The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

Because when you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer use trickery, promises, lies, hypocrisy, and his evil acts to keep you deaf, dumb, and blinded!

“When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, 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!—This enemy who tells you that you are both supposed to be worshiping th...

“The white man would love to support Mr. Elijah Muhammad. Because if Mr. Muhammad had to rely on his support, he could advise Mr. Muhammad. My black brothers and sisters, it is only because your money, black money, supports Mr. Muhammad, that he can hold these all-black meetings from city to city, telling us black men the truth! That’s why we are asking for your all-black support!”

“But, Brother Malcolm, there is something you need to know. You will grow to be hated when you become well known. Because usually people get jealous of public figures.” Nothing that Mr. Muhammad ever said to me was more prophetic.

An amazing percentage of the white letter-writers agreed entirely with Mr. Muhammad’s analysis of the problem—but not with his solution. One odd ambivalence was how some letters, otherwise all but championing Mr. Muhammad, would recoil at the expression “white devils.” I tried to explain this in subsequent speeches:

“Unless we call one white man, by name, a ‘devil,’ we are not speaking of any individual

white man. We are speaking of the collective white man’s historical record. We are speaking of the collective white man’s cruelties, and evils, and greeds, that have seen him act like a devil toward the non-white man. Any intelligent, honest, objective person cannot fail to realize that this white man’s slave trade, and his subsequent devilish actions are directly responsible for not only the presence of this black man in America, but also for the condition in which we find this black man here. You cannot find one ...

Or when I had made some absolutely true point, “Malcolm X conveniently manipulated…”

Lol

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.

History shows that an educated slave always begins to ask, and next demand, equality with his master.

Now my feeling was that although the civil rights “leaders” kept attacking us Muslims, still they were black people, still they were our own kind, and I would be most foolish to let the white man maneuver me against the civil rights movement.

(Sometimes I think I really might have made it as a lawyer,

to give more jobs to Negroes to remove so many of them from the relief and welfare rolls, which created laziness, and which deteriorated the ghettoes into steadily worse places for humans to live.

You never have to worry about me biting my tongue if something I know as truth is on my mind.

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.

militant, unorganized, and leaderless.

The White House speedily invited in the major civil rights Negro “leaders.” They were asked to stop the planned March. They truthfully said they hadn’t begun it, they had no control over it—the idea was national, spontaneous, unorganized, and leaderless. In other words, it was a black powder keg.

Any student of how “integration” can weaken the black man’s movement was about to observe a master lesson. The White House, with a fanfare of international publicity, “approved,” “endorsed,” and “welcomed” a March on Washington.

how much this country goes in for the surface glossing over, the escape ruse, surfaces, instead of truly dealing with its deep-rooted problems.

look at it very practically, whether they know it or not: that all of the bigotry and hatred focused upon the black man keeps off the Jew a lot of heat that would be on him otherwise. For an example of what I am talking about—in every black ghetto, Jews own the major businesses. Every night the owners of those businesses go home with that black community’s money, which helps the ghetto to stay poor.

it doesn’t mean that I am anti-Semitic; it means merely that I am antiexploitation.

“People’s deeds I believe in, Miss—not their words.”

“What can I do?” she exclaimed. I told her, “Nothing.” She burst out crying, and ran out and up Lenox Avenue and caught a taxi.

Standing there by that Harvard window, I silently vowed to Allah that I never would forget that any wings I wore had been put on by the religion of Islam. That fact I never have forgotten…not for one second.

The worst thing in the hustler’s world was to be a dupe.

had told them I was the best, the greatest minister he ever had, but that someday I would leave him, turn against him—so I was “dangerous.” 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. That deeply hurt me.

“I’m David,” he said. “When you read about how David took another man’s wife, I’m that David. You read about Noah, who got drunk—that’s me. You read about Lot, who went and laid up with his own daughters. I have to fulfill all of those things.”

It was so pleasant. I almost forgot the heavy worries on my mind—for that brief respite.

remember we wound up agreeing that by the year 2000, every schoolchild will be taught the true color of great men of antiquity.

The question-and-answer period opened, I suppose inevitably, with someone asking me, “What do you think about President Kennedy’s assassination? What is your opinion?” Without a second thought, I said what I honestly felt—that it was, as I saw it, a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.”

in far stronger ways than I did, that America’s climate of hate had been

responsible for the President’s death. But when Malcolm X said the same thing, it was ominous.

“I’ll have to silence you for the next ninety days—so that the Muslims everywhere can be disassociated from the blunder.”

Many times I had said to my own assistants that anyone in a position to discipline others must be able to take disciplining himself.

This made me suspicious—for the first time. I had completely submitted. But, deliberately, Muslims were being given the impression that I had rebelled.

I hadn’t hustled in the streets for years for nothing. I knew when I was being set up.

Some contagious quality about him made him one of the very few people I ever invited to my home.

Primarily, I impressed upon him to what a great extent a public figure’s success depends upon how alert and knowledgeable he is to the true natures and to the true motives of all of the people who flock around him.

Step three would be either to provoke some Muslim ignorant of the truth to take it upon himself to kill me as a “religious duty”—or to “isolate” me so that I would gradually disappear from the public scene.

Wow

and I knew that whatever happened, she was with me.

to save the heavyweight crown from being held by a Muslim. 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.

Patterson was offering to sell his $140,000 house for a $20,000 loss. He had “integrated” into a neighborhood of whites who had made his life miserable.

The first direct order for my death was issued through a Mosque Seven official who previously had been a close assistant.

But this brother, it happened, had seen too much of my total loyalty to the Nation to carry out his order. Instead, he came to me.

had enough experience to know that in order to be a good organizer of anything which you expect to succeed—including yourself—you must almost mathematically analyze cold facts.

I knew that in any society, a true leader is one who earns and deserves the following he enjoys.

I knew that the great lack of most of the big-named “Negro leaders” was their lack of any true rapport with the ghetto Negroes.

What makes the ghetto hustler yet more dangerous is his “glamor” image to the school-dropout youth in the ghetto. These ghetto teen-agers see the hell caught by their parents struggling to get somewhere,

Even to this day, that’s crazy

knew the ghetto instinctively extends that trust only to one who had demonstrated that he would never sell them out to the white man. I not only had no such intention—to sell out was not even in my nature.

There is no secrets to leadership, simply care for your people above all and the rest will come.

“I am going to organize and head a new mosque in New York City known as the Muslim Mosque, Inc.