The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  “Brother Malcolm, I want you to become well known,” Mr. Muhammad told me one day. “Because if you are well known, it will make me better known,” he went on.

  “But, Brother Malcolm, there is something you need to know. You will grow to be hated when you become well known. Because usually people get jealous of public figures.”

  Nothing that Mr. Muhammad ever said to me was more prophetic.

  CHAPTER 15

  ICARUS

  The more places I represented Mr. Muhammad on television and radio, and at colleges and elsewhere, the more letters came from people who had heard me. I’d say that ninety-five per cent of the letters were from white people.

  Only a few of the letters fell into the “Dear Nigger X” category, or the death-threats. Most of my mail exposed to me the white man’s two major dreads. The first one was his own private belief that God wrathfully is going to destroy this civilization. And the white man’s second most pervading dread was his image of the black man entering the body of the white woman.

  An amazing percentage of the white letter-writers agreed entirely with Mr. Muhammad’s analysis of the problem—but not with his solution. One odd ambivalence was how some letters, otherwise all but championing Mr. Muhammad, would recoil at the expression “white devils.” I tried to explain this in subsequent speeches:

  “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. Any intelligent, honest, objective person cannot fail to realize that this white man’s slave trade, and his subsequent devilish actions are directly responsible for not only the presence of this black man in America, but also for the condition in which we find this black man here. You cannot find one black man, I do not care who he is, who has not been personally damaged in some way by the devilish acts of the collective white man!”

  Nearly every day, some attack on the “Black Muslims” would appear in some newspapers. Increasingly, a focal target was something that I had said, “Malcolm X” as a “demagogue.” I would grow furious reading any harsh attack upon Mr. Muhammad. I didn’t care what they said about me.

  Those social workers and sociologists—they tried to take me apart. Especially the black ones, for some reason. Of course, I knew the reason: the white man signed their paychecks. If I wasn’t “polarizing the community,” according to this bunch, I had “erroneously appraised the racial picture.” Or in some statement, I had “over-generalized.” Or when I had made some absolutely true point, “Malcolm X conveniently manipulated…”

  Once, one of my Mosque Seven Muslim brothers who worked with teenagers in a well-known Harlem community center showed me a confidential report. Some black senior social worker had been given a month off to investigate the “Black Muslims” in the Harlem area. Every paragraph sent me back to the dictionary—I guess that’s why I’ve never forgotten one line about me. Listen to this: “The dynamic interstices of the Harlem sub-culture have been oversimplified and distorted by Malcolm X to meet his own needs.”

  Which of us, I wonder, knew more about that Harlem ghetto “sub-culture”? I, who had hustled for years in those streets, or that black snob status-symbol-educated social worker?

  But that’s not important. What’s important, to my way of thinking about it, is that among America’s 22 million black people so relatively few have been lucky enough to attend a college—and here was one of those who had been lucky. Here was, to my way of thinking, one of those “educated” Negroes who never had understood the true intent, or purpose, or application of education. Here was one of those stagnant educations, never used except for parading a lot of big words.

  Do you realize this is one of the major reasons why America’s white man has so easily contained and oppressed America’s black man? Because until just lately, among the few educated Negroes scarcely any applied their education, as I am forced to say the white man does—in searching and creative thinking, to further themselves and their own kind in this competitive, materialistic, dog-eat-dog white man’s world. For generations, the so-called “educated” Negroes have “led” their black brothers by echoing the white man’s thinking—which naturally has been to the exploitive white man’s advantage.

  The white man—give him his due—has an extraordinary intelligence, an extraordinary cleverness. His world is full of proof of it. You can’t name a thing the white man can’t make. You can hardly name a scientific problem he can’t solve. Here he is now solving the problems of sending men exploring into outer space—and returning them safely to earth.

  But in the arena of dealing with human beings, the white man’s working intelligence is hobbled. His intelligence will fail him altogether if the humans happen to be non-white. The white man’s emotions superseded his intelligence. He will commit against non-whites the most incredible spontaneous emotional acts, so psyche-deep is his “white superiority” complex.

  Where was the A-bomb dropped…“to save American lives”? Can the white man be so naive as to think the clear import of this ever will be lost upon the non-white two-thirds of the earth’s population?

  Before that bomb was dropped—right over here in the United States, 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!

  Historically, the non-white complexion has evoked and exposed the “devil” in the very nature of the white man.

  What else but a controlling emotional “devil” so blinded American white intelligence that it couldn’t foresee that millions of black slaves, “freed,” then permitted even limited education, would one day rise up as a terrifying monster within white America’s midst?

  The white man’s brains that today explore space should have told the slavemaster that any slave, if he is educated, will no longer fear his master. History shows that an educated slave always begins to ask, and next demand, equality with his master.

  Today, in many ways the black man sees the collective white man in America better than that white man can see himself. And the 22 million blacks realize increasingly that physically, politically, economically, and even to some degree socially, the aroused black man can create a turmoil in white America’s vitals—not to mention America’s international image.

  —

  I had not intended to stray off. I had been telling how in 1963, I was trying to cope with the white newspaper, radio, and television reporters who were determined to defeat Mr. Muhammad’s teachings.

  I developed a mental image of reporters as human ferrets—steadily sniffing, darting, probing for some way to trick me, somehow to corner me in our interview exchanges.

  Let some civil rights “leader” make some statement, displeasing to the white public power structure, and the reporters, in an effort to whip him back into line, would try to use me. I’ll give an example. I’d get a question like this: “Mr. Malcolm X, you’ve often gone on record as disapproving of the sit-ins and similar Negro protest actions—what is your opinion of the Montgomery boycott that Dr. King is leading?”

  Now my feeling was that although the civil rights “leaders” kept attacking us Muslims, still they were black people, still they were our own kind, and I would be most foolish to let the white man maneuver me against the civil rights movement.

  When I was asked about the Montgomery boycott, I’d carefully review what led up to it. Mrs. Rosa Parks was riding home on a bus and at some bus stop the white cracker bus driver ordered Mrs. Parks to get up and give her seat to some white passenger who had just got on the bus. I’d say, “Now, just imagine that! This good, hard-working, Christian-believing black woman, she’s paid her money, she’s in her seat. Just because she’s black, she’s asked to get up! I mean, s
ometimes even for me it’s hard to believe the white man’s arrogance!”

  Or I might say, “No one will ever know exactly what emotional ingredient made this relatively trivial incident a fuse for those Montgomery Negroes. There had been centuries of the worst kind of outrages against Southern black people—lynchings, rapings, shootings, beatings! But you know history has been triggered by trivial-seeming incidents. Once a little nobody Indian lawyer was put off a train, and fed up with injustice, he twisted a knot in the British Lion’s tail. His name was Mahatma Gandhi!”

  Or I might copy a trick I had seen lawyers use, both in life and on television. It was a way that lawyers would slip in before a jury something otherwise inadmissable. (Sometimes I think I really might have made it as a lawyer, as I once told that eighth-grade teacher in Mason, Michigan, I wanted to be, when he advised me to become a carpenter.) I would slide right over the reporter’s question to drop into his lap a logical-extension hot potato for him.

  “Well, sir, I see the same boycott reasoning for Negroes asked to join the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Why should we go off to die somewhere to preserve a so-called ‘democracy’ that gives a white immigrant of one day more than it gives the black man with four hundred years of slaving and serving in this country?”

  Whites would prefer fifty local boycotts to having 22 million Negroes start thinking about what I had just said. I don’t have to tell you that it never got printed the way I said it. It would be turned inside out if it got printed at all. And I could detect when the white reporters had gotten their heads together; they quit asking me certain questions.

  If I had developed a good point, though, I’d bait a hook to get it said when I went on radio or television. I’d seem to slip and mention some recent so-called civil rights “advance.” You know, where some giant industry had hired ten showpiece Negroes; some restaurant chain had begun making more money by serving Negroes; some Southern university had enrolled a black freshman without bayonets—like that. When I “slipped,” the program host would leap on that bait: “Ahhh! Indeed, Mr. Malcolm X—you can’t deny that’s an advance for your race!”

  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!”

  Similarly, just let some mayor or some city council somewhere boast of having “no Negro problem.” That would get off the newsroom teletypes and it would soon be jammed right in my face. I’d say they didn’t need to tell me where this was, because I knew that all it meant was that relatively very few Negroes were living there. That’s true the world over, you know. Take “democratic” England—when 100,000 black West Indians got there, England stopped the black migration. Finland welcomed a Negro U. S. Ambassador. Well, let enough Negroes follow him to Finland! Or in Russia, when Khrushchev was in power, he threatened to cancel the visas of black African students whose anti-discrimination demonstration said to the world, “Russia, too….”

  —

  The Deep South white press generally blacked me out. But they front-paged what I felt about Northern white and black Freedom Riders going South to “demonstrate.” I called it “ridiculous”; their own Northern ghettoes, right at home, had enough rats and roaches to kill to keep all of the Freedom Riders busy. I said that ultra-liberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi. If the Northern Freedom Riders wanted more to do, they could work on the roots of such ghetto evils as the little children out in the streets at midnight, with apartment keys on strings around their necks to let themselves in, and their mothers and fathers drunk, drug addicts, thieves, prostitutes. Or the Northern Freedom Riders could light some fires under Northern city halls, unions, and major industries to give more jobs to Negroes to remove so many of them from the relief and welfare rolls, which created laziness, and which deteriorated the ghettoes into steadily worse places for humans to live. It was all—it is all—the absolute truth; but what did I want to say it for? Snakes couldn’t have turned on me faster than the liberal.

  Yes, I will pull off that liberal’s halo that he spends such efforts cultivating! The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.

  I believe my own life mirrors this hypocrisy. I know nothing about the South. I am a creation of the Northern white man and of his hypocritical attitude toward the Negro.

  The white Southerner was always given his due by Mr. Muhammad. The white Southerner, you can say one thing—he is honest. He bares his teeth to the black man; he tells the black man, to his face, that Southern whites never will accept phony “integration.” The Southern white goes further, to tell the black man that he means to fight him every inch of the way—against even the so-called “tokenism.” The advantage of this is the Southern black man never has been under any illusions about the opposition he is dealing with.

  You can say for many Southern white people that, individually, they have been paternalistically helpful to many individual Negroes. But the Northern white man, he grins with his teeth, and his mouth has always been full of tricks and lies of “equality” and “integration.” When one day all over America, a black hand touched the white man’s shoulder, and the white man turned, and there stood the Negro saying “Me, too…” why, that Northern liberal shrank from that black man with as much guilt and dread as any Southern white man.

  Actually, America’s most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettoes—the Northern white power structure’s system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner.

  The word “integration” was invented by a Northern liberal. The word has no real meaning. I ask you: in the racial sense in which it’s used so much today, whatever “integration” is supposed to mean, can it precisely be defined? The truth is that “integration” is an image, it’s a foxy Northern liberal’s smokescreen that confuses the true wants of the American black man. Here in these fifty racist and neo-racist states of North America, this word “integration” has millions of white people confused, and angry, believing wrongly that the black masses want to live mixed up with the white man. That is the case only with the relative handful of these “integration”-mad Negroes.

  I’m talking about these “token-integrated” Negroes who flee from their poor, downtrodden black brothers—from their own self-hate, which is what they’re really trying to escape. I’m talking about these Negroes you will see who can’t get enough of nuzzling up to the white man. These “chosen few” Negroes are more white-minded, more anti-black, than even the white man is.

  Human rights! Respect as human beings! That’s what America’s black masses want. That’s the true problem. The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettoes, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women!

  Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending any more time than they must around white people. This “integration” image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them—and that’s a lie! Or you can’t tell the average white man that the Negro man’s prime desire isn’t to have a white woman—another lie! Like a black brother recently observed to me, “Look, you ever smell one of them wet?”

  The black masses prefer the company of their own kind. Why, even these fancy, bourgeois Negroes—when they get back home from the fancy “integrated” cock
tail parties, what do they do but kick off their shoes and talk about those white liberals they just left as if the liberals were dogs. And the white liberals probably do the very same thing. I can’t be sure about the whites, I am never around them in private—but the bourgeois Negroes know I’m not lying.

  I’m telling it like it is! You never have to worry about me biting my tongue if something I know as truth is on my mind. Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country—to clear the air of the racial mirages, clichés, and lies that this country’s very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years.

  In many communities, especially small communities, white people have created a benevolent image of themselves as having had so much “good-will toward our Negroes,” every time any “local Negro” begins suddenly letting the local whites know the truth—that the black people are sick of being hind-tit, second-class, disfranchised, that’s when you hear, uttered so sadly, “Unfortunately now because of this, our whites of good-will are starting to turn against the Negroes….It’s so regrettable…progress was being made…but now our communications between the races have broken down!”

  What are they talking about? There never was any communication. Until after World War II, there wasn’t a single community in the entire United States where the white man heard from any local Negro “leaders” the truth of what Negroes felt about the conditions that the white community imposed upon Negroes.

  You need some proof? Well, then, why was it that when Negroes did start revolting across America, virtually all of white America was caught up in surprise and even shock? I would hate to be general of an army as badly informed as the American white man has been about the Negro in this country.