The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

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

Whites have always hidden or justified all of the guilts they could by ridiculing or blaming Negroes.

We children watched our anchor giving way. It was something terrible that you couldn’t get your hands on, yet you couldn’t get away from.

All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life—that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business—you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

We were “state children,” court wards; he had the full say-so over us. A white man in charge of a black man’s children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery—however kindly intentioned.

It was so much worse than if it had been a physical sickness, for which a cause might be known, medicine given, a cure effected.

can’t describe how I felt. The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn’t know me. It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers.

I knew I wouldn’t be back to see my mother again because it could make me a very vicious and dangerous person—knowing how they had looked at us as numbers and as a case in their book, not as human beings. And knowing that my mother in there was a statistic that didn’t have to be, that existed because of a society’s failure, hypocrisy, greed, and lack of mercy and compassion. 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.

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.

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.

But people are always speculating—why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.

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. After he gets out, his mind tries to erase the experience, but he can’t. I’ve talked with numerous former convicts. It has been very interesting to me to find that all of our minds had blotted away many details of years in prison. But in every case, he will tell you that he can’t forget those bars.

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 read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose.

Over 115 million African blacks—close to the 1930’s population of the United States—were murdered or enslaved during the slave trade.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me.

I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

can’t think of a better case! Four hundred years of black blood and sweat invested here in America, and the white man still has the black man begging for what every immigrant fresh off the ship can take for granted the minute he walks down the gangplank.

“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 voices questioning me became to me as breathing, living devils.

“Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I’m snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?”

“Well, let’s go back to the Greek, and maybe you will learn the first thing you need to know about the word ‘demagogue.’ ‘Demagogue’ means, actually, ‘teacher of the people.’ And let’s examine some demagogues. The greatest of all Greeks, Socrates, was killed as a ‘demagogue.’ Jesus Christ died on the cross because the Pharisees of His day were upholding their law, not the spirit. The modern Pharisees are trying to heap destruction upon Mr. Muhammad, calling him a demagogue, a crackpot, and fanatic. What about Gandhi? The man that Churchill called ‘a naked little fakir,’ refusing food in a British jail? But then a quarter of a billion people, a whole subcontinent, rallied behind Gandhi—and they twisted the British lion’s tail! What about Galileo, standing before his inquisitors, saying ‘The earth does move!’ What about Martin Luther, nailing on a door his thesis against the all-powerful Catholic church which called him ‘heretic’? We, the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, are today in the ghettoes as once the sect of Christianity’s followers were like termites in the catacombs and the grottoes—and they were preparing the grave of the mighty Roman Empire!”

I’d jerk the pole then. “I can’t turn around without hearing about some ‘civil rights advance’! White people seem to think the black man ought to be shouting ‘hallelujah’! 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!”

I learned from these former secretaries of Mr. Muhammad that while he was praising me to my face, he was tearing me apart behind

The thing to me worse than death was the betrayal. I could conceive death. I couldn’t conceive betrayal—not of the loyalty which I had given to the Nation of Islam, and to Mr. Muhammad.

And that was how, after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength, to start facing the facts, to think for myself.

This was when it began being said that I was America’s only Negro who “could stop a race riot—or start one.” I don’t know if I could do either one. But I know one thing: it had taught me in a very few minutes to have a whole lot of respect for the human combustion that is packed among the hustlers and their young admirers who live in the ghettoes where the Northern white man has sealed-off the Negro—away from whites—for a hundred years.

to sell out was not even in my nature.

The Holy Quran says it, “Pilgrimage to the Ka’ba is a duty men owe to God; those who are able, make the journey.” Allah said: “And proclaim the pilgrimage among men; they will come to you on foot and upon each lean camel, they will come from every deep ravine.”

Dr. Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi.

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

Allah always gives you signs, when you are with Him, that He is with you.

Dr. Shawarbi handed me the signed letter approving me to make the Hajj in Mecca, and then a book. It was The Eternal Message of Muhammad by Abd-Al-Rahman Azzam. The author had just sent the copy of the book to be given to me, Dr. Shawarbi said, and he explained that this author was an Egyptian-born Saudi citizen, an international statesman, and one of the closest advisors of Prince Faisal, the ruler of Arabia. “He has followed you in the press very closely.” It was hard for me to believe.

They were of all complexions, the whole atmosphere was of warmth and friendliness. The feeling hit me that there really wasn’t any color problem here. The effect was as though I had just stepped out of a prison.

Brother, I knew Allah was with me.

“I submit to no one but Thee, O Allah, I submit to no one but Thee. I submit to Thee because Thou hast no partner. All praise and blessings come from Thee, and Thou art alone in Thy kingdom.”

I’m handing them the American passport which signifies the exact opposite of what Islam stands for.

I was speechless at the man’s attitude, and at my own physical feeling of no difference between us as human beings. I had heard for years of Muslim hospitality, but one couldn’t quite imagine such warmth. I asked questions. Dr. Azzam was a Swiss-trained engineer. His field was city planning. The Saudi Arabian government had borrowed him from the United Nations to direct all of the reconstruction work being done on Arabian holy places. And Dr. Azzam’s sister was the wife of Prince Faisal’s son. I was in a car with the brother-in-law of the son of the ruler of Arabia. Nor was that all that Allah had done. “My father will be so happy to meet you,” said Dr. Azzam. The author who had sent me the book!

I was, all at once, thrilled, important, humble, and thankful.

I said, “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.”

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.

Even I was myself astounded. But there was precedent in my life for this letter. My whole life had been a chronology of—changes.

“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors. “I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca. I have made my seven circuits around the Ka’ba, led by a young Mutawaf named Muhammad. I drank water from the well of Zem Zem. I ran seven times back and forth between the hills of Mt. Al-Safa and Al-Marwah. I have

“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.

I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land—every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike—all snored in the same language.

American black man. James Baldwin’s books,

Black Like Me, by John Griffin.

As I entered the room, tall, handsome Prince Faisal came from behind his desk. I never will forget the reflection I had at that instant, that here was one of the world’s most important men, and yet with his dignity one saw clearly his sincere humility. He indicated for me a chair opposite from his. Our interpreter was the Deputy Chief of Protocol, Muhammad Abdul Azziz Maged, an Egyptian-born Arab, who looked like a Harlem Negro. Prince Faisal impatiently gestured when I began stumbling for words trying to express my gratitude for the great honor he had paid me in making me a guest of the State. It was only Muslim hospitality to another Muslim, he explained, and I was an unusual Muslim from America. He asked me to understand above all that whatever he had done had been his pleasure, with no other motives whatever. A gliding servant served a choice of two kinds of tea as Prince Faisal talked. His son, Muhammad Faisal, had “met” me on American television while attending