The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

read about the slave preacher Nat Turner, who put the fear of God into the white slavemaster.

read Herodotus, “the father of History,” or, rather, I read about him.

Will Durant’s story of Oriental civilization, and Mahatma Gandhi’s accounts of the struggle to drive the British out of India.

Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation.

I perceived, as I read, how the collective white man had been actually nothing but a piratical opportunist who used Faustian machinations to make his own Christianity his initial wedge in criminal conquests.

read how, entering India—half a billion deeply religious brown people—the British white man, by 1759, through promises, trickery and manipulations, controlled much of India through Great Britain’s East India Company. The parasitical British administration kept tentacling out to half of the subcontinent. In 1857, some of the desperate people of India finally mutinied—and, excepting the African slave trade, nowhere has history recorded any more unnecessary bestial and ruthless human carnage than the British suppression of the non-white Indian people.

Over 115 million African blacks—close to the 1930’s population of the United States—were murdered or enslaved during the slave trade. And I read how when the slave market was glutted, the cannibalistic white powers of Europe next carved up, as their colonies, the richest areas of the black continent.

Ten guards and the warden couldn’t have torn me out of those books. Not even Elijah Muhammad could have been more eloquent than those books were in providing indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world’s collective non-white man.

If the American black man will start thinking about his human rights, and then start thinking of himself as part of one of the world’s great peoples, he will see he has a case for the United Nations.

I have with me a book that I want to read—and that’s a lot of books these days.

And today the white man is faced head on with what is happening on the Black Continent, Africa. Look at the artifacts being discovered there, that are proving over and over again, how the black man had great, fine, sensitive civilizations before the white man was out of the caves.

Gold work of such fine tolerance and workmanship that it has no rival. Ancient objects produced by black hands…refined by those black hands with results that no human hand today can equal.

This species of man lived 1,818,036 years before Christ. And these bones were found in Tanganyika. In the Black Continent.

It’s a crime, the lie that has been told to generations of black men and white men both. Little innocent black children, born of parents who believed that their race had no history. Little black children seeing, before they could talk, that their parents considered themselves inferior.

I’d explain to them that the real truth was known to some white men, the scholars; but there had been a conspiracy down through the generations to keep the truth from black men.

You let this caged-up black man start realizing, as I did, how from the first landing of the first slave ship, the millions of black men in America have been like sheep in a den of wolves.

My reading had my mind like steam under pressure. Some way, I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face.

In the prison debates I argued for the theory that King James himself was the real poet who used the nom de plume Shakespeare. King James was brilliant. He was the greatest king

“Christianity is the white man’s religion. The Holy Bible in the white man’s hands and his interpretations of it have been the greatest single ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white human beings. Every country the white man has conquered with his guns, he has always paved the way, and salved his conscience, by carrying the Bible and interpreting it to call the people ‘heathens’ and ‘pagans’; then he sends his guns, then his missionaries behind the guns to mop up—” White reporters, anger in their voices, would call us “demagogues,” and I would try to be ready after I had been asked the same question two or three times.

‘Demagogue’ means, actually, ‘teacher of the people.’

“Black bodies with white heads!” I called them what they were. Every one of those “Negro progress” organizations had the same composition.

Segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. But separation is that which is done voluntarily, by two equals—for the good of both! The

Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that as long as our people here in America are dependent upon the white man, we will always be begging him for jobs, food, clothing, and housing. And he will always control our lives, regulate our lives, and have the power to segregate us.

The Negro here in America has been treated like a child. A child stays within the mother until the time of birth! When the time of birth arrives, the child must be separ...

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! It is a miracle that the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man’s heaven!

“Our enemy is the white man!

“And why is Mr. Muhammad’s teaching us this such a great thing? Because when you know who your enemy is, he can no longer keep you divided, and fighting, one brother against the other!

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 b...

“My black brothers and sisters—no one will know who we are…until we know who we are! We never will be able to go anywhere until we know where we are! The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is giving us a true identity, and a true position—the first time they have ever been known to the American black man!

So over you is the greatest enemy a man can have—and that is fear.

“Your slavemaster, he brought you over here, and of your past everything was destroyed. Today, you do not know your true language. What tribe are you from? You would not recognize your tribe’s name if you heard it. 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! The white slavemaster, who hates you!

“You are a people who think you know all about the Bible, and all about Christianity. You even are foolish enough to believe that nothing is right but Christianity!

He has taught you, for his benefit, that you are a neutral, shiftless, helpless so-called ‘Negro.’

say ‘so-called’ because you are not a ‘Negro.’ There is no such thing as a race of ‘Negroes.’ You are members of the Asiatic nation, from the tribe of Shabazz! ‘Negro’ is a false label forced on you by your slavemaster!

He has been pushing things onto you and me and our kind ever since he brought the first slave shipl...

“The ignorance we of the black race here in America have, and the self-hatred we have, they are fine examples of what the white slavemaster has seen fit to teach to us.

Do we show the plain common sense, like every other people on this planet Earth, to unite among ourselves? No! We are humbling ourselves, sitting-in, and begging-in, trying to unite with the slavemaster!

I don’t seem able to imagine any more ridiculous sight. A thousand ways every day, the white man is telling you ‘You can’t live here, you can’t enter here, you can’t eat here, drink here, walk here, work here, you ca...

Haven’t we yet seen enough to see that he has no plan to unite with you? “You have tilled his fields! Cooked his food! Washed his clothes! You have cared ...

In many cases, you have even suckled him at your breast! You have been far and away better Christians than this slavemast...

“You have sweated blood to help him build a country so rich that he can today afford to give away millions—even to his enemies! And when those enemies have gotten enough from him to then be able to attack him, you have been his brave soldiers, dying for him. And you have bee...

“And, still, this Christian American white man has not got it in him to find the human decency, and enough sense of justice, to recognize us, and accept us, the black people who ha...

“So let us, the black people, separate ourselves from this white man slavemaster, who despises us so much! You are out here begging him for some so-called ‘integration’!

But what is this slavemaster white, rapist, going about saying! He is saying he won’t integrate because black blood will mongrelize his race! He says that—and look at us! Turn around in your seats and look at each other! 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!”

“He has left such a little black in us,” Mr. Muhammad would go on, “that now he despises us so bad—meaning he despises himself, for what he has done to us—that he tells us that legally if we have got one drop of black blood in us, that means you are all-black as far as his laws are concerned! Well, if that’s all we’ve got left, we want to reclaim that one drop!”

“So let us separate from this white man, and for the same reason he says—in time to save ourselves from any more ‘integration’!

“Why shouldn’t this white man who likes to think and call himself so good, and so generous, this white man who finances even his enemies—why shouldn’t he subsidize a separate state, a separate territory, for we black people who have been such faithful slaves and servants?

A separate territory on which we can lift ourselves out of these white man’s slums for us,...

We never have done what we could—because we have been brainwashed so well by the slavemaster white man that we must come to him, begging him, for everything we want, and need—”

“We black people don’t know what we can do. You never can know what anything can do—until it is set free, to act by itself!