The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

My clue to the Jew’s question and challenges is that among all other ethnic groups, his expressed thinking, his expressed concerns, are the most subjective. And the Jew is usually hypersensitive. I mean, you can’t even say “Jew” without him accusing you of anti-Semitism. I don’t care what a Jew is professionally, doctor, merchant, housewife, student, or whatever—first he, or she, thinks Jew.

I have told them that if I tell the simple truth, it doesn’t mean that I am anti-Semitic; it means merely that I am antiexploitation.

Why, sometimes I’ve felt I ought to jump down off that stand and get physical with some of those brainwashed white man’s tools, parrots, puppets. At the colleges, I’ve developed some stock put-downs for them: “You must be a law student, aren’t you?” They have to say either yes, or no. And I say, “I thought you were. You defend this criminal white man harder than he defends his guilty self!”

“Do you know what white racists call black Ph.D’s?” He said something like, “I believe that I happen not to be aware of that”—you know, one of these ultra-proper-talking Negroes. And I laid the word down on him, loud: “Nigger!”

She demanded right up in my face, “Don’t you believe there are any good white people?” I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I told her, “People’s deeds I believe in, Miss—not their words.” “What can I do?” she exclaimed. I told her, “Nothing.” She burst out crying, and ran out and up Lenox Avenue and caught a taxi.

Icarus’ father made some wings that he fastened with wax. “Never fly but so high with these wings,” the father said. But soaring around, this way, that way, Icarus’ flying pleased him so that he began thinking he was flying on his own merit. Higher, he flew—higher—until the heat of the sun melted the wax holding those wings. And down came Icarus—tumbling. Standing there by that Harvard window, I silently vowed to Allah that I never would forget that any wings I wore had been put on by the religion of Islam. That fact I never have forgotten…not for one second.

Without a second thought, I said what I honestly felt—that it was, as I saw it, a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.” I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, finally had struck down this country’s Chief of State.

Any Muslim would have known that my “chickens coming home to roost” statement had been only an excuse to put into action the plan for getting me out.

Abd-Al-Rahman Azzam, when at home, lived in a suite at the Jedda Palace Hotel. Because I had come to them with a letter from a friend, he was going to stay at his son’s home, and let me use his suite, until I could get on to Mecca. When I found out, there was no use protesting: I was in the suite; young Dr. Azzam was gone; there was no one to protest to. The three-room suite had a bathroom that was as big as a double at the New York Hilton. It was suite number 214. There was even a porch outside, affording a beautiful view of the ancient Red Sea city. There had never before been in my emotions such an impulse to pray—and I did, prostrating myself on the living-room rug.

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.

I know that I am surrounded by friends whose sincerity and religious zeal I can feel. I must pray again to thank Allah for this blessing, and I must pray again that my wife and children back in America will always be blessed for their sacrifices, too.”

And in everything I said to them, as long as we talked, they were aware of the yardstick that I was using to measure everything—that to me the earth’s most explosive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world.

“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. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color.

“With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called ‘Christian’ white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities—he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

From Beirut, I flew back to Cairo, and there I took a train to Alexandria, Egypt. I kept my camera busy during each brief stopover. Finally I was on a plane to Nigeria.

Afterward, in the Students’ Union, I was plied with questions, and I was made an honorary member of the Nigerian Muslim Students’ Society. Right here in my wallet is my card: “Alhadji Malcolm X. Registration No. M-138.” With the membership, I was given a new name: “Omowale.” It means, in the Yoruba language, “the son who has come home.” I meant it when I told them I had never received a more treasured honor.

expatriates; they had been waiting for my arrival. There were business and professional people, such as the militant former Brooklynites Dr. and Mrs. Robert E. Lee, both of them dentists, who had given up their United States’ citizenship. Such others as Alice Windom, Maya Angelou Make, Victoria Garvin, and Leslie Lacy had even formed a “Malcolm X Committee” to guide me through a whirlwind calendar of appearances and social events.

When black men had been lynched or otherwise murdered in cold blood, it was always said, “Things will get better.” When whites had rifles in their homes, the Constitution gave them the right to protect their home and themselves. But when black people even spoke of having rifles in their homes, that was “ominous.”

The next day I was in my car driving along the freeway when at a red light another car pulled alongside. A white woman was driving and on the passenger’s side, next to me, was a white man. “Malcolm X!” he called out—and when I looked, he stuck his hand out of his car, across at me, grinning. “Do you mind shaking hands with a white man?” Imagine that! Just as the traffic light turned green, I told him, “I don’t mind shaking hands with human beings. Are you one?”

They called me “the angriest Negro in America.” I wouldn’t deny that charge. I spoke exactly as I felt. “I believe in anger. The Bible says there is a time for anger.” They called me “a teacher, a fomentor of violence.” I would say point blank, “That is a lie. I’m not for wanton violence, I’m for justice. I feel that if white people were attacked by Negroes—if the forces of law prove unable, or inadequate, or reluctant to protect those whites from those Negroes—then those white people should protect and defend themselves from those Negroes, using arms if necessary.

I tried in every speech I made to clarify my new position regarding white people—“I don’t speak against the sincere, well-meaning, good white people. I have learned that there are some. I have learned that not all white people are racists. I am speaking against and my fight is against the white racists. I firmly believe that Negroes have the right to fight against these racists, by any means that are necessary.”

White society hates to hear anybody, especially a black man, talk about the crime the white man has perpetrated on the black man.

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.

The Christian church returned to Africa under the banner of the Cross—conquering, killing, exploiting, pillaging, raping, bullying, beating—and teaching white supremacy. This is how the white man thrust himself into the position of leadership of the world—through the use of naked physical power. And he was totally inadequate spiritually.

Two-thirds of the human population today is telling the one-third minority white man, “Get out!” And the white man is leaving. And as he leaves, we see the non-white peoples returning in a rush to their original religions, which had been labeled “pagan” by the conquering white man.

And what is the greatest single reason for this Christian church’s failure? It is its failure to combat racism. It is the old “You sow, you reap” story. The Christian church sowed racism—blasphemously; now it reaps racism.

Sunday mornings in this year of grace 1965, imagine the “Christian conscience” of congregations guarded by deacons barring the door to black would-be worshipers, telling them “You can’t enter this House of God!”

I told him then right to his face he was a fool, that he didn’t know me, or what I stood for, so that made him one of those people who let somebody else do their thinking; and that no matter what job a man had,

“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.”

Under the steady lullabies sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar. But the Southern Negro, facing the honestly snarling white man, rose up to battle that white man for his freedom—long before it happened in the North.

By visibly hovering near us, they are “proving” that they are “with us.” But the hard truth is this isn’t helping to solve America’s racist problem. The Negroes aren’t the racists. 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.

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.

I would just like to study.

Every morning when I wake up, now, I regard it as having another borrowed day. In any city, wherever I go, making speeches, holding meetings of my organization, or attending to other business, black men are watching every move I make, awaiting their chance to kill me. I have said publicly many times that I know that they have their orders. Anyone who chooses not to believe what I am saying doesn’t know the Muslims in the Nation of Islam.

Anyway, now, each day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do. When I am dead—I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form—I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with “hate.”

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.

“I’ve told her like I tell you I’ve seen too many men destroyed by their wives, or their women. “I don’t completely trust anyone,” he went on, “not even myself. I have seen too many men destroy themselves. Other people I trust from not at all to highly, like The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Malcolm X looked squarely at me. “You I trust about twenty-five percent.”

Well, every day you see that woman you look her right in the eyes and tell her ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ and you watch what happens. The first day she may curse you out, the second day, too—but you watch, you keep on, after a while one day she’s going to start smiling just as soon as you come in sight.”

“It’s the hinge that squeaks that gets the grease.”

those white devil convicts and the guards, too, to do anything I wanted. I’d whisper to them, ‘If you don’t, I’ll start a rumor that you’re really a light Negro just passing as white.’ That shows you what the white devil thinks about the black man. He’d rather die than be thought a Negro!”

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

“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!”

“By tomorrow night, they’ll know how to say their first English word—nigger,” observed Malcolm X.

The newspaper person whom he ultimately came to admire probably more than any other was the New York Times’ M. S. Handler. (I was very happy when I learned that Handler had agreed to write this book’s Introduction; I know that Malcolm X would have liked that.)

“We had the best organization the black man’s ever had—niggers ruined it!”

Could any whites join his OAAU? “If John Brown were alive, maybe him.”

On January 19, Malcolm X appeared on the Pierre Berton television show in Canada and said, in response to a question about integration and intermarriage: “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 re...