.

But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

Anyway, now, each day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do.

Anyway, now, each day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do.

“You’re another one of the white man’s tools sent to spy!” he accused me sharply.

Malcolm X repeatedly exclaimed, after particularly blistering anti-Christian or anti-white statements: “You know that devil’s not going to print that!”

I began to light a cigarette and he drily observed, 'That would make you the first person ever to smoke in this automobile.'

This book I dedicate to The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who found me here in America in the muck and mire of the filthiest civilization and society on this earth, and pulled me out, cleaned me up, and stood me on my feet, and made me the man that I am today.

For the first several weeks, he never entered the room where we worked without exclaiming, 'Testing, testing—one, two, three….'

“BM dealing with WM who put our eyes out, now he condemns us because we cannot see.”

One night, suddenly, wildly, he jumped up from his chair and, incredibly, the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, 're-bop-de-bop-blap-blam—'

I’d put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking.

You trust them, and I don’t. You studied what he wanted you to learn about him in schools, I studied him in the streets and in prison, where you see the truth.

The white man does this. He shuts out of his mind, and he builds up subconscious defenses against anything he doesn’t want to face up to.

Look at him laugh. He’s really not laughing, he’s just laughing with his teeth.

The white man is afraid of truth. The truth takes the white man’s breath and drains his strength—you just watch his face get red anytime you tell him a little truth.

The tension on the car could have been cut with a knife.

His voice said, 'I trust you seventy percent'—and then he hung up.

His voice said, “I trust you seventy percent”— and then he hung up.

The first time I ever heard Malcolm X speak of Handler, whom he had recently met, he began, “I was talking with this devil—” and abruptly he cut himself off in obvious embarrassment.

Striding along the sidewalks, he bathed all whom he met in the boyish grin, and his conversation with any who came up was quiet and pleasant. "It’s just what the white devil wants you to do, brother," he might tell a wino, "he wants you to get drunk so he will have an excuse to put a club up beside your head."

“Ahhhh, brother, the white devil has taught you to hate yourself so much that you put hot lye in your hair to make it look more like his hair.”

Malcolm X quickly said to me, firmly, 'Not only don’t write that, never repeat it. Mr. Muhammad would have a fit.'

He scribbled one night, 'You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. John Viscount Morley.'

One hundred years after the Civil War, and these chimpanzees get more recognition, respect and freedom in America than our people do.

How is it possible to write one’s autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

If I’m alive when this book comes out, it will be a miracle.

One of the few times I ever heard his voice betray his hurt was when he said, 'I felt like a blood big-brother to him.'

“I’m a marked man,” he said one day, after such a call. “I’ve had highly placed people tell me to be very careful every move I make.”

I was thinking, some of the time, that if a pebble were dropped from the window behind Malcolm X, it would have struck on a sidewalk eight floors below where years before he had skulked, selling dope.

I was heartsick at the prospect that he might want to re-edit the entire book into a polemic against Elijah Muhammad.

I never again gave him chapters to review unless I was with him. Several times I would covertly watch him frown and wince as he read, but he never again asked for any change in what he had originally said.

“I don’t know if I ought to tell you this or not, but I want to tell the truth.” He eyed me, speculatively. “I palmed the bullet.”

Anyone who wants to follow me and my movement has got to be ready to go to jail, to the hospital, and to the cemetery before he can be truly free.

The New York Times reported that a meeting of Negro intellectuals had agreed that Dr. Martin Luther King could secure the allegiance of the middle and upper classes of Negroes, but Malcolm X alone could secure the allegiance of Negroes at the bottom.

If Malcolm X were not a Negro, his autobiography would be little more than a journal of abnormal psychology, the story of a burglar, dope pusher, addict and jailbird—with a family history of insanity—who acquires messianic delusions and sets forth to preach an upside-down religion of ‘brotherly’ hatred.

Upon his return from Africa, our agent for the book had delivered to me for Malcolm X a check for a sizable sum; soon afterward Malcolm X told me, laughing wryly, 'It’s evaporated. I don’t know where!'

“There is no group in the United States more able to carry out this threat than the Black Muslims,” he said. “I know, because I taught them myself.”

“They won’t let me turn the corner!” he once exclaimed, “I’m caught in a trap!”

Malcolm picked up my walking cane and stuck it out of a back window as if it were a rifle.

“I just want to read it one more time,” he said, “because I don’t expect to read it in finished form.”

He said he wanted to present an alternative; that it might be easier for whites to accept Martin’s proposals after hearing him.

I did many things as a Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march.

I was a zombie then—like all Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march.

I know what they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff recently going on.

“If I can’t be safe among my own kind, where can I be?” he had once said testily.

His voice sounded far away, 'I wonder if anybody really understands—' And he walked out onto the stage, into the applause.

It looked like a firing squad.

The Negro men were visibly fighting their emotions; one kept smashing his fist into the other cupped palm.

Police and reporters at the shooting scene had pictures taken of the stage, with white chalk marks now circling five bullet holes in the speaker’s stand; there were other holes in the stage’s mural backdrop, indicating slugs or shotgun pellets which had either missed Malcolm X or passed through him.

No one believed what he said. They never took him seriously, even after the bombing of our home they said he did it himself!

No one believed what he said. They never took him seriously, even after the bombing of our home they said he did it himself!

At the spectacular five-alarm fire’s height, a wall of the building collapsed; it smashed two fire engines at the curb and injured five firemen, one seriously, and also a pedestrian who had been across the street buying a newspaper.

Shortly after the news became known, Bishop Childs and his wife began to receive the first of a succession of bomb threats telephoned both to the church and to their home.

Master spellbinder that he was, Malcolm X in death cast a spell more far-flung and more disturbing than any he cast in life.

All this about an ex-convict, ex-dope peddler who became a racial fanatic.

The Ghanaian Times, Accra, called Malcolm X “the militant and most popular of Afro-American anti-segregationist leaders” and it added his name to “a host of Africans and Americans” ranging from John Brown to Patrice Lumumba “who were martyred in freedom’s cause.”

The ghost of Malcolm X was in the coliseum.

He was a star, who went astray!…They knew I didn’t harm Malcolm, but he tried to make war against me.

When reporters rushed to attempt interviews, another man in the party waved them away, saying, 'A silent tongue does not betray its owner.'

All I could think was that it was he, all right—Malcolm X. “ Move on”—the policeman’ s voice was soft. Malcolm look ed to me— just wax y and dead .

And we will know him then for what he was and is—a Prince—our own black shining Prince!—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.

When the family left the gravesite, followers of Malcolm X would not let the coffin be covered by the white grave-diggers who had stood a little distance away, waiting.

He was one of the most fascinating and charming men I have ever met, and never hesitated to take his attractiveness and beat you to death with it.

He was one of the most fascinating and charming men I have ever met, and never hesitated to take his attractiveness and beat you to death with it.

I thought at least that now, when all the white folks are safe from him at last, I could be honest with myself enough to lift my hat for one final salute to that brave, black, ironic gallantry, which was his style and hallmark, that shocking zing of fire-and-be-damned-to-you.

“You know, it was like having tea with a black panther.”

It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.

With one twist of his big black hands he simply twisted off the head and threw the bleeding-necked thing back at my mother’s feet.

It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers.

They would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, the same way people would talk freely in front of a pet canary.

A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger.

The congolene just felt warm when Shorty started combing it in. But then my head caught fire.

And even Duke Ellington half raised up from his piano stool and bowed.

Within the first five minutes in Small’s, I had left Boston and Roxbury forever.

These wives were so disagreeable and had made their men so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men.

He stared at me as if I were a snake’s egg hatching, fumbling for his red pencil.

She knew from personal experience how crime existed only to the degree that the law cooperated with it.

A .32-20 is a funny kind of gun. It’s bigger than a .32. But it’s not as big as a .38. I had faced down some dangerous Negroes. But no one who wasn’t ready to die messed with West Indian Archie.

He stood back; he watched me as though I were a snake.

He got red from the neck up and shuffled his papers: “You had no business with white girls!”

I would pace for hours like a caged leopard, viciously cursing aloud to myself.

Reginald knew how my street-hustler mind operated. That’s why his approach was so effective.

Picking a lock to rob someone’ s house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

It was like an electrical shock. Not looking at me directly, he asked me to stand.

For me, my 'X' replaced the white slavemaster name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.

When I saw our Brother Hinton, it was all I could do to contain myself; blood had bathed his head and face and shoulder.

He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion.

The child stays within the mother until the time of birth! When the time of birth arrives, the child must be separated, or it will destroy its mother and itself.

Their self-brainwashing had been so complete that not long after, in the gas chambers, a lot of them were still gasping, 'It can’t be true!'

Awareness came surging up in me—how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, to save me from being what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave.

When I discovered who else wanted me dead, I am telling you—it nearly sent me to Bellevue.

I said what I honestly felt—that it was, as I saw it, a case of 'the chickens coming home to roost.'

That was how I first began to realize that I had believed in Mr. Muhammad more than he believed in himself.

I knew that no one would kill you quicker than a Muslim if he felt that’s what Allah wanted him to do.

In America, he would have been called a white man, but—it struck me, hard and instantly—from the way he acted, I had no feeling of him being a white man.

It was being circumambulated by thousands upon thousands of praying pilgrims, both sexes, and every size, shape, color, and race in the world.

We were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the ‘white’ from their minds, the ‘white’ from their behavior, and the ‘white’ from their attitude.

But I was the “villain” they had come to meet.

Sometimes, I have dared to dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice—which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency—that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.

It looked like a firing squad.

And we will know him then for what he was and is—a Prince—our own black shining Prince!—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.