The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

Back in Detroit, I talked with my brother Wilfred. I offered my services to our Temple’s Minister, Lemuel Hassan. He shared my determination that we should apply Mr. Muhammad’s formula in a recruitment drive. Beginning that day, every evening, straight from work at the furniture store, I went doing what we Muslims later came to call “fishing.” I knew the thinking and the language of ghetto streets: “My man, let me pull your coat to something—”

  My application had, of course, been made and during this time I received from Chicago my “X.” The Muslim’s “X” symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my “X” replaced the white slavemaster name of “Little” which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears. The receipt of my “X” meant that forever after in the nation of Islam, I would be known as Malcolm X. Mr. Muhammad taught that we would keep this “X” until God Himself returned and gave us a Holy Name from His own mouth.

  Recruit as I would in the Detroit ghetto bars, in the poolrooms, and on the corners, I found my poor, ignorant, brainwashed black brothers mostly too deaf, dumb, and blind, mentally, morally, and spiritually, to respond. It angered me that only now and then would one display even a little curiosity about the teachings that would resurrect the black man.

  These few I would almost beg to visit Temple Number One at our next meeting. But then not half of those who agreed to come would actually show up.

  Gradually, enough were made interested, though, that each month, a few more automobiles lengthened our caravans to Temple Two in Chicago. But even after seeing and hearing Elijah Muhammad in person, only a few of the interested visitors would apply by formal letter to Mr. Muhammad to be accepted for Nation of Islam membership.

  With a few months of plugging away, however, our storefront Temple One about tripled its membership. And that so deeply pleased Mr. Muhammad that he paid us the honor of a personal visit.

  Mr. Muhammad gave me warm praise when Minister Lemuel Hassan told how hard I had labored in the cause of Islam.

  Our caravans grew. I remember with what pride we led twenty-five automobiles to Chicago. And each time we went, we were honored with dinner at the home of Elijah Muhammad. He was interested in my potential, I could tell from things he would say.

  And I worshiped him.

  In early 1953, I left the furniture store. I earned a little better weekly paycheck working at the Gar Wood factory in Detroit, where big garbage truck bodies were made. I cleaned up behind the welders each time they finished another truck body.

  Mr. Muhammad was saying at his dining table by this time that one of his worst needs was more young men willing to work as hard as they would have to in order to bear the responsibilities of his ministers. He was saying that the teachings should be spreading further than they had, and temples needed to be established in other cities.

  It simply had never occurred to me that I might be a minister. I had never felt remotely qualified to directly represent Mr. Muhammad. If someone had asked me about becoming a minister, I would have been astonished, and told them I was happy and willing to serve Mr. Muhammad in the lowliest capacity.

  I don’t know if Mr. Muhammad suggested it or if our Temple One Minister Lemuel Hassan on his own decision encouraged me to address our assembled brothers and sisters. I know that I testified to what Mr. Muhammad’s teachings had done for me: “If I told you the life I have lived, you would find it hard to believe me….When I say something about the white man, I am not talking about someone I don’t know….”

  Soon after that, Minister Lemuel Hassan urged me to address the brothers and sisters with an extemporaneous lecture. I was uncertain, and hesitant—but at least I had debated in prison, and I tried my best. (Of course, I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I do know that in my beginning efforts my favorite subject was Christianity and the horrors of slavery, where I felt well-equipped from so much reading in prison.)

  “My brothers and sisters, our white slavemaster’s Christian religion has taught us black people here in the wilderness of North America that we will sprout wings when we die and fly up into the sky where God will have for us a special place called heaven. This is white man’s Christian religion used to brainwash us black people! We have accepted it! We have embraced it! We have believed it! We have practiced it! And while we are doing all of that, for himself, this blue-eyed devil has twisted his Christianity, to keep his foot on our backs…to keep our eyes fixed on the pie in the sky and heaven in the hereafter…while he enjoys his heaven right here…on this earth…in this life.”

  Today when thousands of Muslims and others have been audiences out before me, when audiences of millions have been beyond radio and television microphones, I’m sure I rarely feel as much electricity as was then generated in me by the upturned faces of those seventy-five or a hundred Muslims, plus other curious visitors, sitting there in our storefront temple with the squealing of pigs filtering in from the slaughterhouse just outside.

  In the summer of 1953—all praise is due to Allah—I was named Detroit Temple Number One’s Assistant Minister.

  Every day after work, I walked, “fishing” for potential converts in the Detroit black ghetto. I saw the African features of my black brothers and sisters whom the devilish white man had brainwashed. I saw the hair as mine had been for years, conked by cooking it with lye until it lay limp, looking straight like the white man’s hair. Time and again Mr. Muhammad’s teachings were rebuffed and even ridiculed….“Aw, man, get out of my face, you niggers are crazy!” My head would reel sometimes, with mingled anger and pity for my poor blind black brothers. I couldn’t wait for the next time our Minister Lemuel Hassan would let me speak:

  “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us!”…“Give all you can to help Messenger Elijah Muhammad’s independence program for the black man!…This white man always has controlled us black people by keeping us running to him begging, ‘Please, lawdy, please, Mr. White Man, boss, would you push me off another crumb down from your table that’s sagging with riches….’

  “…my beautiful, black brothers and sisters! And when we say ‘black,’ we mean everything not white, brothers and sisters! Because look at your skins! We’re all black to the white man, but we’re a thousand and one different colors. Turn around, look at each other! What shade of black African polluted by devil white man are you? You see me—well, in the streets they used to call me Detroit Red. Yes! Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my grandfather! That close, yes! My mother’s father! She didn’t like to speak of it, can you blame her? She said she never laid eyes on him! She was glad for that! I’m glad for her! If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I’d do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist’s blood that’s in me!

  “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! And his vicious, animal attacks’ offspring, this white man named things like ‘mulatto’ and ‘quadroon’ and ‘octoroon’ and all those other things that he has called us—you and me—when he is not calling us ‘nigger’!

  “Turn around and look at each other, brothers and sisters, and think of this! You and me, polluted all these colors—and this devil has the arrogance and the gall to think we, his victims, should love him!”

  I would become so choke
d up that sometimes I would walk in the streets until late into the night. Sometimes I would speak to no one for hours, thinking to myself about what the white man had done to our poor people here in America.

  —

  At the Gar Wood factory where I worked, one day the supervisor came, looking nervous. He said that a man in the office was waiting to see me.

  The white man standing in there said, “I’m from the F.B.I.” He flipped open—that way they do, to shock you—his little folded black leather case containing his identification. He told me to come with him. He didn’t say for what, or why.

  I went with him. They wanted to know, at their office, why hadn’t I registered for the Korean War draft?

  “I just got out of prison,” I said. “I didn’t know you took anybody with prison records.”

  They really believed I thought ex-convicts weren’t supposed to register. They asked a lot of questions. I was glad they didn’t ask if I intended to put on the white man’s uniform, because I didn’t. They just took it for granted that I would. They told me they weren’t going to send me to jail for failing to register, that they were going to give me a break, but that I would have to register immediately.

  So I went straight from there to the draft board. When they gave me a form to fill out, I wrote in the appropriate places that I was a Muslim, and that I was a conscientious objector.

  I turned in the form. This middle-aged, bored-acting devil who scanned it looked out from under his eyes at me. He got up and went into another office, obviously to consult someone over him. After a while, he came out and motioned for me to go in there.

  These three—I believe there were three, as I remember—older devils sat behind desks. They all wore that “troublesome nigger” expression. And I looked “white devil” right back into their eyes. They asked me on what basis did I claim to be a Muslim in my religion. I told them that the Messenger of Allah was Mr. Elijah Muhammad, and that all who followed Mr. Muhammad here in America were Muslims. I knew they had heard this before from some Temple One young brothers who had been there before me.

  They asked if I knew what “conscientious objector” meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.

  They told me that my case would be “pending.” But I was put through the physical anyway, and they sent me a card with some kind of classification. That was 1953, then I heard no more for seven years, when I received another classification card in the mail. In fact, I carry it in my wallet right now. Here: it’s card number 20 219 25 1377, it’s dated November 21, 1960. It says, “Class 5-A,” whatever that means, and stamped on the card’s back is “Michigan Local Board No. 19, Wayne County, 3604 South Wayne Road, Wayne, Michigan.”

  —

  Every time I spoke at our Temple One, my voice would still be hoarse from the last time. My throat took a long time to get into condition.

  “Do you know why the white man really hates you? It’s because every time he sees your face, he sees a mirror of his crime—and his guilty conscience can’t bear to face it!

  “Every white man in America, when he looks into a black man’s eyes, should fall to his knees and say ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry—my kind has committed history’s greatest crime against your kind; will you give me the chance to atone?’ But do you brothers and sisters expect any white man to do that? No, you know better! And why won’t he do it? Because he can’t do it. The white man has created a devil, to bring chaos upon this earth….”

  Somewhere about this time, I left the Gar Wood factory and I went to work for the Ford Motor Company, one of the Lincoln-Mercury Division assembly lines.

  As a young minister, I would go to Chicago and see Mr. Elijah Muhammad every time I could get off. He encouraged me to come when I could. I was treated as if I had been one of the sons of Mr. Muhammad and his dark, good wife Sister Clara Muhammad. I saw their children only occasionally. Most of them in those years worked around Chicago in various jobs, laborers, driving taxis, and things such as that. Also living in the home was Mr. Muhammad’s dear Mother Marie.

  I would spend almost as much time with Mother Marie as I did with Mr. Muhammad. I loved to hear her reminiscences about her son Elijah’s early life when they lived in Sandersville, Georgia, where he was born in 1897.

  Mr. Muhammad would talk with me for hours. After eating good, healthful Muslim food, we would stay at the dinner table and talk. Or I would ride with him as he drove on his daily rounds between the few grocery stores that the Muslims then owned in Chicago. The stores were examples to help black people see what they could do for themselves by hiring their own kind and trading with their own kind and thus quit being exploited by the white man.

  In the Muslim-owned combination grocery-drug store on Wentworth and 31st Street, Mr. Muhammad would sweep the floor or something like that. He would do such work himself as an example to his followers whom he taught that idleness and laziness were among the black man’s greatest sins against himself. I would want to snatch the broom from Mr. Muhammad’s hand, because I thought he was too valuable to be sweeping a floor. But he wouldn’t let me do anything but stay with him and listen while he advised me on the best ways to spread his message.

  The way we were with each other, it would make me think of Socrates on the steps of the Athens market place, spreading his wisdom to his students. Or how one of those students, Aristotle, had his students following behind him, walking through the Lyceum.

  One day, I remember, a dirty glass of water was on a counter and Mr. Muhammad put a clean glass of water beside it. “You want to know how to spread my teachings?” he said, and he pointed to the glasses of water. “Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,” he said, “just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won’t have to say that yours is better.”

  Of all the things that Mr. Muhammad ever was to teach me, I don’t know why, that still stands out in my mind, although I haven’t always practiced it. I love too much to battle. I’m inclined to tell somebody if his glass of water is dirty.

  Mother Marie, when Mr. Muhammad was busy, would tell me about her son’s boyhood and of his growing up in Georgia to young manhood.

  Mother Marie’s account of her son began when she was herself but seven years old. She told me that then she had a vision that one day she would be the mother of a very great man. She married a Baptist minister, Reverend Poole, who worked around Sandersville on the farms, and in the sawmills. Among their thirteen children, said Mother Marie, little Elijah was very different, almost from when he could walk and talk.

  The small, frail boy usually settled his older brothers’ and sisters’ disputes, Mother Marie said. And young as he was, he became regarded by them as their leader. And Elijah, about the time he entered school, began displaying a strong race consciousness. After the fourth grade, because the family was so poor, Elijah had to quit school and begin full-time working. An older sister taught Elijah as much as she was able at night.

  Mother Marie said that Elijah spent hours poring through the Bible, with tears shining in his eyes. (Mr. Muhammad told me himself later that as a boy he felt that the Bible’s words were a locked door, that could be unlocked, if only he knew how, and he cried because of his frustrated anxiety to receive understanding.) Elijah grew up into a still-frail teenager who displayed a most uncommonly strong love for his race, and, Mother Marie said, instead of condemning Negroes’ faults, young Elijah always would speak of reasons for those faults.

  Mother Marie has since died. I believe that she had as large a funeral as Chicago has seen. Not only Muslims, but others knew of the deep bond that Messenger Elijah had with his mother.

  “I am not ashamed to say how little learning I have had,” Mr. Muhammad told me. “My going to school no further than the fourth grade proves that I can know nothing except the truth I have been taught by
Allah. Allah taught me mathematics. He found me with a sluggish tongue, and taught me how to pronounce words.”

  Mr. Muhammad said that somehow, he never could stand how the Sandersville white farmers, the sawmill foremen, or other white employers would habitually and often curse Negro workers. He said he would politely ask any for whom he worked never to curse him. “I would ask them to just fire me if they didn’t like my work, but just don’t curse me.” (Mr. Muhammad’s ordinary conversation was the manner he used when making speeches. He was not “eloquent,” as eloquence is usually meant, but whatever he uttered had an impact on me that trained orators did not begin to have.) He said that on the jobs he got, he worked so honestly that generally he was put in charge of the other Negroes.

  After Mr. Muhammad and Sister Clara met and married and their first two children had been born, a white employer early in 1923 did curse Mr. Muhammad, then Elijah Poole. Elijah Poole, determined to avoid trouble, took his family to Detroit, arriving when he was twenty-five. Five more children would be born there in Detroit, and, finally, the last one in Chicago.

  In Detroit in 1931, Mr. Muhammad met Master W. D. Fard.

  The effects of the depression were bad everywhere, but in the black ghetto they were horrible, Mr. Muhammad told me. A small, light brown-skinned man knocked from door to door at the apartments of the poverty-stricken Negroes. The man offered for sale silks and other yard goods, and he identified himself as “a brother from the East.”

  This man began to tell Negroes how they came from a distant land, in the seeds of their forefathers.

  He warned them against eating the “filthy pig” and other “wrong foods” that it was habitual for Negroes to eat.

  Among the Negroes whom he found most receptive, he began holding little meetings in their poor homes. The man taught both the Quran and the Bible, and his students included Elijah Poole.

  This man said his name was W. D. Fard. He said that he was born in the Koreish tribe of Muhammad ibn Abdullah, the Arabian prophet Himself. This peddler of silks and yard goods, Mr. W. D. Fard, knew the Bible better than any of the Christian-bred Negroes.