The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

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

I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

a can of Red Devil lye, two eggs, and two medium-sized white potatoes. Then at a drugstore near the poolroom, I asked for a large jar of vaseline, a large bar of soap, a large-toothed comb and a fine-toothed comb, one of those rubber hoses with a metal spray-head, a rubber apron and a pair of gloves.

He peeled the potatoes and thin-sliced them into a quart-sized Mason fruit jar, then started stirring them with a wooden spoon as he gradually poured in a little over half the can of lye. “Never use a metal spoon; the lye will turn it black,” he told me. A jelly-like, starchy-looking glop resulted from the lye and potatoes, and Shorty broke in the two eggs, stirring real fast—his own conk and dark face bent down close. The congolene turned pale-yellowish. “Feel the jar,” Shorty said. I cupped my hand against the outside, and snatched it away. “Damn right, it’s hot, that’s the lye,” he said. “So you know it’s going to burn when I comb it in—it burns bad. But the longer you can stand it, the straighter the hair.”

It was maybe halfway in the number before I became aware of how she danced. If you’ve ever lindy-hopped, you’ll know what I’m talking about. With most girls, you kind of work opposite them, circling, side-stepping, leading. Whichever arm you lead with is half-bent out there, your hands are giving that little pull, that little push, touching her waist, her shoulders, her arms. She’s in, out, turning, whirling, wherever you guide her. With poor partners, you feel their weight. They’re slow and heavy. But with really good partners, all you need is just the push-pull suggestion. They guide nearly effortlessly, even off the floor and into the air, and your little solo maneuver is done on the floor before they land, when they join you, whirling, right in step. I’d danced with plenty of good partners. But what I became suddenly aware of with Laura was that I’d never before felt so little weight! I’d nearly just think a maneuver, and she’d respond. Anyway, as she danced up, down, under my arm, flinging out, while I felt her out and examined her style, I glimpsed her footwork. I can close my eyes right now and see it, like some blurring ballet—beautiful! And her lightness, like a shadow!

But little Laura inspired me to drive to new heights. Her hair was all over her face, it was running sweat, and I couldn’t believe her strength. The crowd was shouting and stomping. A new favorite was being discovered; there was a wall of noise around us. I felt her weakening, she was lindying like a fighter out on her feet, and we stumbled off to the sidelines. The band was still blasting. I had to half-carry her; she was gasping for air. Some of the men in the band applauded. And even Duke Ellington half raised up from his piano stool and bowed.

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.

Many times since, I have thought about it, and what it really meant. In one sense, we were huddled in there, bonded together in seeking security and warmth and comfort from each other, and we didn’t know it. 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.

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

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

This is still one of the black man’s big troubles today. So many of those so-called “upper class” Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are “different from those others” that they can’t see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.

can be observed in many groups

Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.

Norfolk Prison Colony represented the most enlightened form of prison that I have ever heard of. In place of the atmosphere of malicious gossip, perversion, grafting, hateful guards, there was more relative “culture,” as “culture” is interpreted in prisons. A high percentage of the Norfolk Prison Colony inmates went in for “intellectual” things, group discussions, debates, and such. Instructors for the educational rehabilitation programs came from Harvard, Boston University, and other educational institutions in the area. The visiting rules, far more lenient than other prisons’, permitted visitors almost every day, and allowed them to stay two hours.

I read, I saw, how the white man never has gone among the non-white peoples bearing the Cross in the true manner and spirit of Christ’s teachings—meek, humble, and Christ-like. 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. First, always “religiously,” he branded “heathen” and “pagan” labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations. The stage thus set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons of war.

When I discovered philosophy, I tried to touch all the landmarks of philosophical development. Gradually, I read most of the old philosophers, Occidental and Oriental. The Oriental philosophers were the ones I came to prefer; finally, my impression was that most Occidental philosophy had largely been borrowed from the Oriental thinkers.

But I will tell you that, right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been. Standing up there, the faces looking up at me, things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate—once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating. Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I’d track down and study everything I could find on it. I’d put myself in my opponent’s place and decide how I’d try to win if I had the other side; and then I’d figure a way to knock down those points.

I had not intended to stray off. I had been telling how in 1963, I was trying to cope with the white newspaper, radio, and television reporters who were determined to defeat Mr. Muhammad’s teachings. I developed a mental image of reporters as human ferrets—steadily sniffing, darting, probing for some way to trick me, somehow to corner me in our interview exchanges. Let some civil rights “leader” make some statement, displeasing to the white public power structure, and the reporters, in an effort to whip him back into line, would try to use me. I’ll give an example. I’d get a question like this: “Mr. Malcolm X, you’ve often gone on record as disapproving of the sit-ins and similar Negro protest actions—what is your opinion of the Montgomery boycott that Dr. King is leading?” 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. When I was asked about the Montgomery boycott, I’d carefully review what led up to it. Mrs. Rosa Parks was riding home on a bus and at some bus stop the white cracker bus driver ordered Mrs. Parks to get up and give her seat to some white passenger who had just got on the bus. I’d say, “Now, just imagine that! This good, hard-working, Christian-believing black woman, she’s paid her money, she’s in her seat. Just because she’s black, she’s asked to get up! I mean, s...

Except for all-black audiences, I liked the college audiences best. The college sessions sometimes ran two to four hours—they often ran overtime. Challenges, queries, and criticisms were fired at me by the usually objective and always alive and searching minds of undergraduate and graduate students, and their faculties. The college sessions never failed to be exhilarating. They never failed in helping me to further my own education. I never experienced one college session that didn’t show me ways to improve upon my presentation and defense of Mr. Muhammad’s teachings. Sometimes in a panel or debate appearance, I’d find a jam-packed audience to hear me, alone, facing six or eight student and faculty scholars—heads of departments such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, and religion, and each of them coming at me in his specialty.

It was like being on a battlefield—with intellectual and philosophical bullets. It was an exciting battling with ideas. I got so I could feel my audiences’ temperaments. I’ve talked with other public speakers; they agree that this ability is native to any person who has the “mass appeal” gift, who can get through to and move people. It’s a psychic radar. As a doctor, with his finger against a pulse, is able to feel the heart rate, when I am up there speaking, I can feel the reaction to what I am saying.

Whenever any group can vote in a bloc, and decide the outcome of elections, and it fails to do this, then that group is politically sick. Immigrants once made Tammany Hall the most powerful single force in American politics. In 1880, New York City’s first Irish Catholic Mayor was elected and by 1960 America had its first Irish Catholic President. America’s black man, voting as a bloc, could wield an even more powerful force. U.S. politics is ruled by special-interest blocs and lobbies. What group has a more urgent special interest, what group needs a bloc, a lobby, more than the black man? Labor owns one of Washington’s largest non-government buildings—situated where they can literally watch the White House—and no political move is made that doesn’t involve how Labor feels about it. A lobby got Big Oil its depletion allowance. The farmer, through his lobby, is the most government-subsidized special-interest group in America today, because a million farmers vote, not as Democrats, or Republicans, liberals, conservatives, but as farmers. Doctors have the best lobby in Washington. Their special-interest influence successfully fights the Medicare program that’s wanted, and needed, by millions of other people.

That morning was when I first began to reappraise the “white man.” It was when I first began to perceive that “white man,” as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, “white man” meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about “white” men. I should quote from my notebook here. I wrote this about noon, in the hotel: “My excitement, sitting here, waiting to go before the Hajj Committee, is indescribable. My window faces to the sea westward. The streets are filled with the incoming pilgrims from all over the world. The prayers are to Allah and verses from the Quran are on the lips of everyone. Never have I seen such a beautiful sight, nor witnessed such a scene, nor felt such an atmosphere.

“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. This was not too difficult for me. 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 of intelligent search for truth.

where true brotherhood existed among all colors, where no one felt segregated, where there was no “superiority” complex, no “inferiority” complex—then voluntarily, naturally, people of the same kind felt drawn together by that which they had in common.

I was astonished at the degree to which the major single image of America seemed to be discrimination.

They were true revolutionists, not afraid of death. They had, for so long, faced death.

“It was in the Holy World that my attitude was changed, by what I experienced there, and by what I witnessed there, in terms of brotherhood—not just brotherhood toward me, but brotherhood between all men, of all nationalities and complexions, who were there. And now that I am back in America, my attitude here concerning white people has to be governed by what my black brothers and I experience here, and what we witness here—in terms of brotherhood. The problem here in America is that we meet such a small minority of individual so-called ‘good,’ or ‘brotherly’ white people. Here in the United States, notwithstanding those few ‘good’ white people, it is the collective 150 million white people whom the collective 22 million black people have to deal with! “Why, here in America, the seeds of racism are so deeply rooted in the white people collectively, their belief that they are ‘superior’ in some way is so deeply rooted, that these things are in the national white subconsciousness. Many whites are even actually unaware of their own racism, until they face some test, and then their racism emerges in one form or another.

In my thirty-nine years on this earth, the Holy City of Mecca had been the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being.

Mankind’s history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual. Men are attracted by spirit. By power, men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power, anxieties are created.

“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.” He agreed. 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 could truly live like human beings.

America’s racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.

I said I was seeking for the truth, and I was trying to weigh—objectively—everything on its own merit. I said what I was against was strait-jacketed thinking, and strait-jacketed societies. 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.

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.

You have seen how throughout my life, I have often known unexpected drastic changes. I am only facing the facts when I know that any moment of any day, or any night, could bring me death.

To come right down to it, if I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred percent dedication I have to whatever I believe in—these are ingredients which make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.

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.

Those who would hunt a man need to remember that a jungle also contains those who hunt the hunters.

And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America—then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.

We got off to a very poor start. To use a word he liked, I think both of us were a bit “spooky.” Sitting right there and staring at me was the fiery Malcolm X who could be as acid toward Negroes who angered him as he was against whites in general. On television, in press conferences, and at Muslim rallies, I had heard him bitterly attack other Negro writers as “Uncle Toms,” “yard Negroes,” “black men in white clothes.” And there I sat staring at him, proposing to spend a year plumbing his innermost secrets when he had developed a near phobia for secrecy during his years of crime and his years in the Muslim hierarchy. My twenty years in military service and my Christian religious persuasion didn’t help, either; he often jeered publicly at these affiliations for Negroes. And although he now would indirectly urge me to write for national magazines about the Muslims, he had told me several times, in various ways, that “you blacks with professional abilities of any kind will one of these days wake up and find out that you must unite under the leadership of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad for your own salvation.” Malcolm X was also convinced that the F.B.I. had “bugged” my studio; he probably suspected that it may even have been done with my cooperation.

Then one night, Malcolm X arrived nearly out on his feet from fatigue. For two hours, he paced the floor delivering a tirade against Negro leaders who were attacking Elijah Muhammad and himself. I don’t know what gave me the inspiration to say once when he paused for breath, “I wonder if you’d tell me something about your mother?” Abruptly he quit pacing, and the look he shot at me made me sense that somehow the chance question had hit him. When I look back at it now, I believe I must have caught him so physically weak that his defenses were vulnerable. Slowly, Malcolm X began to talk, now walking in a tight circle. “She was always standing over the stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat. We stayed so hungry that we were dizzy. I remember the color of dresses she used to wear—they were a kind of faded-out gray….” And he kept on talking until dawn, so tired that the big feet would often almost stumble in their pacing. From this stream-of-consciousness reminiscing I finally got out of him the foundation for this book’s beginning chapters, “Nightmare” and “Mascot.” After that night, he never again hesitated to tell me even the most intimate details of his personal life, over the next two years. His talking about his mother triggered something.

But when Malcolm X returned this time, he reported triumphantly, “I have something to tell you that will surprise you. Ever since we discussed my mother, I’ve been thinking about her. I realized that I had blocked her out of my mind—it was just unpleasant to think about her having been twenty-some years in that mental hospital.” He said, “I don’t want to take the credit. It was really my sister Yvonne who thought it might be possible to get her out. Yvonne got my brothers Wilfred, Wesley and Philbert together, and I went out there, too. It was Philbert who really handled it. “It made me face something about myself,” Malcolm X said. “My mind had closed about our mother. I simply didn’t feel the problem could be solved, so I had shut it out. I had built up subconscious defenses. 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. I’ve just become aware how closed my mind was now that I’ve opened it up again. That’s one of the characteristics I don’t like about myself. If I meet a problem I feel I can’t solve, I shut it out. I make believe that it doesn’t exist. But it exists.” It was my turn to be deeply touched. Not long afterward, he was again away for a few days. When he returned this time, he said that at his brother Philbert’s home, “we had dinner with our mother for the first time in all those years!”

The only time that I have ever heard Malcolm X use what might be construed as a curse word, it was a “hell” used in response to a statement that Dr. Martin Luther King made that Malcolm X’s talk brought “misery upon Negroes.” Malcolm X exploded to me, “How in the hell can my talk do this? It’s always a Negro responsible, not what the white man does!” The “extremist” or “demagogue” accusation invariably would burn Malcolm X. “Yes, I’m an extremist. The black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a black man who isn’t an extremist and I’ll show you one who needs psychiatric attention!”

Another time, when something provoked him to exclaim, “These Uncle Toms make me think about how the Prophet Jesus was criticized in his own country!” Malcolm X promptly got up and silently took my notebook, tore out that page and crumpled it and put it into his pocket, and he was considerably subdued during the remainder of that session.

Malcolm X rarely put in less than an 18-hour workday. Often when he had left my studio at four A.M. and a 40-minute drive lay between him and home in East Elmhurst, Long Island, he had asked me to telephone him there at nine A.M.

There was something about this man when he was in a room with people. He commanded the room, whoever else was present.

I went off to Atlanta and interviewed for Playboy Dr. Martin Luther King. He was privately intrigued to hear little-known things about Malcolm X that I told him; for publication, he discussed him with reserve, and he did say that he would sometime like to have an opportunity to talk with him. Hearing this, Malcolm X said drily, “You think I ought to send him a telegram with my telephone number?” (But from other things that Malcolm X said to me at various times, I deduced that he actually had a reluctant admiration for Dr. King.) Malcolm X and I reached the point, ultimately, where we shared a mutual camaraderie that, although it was never verbally expressed, was a warm one. He was for me unquestionably one of the most engaging personalities I had ever met, and for his part, I gathered, I was someone he had learned he could express himself to, with candor, without the likelihood of hearing it repeated, and like any person who lived amid tension, he enjoyed being around someone, another man, with whom he could psychically relax.

One call that I never will forget came at close to four A.M., waking me; he must have just gotten up in Los Angeles. His voice said, “Alex Haley?” I said, sleepily, “Yes? Oh, hey, Malcolm!” His voice said, “I trust you seventy percent”—and then he hung up. I lay a short time thinking about him and I went back to sleep feeling warmed by that call, as I still am warmed to remember it. Neither of us ever mentioned it. Malcolm X’s growing respect for individual whites seemed to be reserved for those who ignored on a personal basis the things he said about whites and who jousted with him as a man. He, moreover, was convinced that he could tell a lot about any person by listening. “There’s an art to listening well,” he told me. “I listen closely to the sound of a man’s voice when he’s speaking. I can hear sincerity.”

I saw Malcolm X too many times exhilarated in after-lecture give-and-take with predominantly white student bodies at colleges and universities to ever believe that he nurtured at his core any blanket white-hatred. “The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has,” he said to me once. “The rest of us have always been living in a lie.”

“Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”

He talked about the pressures on him everywhere he turned, and about the frustrations, among them that no one wanted to accept anything relating to him except “my old ‘hate’ and ‘violence’ image.” He said “the so-called moderate” civil-rights organizations avoided him as “too militant” and the “so-called militants” avoided him as “too moderate.” “They won’t let me turn the corner!” he once exclaimed, “I’m caught in a trap!”

“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being—neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being. I may say, though, that I don’t think it should ever be put upon a black man, I don’t think the burden to defend any position should ever be put upon the black man, because it is the white man collectively who has shown that he is hostile toward integration and toward intermarriage and toward these other strides toward oneness. So as a black man and especially as a black American, any stand that I formerly took, I don’t think that I would have to defend it because it’s still a reaction to the society, and it’s a reaction that was produced by the society; and I think that it is the society that produced this that should be attacked, not the reaction that develops among the people who are the victims of that negative society.”