The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

this philosophy among his people was that he had seen four of his six brothers die by violence, three of them killed by white men, including one by lynching.

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

an educated woman, I suppose, can’t resist the temptation to correct an uneducated man.

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.

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair.

life did deal her cruel blows, starting with her meeting me.

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.

I never would forget that—that I couldn’t have whipped that white man as badly with a club as I had with my mind.

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

oh dear god malcolm please no

Sammy said that white women were very practical; he had heard so many of them express how they felt. They knew that the black man had all the strikes against him, that the white man kept the black man down, under his heel, unable to get anywhere, really. The white woman wanted to be comfortable, she wanted to be looked upon with favor by her own kind, but also she wanted to have her pleasure.

The hypocritical white man will talk about the Negro’s “low morals.” But who has the world’s lowest morals if not whites?

Sometimes, recalling all of this, I don’t know, to tell the truth, how I am alive to tell it today. They say God takes care of fools and babies. I’ve so often thought that Allah was watching over me. Through all of this time of my life, I really was dead—mentally dead. I just didn’t know that I was.

It seems that some women love to be exploited. When they are not exploited, they exploit the man.

Deep down, I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then, as I still expect today, to die at any time. But then, I think I deliberately invited death in many, sometimes insane, ways.

But I always had the feeling that Ella somehow admired my rebellion against the world, because she, who had so much more drive and guts than most men, often felt stymied by having been born female.

Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars. After he gets out, his mind tries to erase the experience, but he can’t.

I had experienced, for the first time, the Muslim teaching, “If you will take one step toward Allah—Allah will take two steps toward you.”

I hand-scratched to them how the white man’s society was responsible for the black man’s condition in this wilderness of North America.

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.

My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America.

Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?

The Jews excommunicated him because he advocated a pantheistic doctrine, something like the “allness of God,” or “God in everything.”

I don’t think anyone ever prayed more sincerely to Allah. I prayed for some kind of relief from my confusion.

The warmth of a home and a family was a healing change from the prison cage for me.

Allah. Allah taught me mathematics. He found me with a sluggish tongue, and taught me how to pronounce words.”

“Do nothing unto anyone that you would not like to have done unto yourself. Seek peace, and never be the aggressor—but if anyone attacks you, we do not teach you to turn the other cheek. May Allah bless you to be successful and victorious in all that you do.”

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that the black man is going around saying he wants respect; well, the black man never will get anybody’s respect until he first learns to respect his own women!

no true leader burdened his followers with a greater load than they could carry, and no true leader sets too fast a pace for his followers to keep up.

love transcends just the physical. Love is disposition, behavior, attitude, thoughts, likes, dislikes—these things make a beautiful woman, a beautiful wife. This is the beauty that never fades. You find in your Western civilization that when a man’s wife’s physical beauty fails, she loses her attraction. But Islam teaches us to look into the woman, and teaches her to look into us.

Once on the long-distance telephone, Betty told me in beautiful phrasing the way she thinks. She said, “You are present when you are away.”

Harlem’s black people were long since sick and tired of police brutality. And they never had seen any organization of black men take a firm stand as we were.

Christian love is the white man’s love for himself and for his race. For the man who is not white, Islam is the hope for justice and equality in the world we must build tomorrow.”

It grieves me that I don’t care where you go, you see this symbol of ignorance and self-hate on so many Negroes’ heads.

Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man’s back—and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man’s supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it’s still going to leave a scar!”

In fact, history’s most tragic result of a mixed, therefore diluted and weakened, ethnic identity has been experienced by a white ethnic group—the Jew in Germany.

jesus christ

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.

I had a ghetto instinct; for instance, I could feel if tension was beyond normal in a ghetto audience.

The ghetto masses already had entrusted me with an image of leadership among them. I knew the ghetto instinctively extends that trust only to one who had demonstrated that he would never sell them out to the white man. I not only had no such intention—to sell out was not even in my nature.

Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair—all together, brothers! All honoring the same God Allah, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

Love, humility, and true brotherhood was almost a physical feeling wherever I turned.

Western ankles won’t do what Muslim ankles have done for a lifetime.

All ate as One, and slept as One. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God.

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.

“The brotherhood! The people of all races, colors, from all over the world coming together as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God.”

As Muslims, they had a very tender heart for all unfortunates, and very sensitive feelings for truth and justice.

My whole life had been a chronology of—changes.

“In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I never will be guilty of that again—as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.

I realized how very dangerous it is for people to hold any human being in such esteem, especially to consider anyone some sort of “divinely guided” and “protected” person.

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. And I feel that when the law fails to protect Negroes from whites’ attack, then those Negroes should use arms, if necessary, to defend themselves.”