The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

He believed, as did Marcus Garvey, that freedom, independence and self-respect could never be achieved by the Negro in America, and that therefore the Negro should leave America to the white man and return to his African land of origin.

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

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

Whites have always hidden or justified all of the guilts they could by ridiculing or blaming Negroes.

All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life—that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business—you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.

All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.

I told Reginald what I had learned: that in order to get something you had to look as though you already had something.

To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

“You don’t even know who you are,” Reginald had said. “You don’t even know, the white devil has hidden it from you, that you are a race of people of ancient civilizations, and riches in gold and kings.

“The devil white man,” down through history, out of his devilish nature, had pillaged, murdered, raped, and exploited every race of man not white.

Human history’s greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.

The devil white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth’s only race o...

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

This religion taught the “Negro” that black was a curse. It taught him to hate everything black, including himself.

Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth.

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.

Then, the first humans, Original Man, were a black people. They founded the Holy City Mecca.

Among this black race were twenty-four wise scientists. One of the scientists, at odds with the rest, created the especially strong black tribe of Shabazz, from which America’s Negroes, so-called, descend.

About sixty-six hundred years ago, when seventy percent of the people were satisfied, and thirty per cent were dissatisfied, among th...

He was known as “the big-head scientist.” Among many other things, he had learned how to breed races scientifically.

This big-head scientist, Mr. Yacub, began preaching in the streets of Mecca, making such hosts of converts that the authorities, increasingly concerned, finally exiled him with 59,999 followers to the island of Patmos—described in the Bible as the island where John received the message contained in Revelations in the New Testament.

Though he was a black man, Mr. Yacub, embittered toward Allah now, decided, as revenge, to create upon the earth a devil race—a...

From his studies, the big-head scientist knew that black men contained two ...

The humans resulting, he knew, would be, as they became lighter, and weaker, progressively also more susceptible to wickedness and evil.

He knew that it would take him several total color-change stages to get from black to white. Mr. Yacub began his work by setting up a eugenics law on the island of Patmos.

According to the teachings of Mr. Elijah Muhammad, Mr. Yacub, except in his mind, never saw the bleached-out devil race that his procedures and laws and rules created.

A two-hundred-year span was needed to eliminate on the island of Patmos all of the black people—until only brown people remained. The next two hundred years were needed to create from the brown race the red race—with no more browns left on the island. In another two hundred years, from the red race was created the yellow race. Two hundred years later—the white race had at last been created.

On the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils—savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they wal...

Mr. Elijah Muhammad teaches his followers that within six months time, through telling lies that set the black men fighting among each other, this devil race had turned what had been a peaceful heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarreling and fighting.

But finally the original black people recognized that their sudden troubles stemmed from this devil white race that Mr. Yacub had made. They rounded them up,

With little aprons to cover their nakedness, this devil race was marched off across the Arabian d...

When this devil race had spent two thousand years in the caves, Allah raised up Moses to civilize them, and bring them out of the caves.

It was written that this devil white race would rule the world for six thousand years.

“Yacub’s History,” when the Bible says “Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” that serpent is symbolic of the devil white race Moses lifted up out of the caves of Europe, teaching them civilization.

It was written that after Yacub’s bleached white race had ruled the world for six thousand years—down to our time—the black original race would give birth to one whose wisdom, knowledge, and power would be infinite.

The black prisoner, he said, symbolized white society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals.

How would I sound writing in slang, the way I would say it, something such as “Look, daddy, let me pull your coat about a cat, Elijah Muhammad—”

Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened.

The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been “whitened”—when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out.

Wonders of the World.

found books like Will Durant’s Story of Civilization. I read H. G. Wells’ Outline of History. Souls Of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois gave me a glimpse into the black people’s history before they came to this country. Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History opened my eyes about black empires before the black slave was brought to the United States, and the early Negro struggles for freedom.

J. A. Rogers’ three volumes of Sex and Race told about race-mixing before Christ’s time; about Aesop being a black man who told fables; about Egypt’s Pharaohs; about the great Coptic Christian Empires; about Ethiopia, the earth’s oldest continuous black civilization, as China is the oldest continuous civilization.

Mr. Muhammad’s teaching about how the white man had been created led me to Findings In ...

Reading it over and over, especially certain sections, helped me to understand that if you started with a black man, a white man could be produced; but starting with a white man, you never could produce a black man—because the white gene is recessive. And since no one disputes that there was but one Original Man, the conclusion is clear.

Toynbee also referred to the European geographic area as only a peninsula of Asia. He said there is no such thing as Europe. And if you look at the globe, you will see for yourself that America is only an extension of Asia. (But at the same time Toynbee is among those who have

He has written that Africa was the only continent that produced no history. He won’t write that again. Every day now, the truth is coming to light.)

The world’s most monstrous crime, the sin and the blood on the white man’s hands, are almost impossible to believe.

Books like the one by Frederick Olmstead opened my eyes to the horrors suffered when the slave was landed in the United States. The European woman, Fannie Kimball, who had married a Southern white slaveowner, described how human beings were degraded. Of course I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.