The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

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.

I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms.

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. But now, things were different. First came the white newspapers—feature writers and columnists: “Alarming”…“hate-messengers”…“threat to the good relations between the races”…“black segregationists”…“black supremacists,” and the like.

“Unless we call one white man, by name, a ‘devil,’ we are not speaking of any individual white man. We are speaking of the collective white man’s historical record. We are speaking of the collective white man’s cruelties, and evils, and greeds, that have seen him act like a devil toward the non-white man.