The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

We spoke for more than three hours at this first encounter. His views about the white man were devastating, but at no time did he transgress against my own personality and make me feel that I, as an individual, shared in the guilt. He attributed the degradation of the Negro people to the white man. He denounced integration as a fraud. He contended that if the leaders of the established civil rights organizations persisted, the social struggle would end in bloodshed because he was certain the white man would never concede full integration.

In his television appearances and at public meetings Malcolm articulated the woes and the aspirations of the depressed Negro mass in a way it was unable to do for itself. When he attacked the white man, Malcolm did for the Negroes what they couldn’t do for themselves—he attacked with a violence and anger that spoke for the ages of misery. It was not an academic exercise of just giving hell to “Mr. Charlie.”

Many of the Negro writers and artists who are national figures today revered Malcolm for what they considered his ruthless honesty in stating the Negro case, his refusal to compromise, and his search for a group identity that had been destroyed by the white man when he brought the Negroes in chains from Africa. The Negro writers and artists regarded Malcolm as the great catalyst, the man who inspired self-respect and devotion in the downtrodden millions.

He always spoke respectfully and with a certain surprise of the positive response of white students to his lectures.

It was Malcolm’s intention to raise Negro militancy to a new high point with the main thrust aimed at both the Southern and Northern white supremacists. The Negro problem, which he had always said should be renamed “the white man’s problem,” was beginning to assume new dimensions for him in the last months of his life.

What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned upon them that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position. But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered of them. Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me. This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their “liberal” white friends, these so-called “good white people”—most of them anyway. I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind. He may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you’ll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he’s better than anybody black.

In fact, by then, I didn’t really have much feeling about being a Negro, because I was trying so hard, in every way I could, to be white. Which is why I am spending much of my life today telling the American black man that he’s wasting his time straining to “integrate.” I know from personal experience. I tried hard enough.

I think the major impact of Ella’s arrival, at least upon me, was that she was the first really proud black woman I had ever seen in my life. She was plainly proud of her very dark skin. This was unheard of among Negroes in those days, especially in Lansing.

It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn’t, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be. It was then that I began to change—inside. I drew away from white people. I came to class, and I answered when called upon. It became a physical strain simply to sit in Mr. Ostrowski’s class.

One statue in the Boston Commons astonished me: a Negro named Crispus Attucks, who had been the first man to fall in the Boston Massacre. I had never known anything like that.

Every Benny Goodman record I’d ever heard in my life, it seemed, was filtering faintly into where we were. During another customer lull, Freddie let me slip back outside again to listen. Peggy Lee was at the mike singing. Beautiful! She had just joined the band and she was from North Dakota and had been singing with a group in Chicago when Mrs. Benny Goodman discovered her, we had heard some customers say. She finished the song and the crowd burst into applause. She was a big hit.

That's pretty amazing

The mirror reflected Shorty behind me. We both were grinning and sweating. And on top of my head was this thick, smooth sheen of shining red hair—real red—as straight as any white man’s. How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair now looking “white,” reflected in the mirror in Shorty’s room. I vowed that I’d never again be without a conk, and I never was for many years. 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. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”—and white people “superior”—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards. Look around today, in every small town and big city, from two-bit catfish and soda-pop joints into the “integrated” lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, and you’ll see conks on black men. And you’ll see black women wearing these green and pink and purple and red and platinum-blonde wigs. They’re all more ridiculous than a slapstick comedy. It makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost his sense of identity, lost touch with himself.

Really interesting. I don't know if I've seen this hairstyle on men in my life but I am notoriously bad at noticing hair. I will have to try to pay attention. Wigs are not something I'm going to get into, except I do feel bad when I see one of my patients who appears to have an itchy head due to one. I hate when my head is itchy so if they feel as unhappy as I'd feel, it would be very bad. Hopefully it is not that bad. But having fun colored hair is fun, and if it comes from a place of not liking one's natural hair that's one thing and not my place to discuss beyond taking down other white people for being racist shitheads. But if a Black person wants to have purple hair because purple hair is cool, then I think maybe a little less judging here Malcolm.

it didn’t take long to loosen up the dancing instincts in my African heritage.

Hmmmm. Friend.

Learning to hate the men who bought her, she also became a Lesbian.

Or she likes women

He was worried sick himself about the draft call that he knew was soon to come. Like hundreds of the black ghetto’s young men, he was taking some stuff that, it was said, would make your heart sound defective to the draft board’s doctors. Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: “Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.”

I did not know about the thing people were taking. I wonder what it was.

Hundreds of thousands of New York City Negroes, every day but Sunday, would play from a penny on up to large sums on three-digit numbers. A hit meant duplicating the last three figures of the Stock Exchange’s printed daily total of U.S. domestic and foreign sales.

I wonder how that is the number that was landed on.

Many players practiced what was called “combinating.” For example six cents would put one penny on each of the six possible combinations of three digits. The number 840, combinated, would include 840, 804, 048, 084, 408, and 480.

Practically everyone played every day in the poverty-ridden black ghetto of Harlem. Every day, someone you knew was likely to hit and of course it was neighborhood news; if big enough a hit, neighborhood excitement. Hits generally were small; a nickel, dime, or a quarter. Most people tried to play a dollar a day, but split it up among different numbers and combinated.

The ubiquity is interesting. I am curious if similar things existed in other cities.

Harlem’s numbers industry hummed every morning and into the early afternoon, with the runners jotting down people’s bets on slips of paper in apartment house hallways, bars, barbershops, stores, on the sidewalks. The cops looked on; no runner lasted long who didn’t, out of his pocket, put in a free “figger” for his working area’s foot cops, and it was generally known that the numbers bankers paid off at higher levels of the police department. The daily small army of runners each got ten percent of the money they turned in, along with the bet slips, to their controllers. (And if you hit, you gave the runner a ten percent tip.) A controller might have as many as fifty runners working for him, and the controller got five percent of what he turned over to the banker, who paid off the hit, paid off the police, and got rich off the balance.

Some people played one number all year. Many had lists of the daily hit numbers going back for years; they figured reappearance odds, and used other systems. Others played their hunches: addresses, license numbers of passing cars, any numbers on letters, telegrams, laundry slips, numbers from anywhere. Dream books that cost a dollar would say what number nearly any dream suggested. Evangelists who on Sundays peddled Jesus, and mystics, would pray a lucky number for you, for a fee.

What if that ingenuity didn't have to worry about money and could be used on anything else.

Every day in Small’s Paradise Bar was fascinating to me. And from a Harlem point of view, I couldn’t have been in a more educational situation. Some of the ablest of New York’s black hustlers took a liking to me, and knowing that I still was green by their terms, soon began in a paternal way to “straighten Red out.”

One day when I brought his beer, he said, “Red, hold still a minute.” He went over me with one of those yellow tape measures, and jotted figures in his notebook. When I came to work the next afternoon, one of the bartenders handed me a package. In it was an expensive, dark blue suit, conservatively cut. The gift was thoughtful, and the message clear. The bartenders let me know that this customer was one of the top executives of the fabulous Forty Thieves gang. That was the gang of organized boosters, who would deliver, to order, in one day, C.O.D., any kind of garment you desired. You would pay about one-third of the store’s price. I heard how they made mass hauls. A well-dressed member of the gang who wouldn’t arouse suspicion by his manner would go into a selected store about closing time, hide somewhere, and get locked inside when the store closed. The police patrols would have been timed beforehand. After dark, he’d pack suits in bags, then turn off the burglar alarm, and use the telephone to call a waiting truck and crew. When the truck came, timed with the police patrols, it would be loaded and gone within a few minutes. I later got to know several members of the Forty Thieves.

Longshoremen, or fences for them, would come into the bars selling guns, cameras, perfumes, watches, and the like, stolen from the shipping docks. These Negroes got what white-longshoreman thievery left over.

Yeah

What I was learning was the hustling society’s first rule; that you never trusted anyone outside of your own close-mouthed circle, and that you selected with time and care before you made any intimates even among these.

Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early rush. These wives were so disagreeable and had made their men so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men. To escape this tension and the chance of being ridiculed by his own wife, each of these men had gotten up early and come to a prostitute.

Wonder why strong women didn't feel welcome in the black liberation movement (obviously white radicals of the time were no better, don't get me wrong.)

More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men.

Maybe husbands should try to keep their wives. Maybe men should try to be less terrible.

The prostitutes said that most men needed to know what the pimps knew. A woman should occasionally be babied enough to show her the man had affection, but beyond that she should be treated firmly. These tough women said that it worked with them. All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.

Pimps aren't really men to be emulated and the relationship between pimp and prostitute isn't an ideal to base a relationship on. Fail, Malcolm.

I told him the story of Sammy the Pimp. In Sammy’s native Paducah, Kentucky, he had gotten a girl pregnant. Her parents made it so hot that Sammy had come to Harlem, where he got a job as a restaurant waiter. When a woman came in to eat alone, and he found she really was alone, not married, or living with somebody, it generally was not hard for smooth Sammy to get invited to her apartment. He’d insist on going out to a nearby restaurant to bring back some dinner, and while he was out he would have her key duplicated. Then, when he knew she was away, Sammy would go in and clean out all her valuables. Sammy was then able to offer some little stake, to help her back on her feet. This could be the beginning of an emotional and financial dependency, which Sammy knew how to develop until she was his virtual slave.

So you're willing to criticize women for *checks notes* being independent but you admire with this *checks notes again* actual monster? Cool cool cool.

There were many more reefer smokers around there, but these were a cheaper type, this was the worst of the ghetto, the poorest people, the ones who in every ghetto keep themselves narcotized to keep from having to face their miserable existence.

Suddenly, I sprang up and peeped under both doors, the one I’d entered and another that probably was a closet. And then I bent and whispered fast in his ear. “Daddy-o, now you and me, we’re from up North here, so don’t you tell nobody….I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!” That psychiatrist’s blue pencil dropped, and his professional manner fell off in all directions. He stared at me as if I were a snake’s egg hatching, fumbling for his red pencil. I knew I had him. I was going back out past Miss First when he said, “That will be all.” A 4-F card came to me in the mail, and I never heard from the Army any more, and never bothered to ask why I was rejected.

Not able to figure out why Sammy didn’t shut her up, I did…and from the corner of my eye, I saw Sammy going for his gun. Sammy’s reaction that way to my hitting his woman—close as he and I were—was the only weak spot I’d ever glimpsed.

Are you... are you describing how you felt at the time, or how you still felt upon writing this? This is important.

Always, every now and then, I had given her a hard time, just to keep her in line. Every once in a while a woman seems to need, in fact wants this, too. But now, I would feel evil and slap her around worse than ever, some of the nights when Shorty was away. She would cry, curse me, and swear that she would never be back. But I knew she wasn’t even thinking about not coming back.

Because you abused her?

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.

What makes the black man think of himself as only an internal United States issue is just a catch-phrase, two words, “civil rights.” How is the black man going to get “civil rights” before first he wins his human rights? If the American black man will start thinking about his human rights, and then start thinking of himself as part of one of the world’s great peoples, he will see he has a case for the United Nations.

“And it’s not just me, it’s all of us! During slavery, think of it, it was a rare one of our black grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and our great-great-grandmothers who escaped the white rapist slavemaster. That rapist slavemaster who emasculated the black man…with threats, with fear…until even today the black man lives with fear of the white man in his heart! Lives even today still under the heel of the white man! “Think of it—think of that black slave man filled with fear and dread, hearing the screams of his wife, his mother, his daughter being taken—in the barn, the kitchen, in the bushes! Think of it, my dear brothers and sisters! Think of hearing wives, mothers, daughters, being raped! And you were too filled with fear of the rapist to do anything about it!

You are only speaking to men with women as objects to be acted upon and about, I see.

in what he taught us were the true natures of men and women;

HMMMM

The dramatization of slavery never failed intensely to arouse Negroes hearing its horrors spelled out for the first time. 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.

Here was one of the white man’s most characteristic behavior patterns—where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion. In America for centuries it had been just fine as long as the victimized, brutalized and exploited black people had been grinning and begging and “Yessa, Massa” and Uncle Tomming.

One funny thing—in all that hectic period, something quickly struck my notice: the Europeans never pressed the “hate” question. Only the American white man was so plagued and obsessed with being “hated.” He was so guilty, it was clear to me, of hating Negroes.

Our cure program’s first major ingredient was the painfully patient work of Muslims who previously were junkies themselves.

But I know that America’s five and a half million Jews (two million of them are concentrated in New York) look at it very practically, whether they know it or not: that all of the bigotry and hatred focused upon the black man keeps off the Jew a lot of heat that would be on him otherwise.

Yikes!!!

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.

Hmph!

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.

Not an adherent of intersectionality here then

It showed me how any country’s moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women—especially its young women.

I sense I'm about to have Problems

The second film focused upon the Chinese people’s support for the Afro-American struggle. Chairman Mao Tse-tung was shown delivering his statement of that support,

Ok but if you actually believed Mao did this out of his beliefs vs to injure the US I've got an "enemy of my enemy" fallacy for you.

In Mecca, too, I had played back for myself the twelve years I had spent with Elijah Muhammad as if it were a motion picture. I guess it would be impossible for anyone ever to realize fully how complete was my belief in Elijah Muhammad. I believed in him not only as a leader in the ordinary human sense, but also I believed in him as a divine leader, I believed he had no human weaknesses or faults, and that, therefore, he could make no mistakes and that he could do no wrong. There on a Holy World hilltop, 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.

Big "yup"

“It takes no one to stir up the sociological dynamite that stems from the unemployment, bad housing, and inferior education already in the ghettoes. This explosively criminal condition has existed for so long, it needs no fuse; it fuses itself; it spontaneously combusts from within itself….”

Not wrong at all!

But the white reporters kept wanting me linked with that word “violence.” I doubt if I had one interview without having to deal with that accusation. “I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man’s problem—just to avoid violence. I don’t go for non-violence if it also means a delayed solution. To me a delayed solution is a non-solution. Or I’ll say it another way. If it must take violence to get the black man his human rights in this country, I’m for violence exactly as you know the Irish, the Poles, or Jews would be if they were flagrantly discriminated against. I am just as they would be in that case, and they would be for violence—no matter what the consequences, no matter who was hurt by the violence.”

Similar to arguments regarding the civil war being a tragedy vs necessary

An American white ambassador in one African country was Africa’s most respected American ambassador: I’m glad to say that this was told to me by one ranking African leader. We talked for an entire afternoon. Based on what I had heard of him, I had to believe him when he told me that as long as he was on the African continent, he never thought in terms of race, that he dealt with human beings, never noticing their color. He said he was more aware of language differences than of color differences. He said that only when he returned to America would he become aware of color differences. 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.” 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.

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.