The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

“We, the black people here in America, we never have been free to find out what we really can do! We have knowledge and experience to pool to do for ourselves!

ThiS bought me to tears

All of our lives we have farmed—we can grow our own food. We can set up factories to manufacture our own necessities! We can build other kinds of businesses, to establish trade, and commerce—and become independent, as other civilized people are— “We can throw off our brainwashing, and our self-hate, and live as brothers together…

some land of our own!…Something for ourselves!…leave this white slav...

These intellectual and professional Negroes couldn’t use what they knew for the benefit of their own black kind simply because even among themselves they were disunited. United among themselves, united with their own kind, they could have benefited black people all over the world!

That’s a powerful combination for a man who has been existing in the mud of society. In fact, once he is motivated no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom.

The word “integration” was invented by a Northern liberal. The word has no real meaning.

Human rights! Respect as human beings! That’s what America’s black masses want.

Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending any more time than they must around white people.

The black masses prefer the company of their own kind.

I’m telling it like it is! You never have to worry about me biting my tongue if something I know as truth is on my mind.

Its characteristic design permitted the white man to feel “noble” about throwing crumbs to the black man, instead of feeling guilty about the local community’s system of cruelly exploiting Negroes.

The American black man should be focusing his every effort toward building his own businesses, and decent homes for himself.

As other ethnic groups have done, let the black people, wherever possible, however possible, patronize their own kind, hire their own kind, and start in those ways to build up the black race’s ability to do for itself.

That’s the only way the American black man is ever goi...

One thing the white man never can give the black man is self-respect! The black man never can become independent and recognized as a human being who is truly equal with other human beings until he has what they have, and until ...

neighborhoods. And the way most Negroes feel today, a mixed couple probably finds that black families, black communities, are even more hostile than the white ones.

So what’s bound to face “integrated” marriages, except being unwelcomed, unwanted, “misfits” in whichever world they try to live in?

What we arrive at is that “integration,” socially, is no good for either side. “Integration,” ultimately, would destroy the wh...

The white man’s “integrating” with black women has already changed the complexion and characteristics...

I’m told that there are in America today between two and five million “white Negroes,” who are “passing” in white society.

Imagine their torture! Living in constant fear that some black person they’ve known might meet and expose them. 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.”

They had been aware that the plight of the black man in America was “bad,” but they had not been aware that it was inhuman, that it was a psychological castration.

“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other prophets of the Holy Scriptures.

“I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca. I have made my seven circuits around the Ka’ba, led by a young Mutawaf named Muhammad. I drank water from the well of Zem Zem. I ran seven times back and forth between the hills of Mt. Al-Safa and Al-Marwah. I have prayed in the ancient city of Mina, and I have prayed on Mt. Arafat.

“America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered ‘white’—but the ‘white’ attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam.

“You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.

Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it.

I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form ...

“During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug)—while praying to the same God—with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hai...

“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.

I told him, “What you are telling me is that it isn’t the American white man who is a racist, but it’s the American political, economic, and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.”

We both agreed that American society makes it next to impossible for humans to meet in America and not be conscious of their color differences.

And we both agreed that if racism could be removed, America could offer a society where rich and poor coul...

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 racis...

I said I respected every man’s right to believe whatever his intelligence tells him is intellectually sound, and I expect everyone else to respect my right to believe likewise.

“Conservatism” in America’s politics means “Let’s keep the niggers in their place.” And “liberalism” means “Let’s keep the knee-grows in their place—but tell them we’ll treat them a little better; let’s fool them more, with more promises.” With these choices, I felt that the American black man only needed to choose which one to be eaten by, the “liberal” fox or the “conservative” wolf—because both of them would eat him.

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; America’s racism is among their own fellow whites.

That’s where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.

I sure don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but in fact I’ll even go so far as to say that I never really trust the kind of white people who are always so anxious to hang around Negroes, or to hang around in Negro communities.

I don’t trust the kind of whites who love having Negroes always hanging around them.

During nineteen fifty-nine, when the public was becoming aware of the Muslims after the New York telecast “The Hate That Hate Produced,” I was in San Francisco, about to retire after twenty years in the U.S. Coast Guard. A friend returned from a visit to her Detroit home and told me of a startling “black man’s” religion, “The Nation of Islam,” to which, to her surprise, her entire family was converted. I listened with incredulity to how a “mad scientist Mr. Yacub” had genetically “grafted” the white race from an original black people.

“Only persons really changed history those who changed men’s thinking about themselves. Hitler as well as Jesus, Stalin as well as Buddha…Hon. Elijah Muhammad….”

“Learn wisdom from the pupil of the eye that looks upon all things and yet to self is blind. Persian poet.”

The Loom of Language?”