The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

the slavery tradition that the “mulatto,” because he was visibly nearer to white, was therefore “better.”

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

could see, though I didn’t say, how any average man would find it almost impossible to live for very long with a woman whose every instinct was to run everything and everybody she had anything to do with—including me.

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

don’t see any reason why old Chicago Red would mind me telling that he is Redd Foxx.

She knew from personal experience how crime existed only to the degree that the law cooperated with it. She showed me how, in the country’s entire social, political and economic structure, the criminal, the law, and the politicians were actually inseparable partners. It

you will take one step toward Allah—Allah will take two steps toward you.”

“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” a small, gentle man, whom they sometimes referred to as “The Messenger of Allah.” He was, they said, “a black man, like us.” He had been born in America on a farm in Georgia. He had moved with his family to Detroit, and there had met a Mr. Wallace D. Fard who he claimed was “God in person.” Mr. Wallace D. Fard had given to Elijah Muhammad Allah’s message for the black people who were “the Lost-Found Nation of Islam here in this wilderness of North America.”

“The key to a Muslim is submission, the attunement of one toward Allah.”

the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much.

the one people whom Jesus could not help were the Pharisees; they didn’t feel they needed any help.

Elijah Muhammad teaches that the greatest and mightiest God who appeared on the earth was Master W. D. Fard.

Master W. D. Fard, in 1931, posing as a seller of silks, met, in Detroit, Michigan, Elijah Muhammad. Master W. D. Fard gave to Elijah Muhammad Allah’s message, and Allah’s divine guidance, to save the Lost-Found Nation of Islam,

Elijah Muhammad’s tales, like this one of “Yacub,” infuriated the Muslims of the East.

As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college.

among all Negroes the black convict is the most perfectly preconditioned to hear the words, “the white man is the devil.”

“Aesop” was only the Greek name for an Ethiopian.

Master W. D. Fard, the Messiah, the one whom Elijah Muhammad said had appointed him—Elijah Muhammad—as His Last Messenger to the black people of North America.

“As-Salaam-Alaikum” (the Arabic for “Peace be unto you”). “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam” (“and unto you be peace”)

“Allahu-Akbar, Allahu-Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”).

Mr. W. D. Fard taught that the Negroes in America were directly descended from Muslims.

He taught that Negroes in America were Lost Sheep, lost for four hundred years from the Nation of Islam,

In 1934, Master W. D. Fard disappeared, without a trace.

One hundred million of us black people! Your grandparents! Mine! Murdered by this white man. To get fifteen million of us here to make us his slaves, on the way he murdered one hundred million!

It’s unbelievable how many black men and women have let the white man fool them into holding an almost romantic idea of what slave days were like.

“The Christian religion is incompatible with the Negro’s aspirations for dignity and equality in America,”

For the man who is not white, Islam is the hope for justice and equality in the world we must build tomorrow.”

I was learning under fire how the press, when it wants to, can twist, and slant.

“Today’s Uncle Tom doesn’t wear a handkerchief on his head. This modern, twentieth-century Uncle Thomas now often wears a top hat. He’s usually well-dressed and well-educated. He’s often the personification of culture and refinement. The twentieth-century Uncle Thomas sometimes speaks with a Yale or Harvard accent. Sometimes he is known as Professor, Doctor, Judge, and Reverend, even Right Reverend Doctor. This twentieth-century Uncle Thomas is a professional Negro…by that I mean his profession is being a Negro for the white man.”

“Black bodies with white heads!” I called them what they were.

“No sane black man really wants integration! No sane white man really wants integration! No sane black man really believes that the white man ever will give the black man anything more than token integration. No! The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches that for the black man in America the only solution is complete separation from the white man!”

We reject segregation even more militantly than you say you do! We want separation, which is not the same!

To segregate means to control. Segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. But separation is that which is done voluntarily, by two equals—for

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

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.

The black man in the ghettoes, for instance, has to start self-correcting his own material, moral, and spiritual defects and evils. The black man needs to start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution. The black man in America has to lift up his own sense of values.

I’m right with the Southern white man who believes that you can’t have so-called “integration,” at least not for long, without intermarriage increasing. And what good is this for anyone? Let’s again face reality. In a world as color-hostile as this, man or woman, black or white, what do they want with a mate of the other race?

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

The very fact that millions, black and white, believed in this monumental farce is another example of how much this country goes in for the surface glossing over, the escape ruse, surfaces, instead of truly dealing with its deep-rooted problems.

you can’t even say “Jew” without him accusing you of anti-Semitism.

in every black ghetto, Jews own the major businesses.

Jerusalem there are Muslim shrines built to the Prophet Jesus.

Billy Graham, challenged in Africa, had himself made the distinction, “I believe in Christ, not Christianity.”

forty per cent of the expensive imported Scotch whisky consumed in America goes down the throats of the status-sick black man;

U.S. politics is ruled by special-interest blocs and lobbies.

if one was sincere in professing a religion, why should he balk at broadening his knowledge of that religion?

“No man has believed perfectly until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”

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,

“America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.