The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

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

I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but 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.

I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.

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 was really a clown, but my ignorance made me think I was “sharp.”

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.

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.

only guilt admitted accepts truth.

I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.

I still marvel at how swiftly my previous life’s thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof.

As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students.

Time is more important to me than distance.

when you know who your enemy is, he can no longer keep you divided, and fighting, one brother against the other! Because when you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer use trickery, promises, lies, hypocrisy, and his evil acts to keep you deaf, dumb, and blinded! “When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eyes so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth!—This

once he is motivated no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom.

what about the one hundred thousand loyal naturalized and native-born Japanese-American citizens who were herded into camps, behind barbed wire? But how many German-born naturalized Americans were herded behind barbed wire? They were white!

But I want to tell you something. This pattern, this “system” that the white man created, of teaching Negroes to hide the truth from him behind a façade of grinning, “yessir-bossing,” foot-shuffling and head-scratching—that system has done the American white man more harm than an invading army would do to him. Why do I say this? Because all this has steadily helped this American white man to build up, deep in his psyche, absolute conviction that he is “superior.” In how many, many communities have, thus, white men who didn’t finish high school regarded condescendingly university-educated local Negro “leaders,” principals of schools, teachers, doctors, other professionals?

I hadn’t hustled in the streets for years for nothing. I knew when I was being set up.

My whole life had been a chronology of—changes.

Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”

I would just like to study.