The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  —

  As far back as 1961, when Mr. Muhammad’s illness took that turn for the worse, I had heard chance negative remarks concerning me. I had heard veiled implications. I had noticed other little evidences of the envy and of the jealousy which Mr. Muhammad had prophesied. For example, it was being said that “Minister Malcolm is trying to take over the Nation,” it was being said that I was “taking credit” for Mr. Muhammad’s teaching, it was being said that I was trying to “build an empire” for myself. It was being said that I loved playing “coast-to-coast Mr. Big Shot.”

  When I heard these things, actually, they didn’t anger me. They helped me to re-steel my inner resolve that such lies would never become true of me. I would always remember that Mr. Muhammad had prophesied this envy and jealousy. This would help me to ignore it, because I knew that he would understand if he ever should hear such talk.

  A frequent rumor among non-Muslims was “Malcolm X is making a pile of money.” All Muslims at least knew better than that. Me making money? The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the I.R.S. all combined can’t turn up a thing I got, beyond a car to drive and a seven-room house to live in. (And by now the Nation of Islam is jealously and greedily trying to take away even that house.) I had access to money. Yes! Elijah Muhammad would authorize for me any amount that I asked for. But he knew, as every Muslim official knew, that every nickel and dime I ever got was used to promote the Nation of Islam.

  My attitude toward money generated the only domestic quarrel that I have ever had with my beloved wife Betty. As our children increased in number, so did Betty’s hints to me that I should put away something for our family. But I refused, and finally we had this argument. I put my foot down. I knew I had in Betty a wife who would sacrifice her life for me if such an occasion ever presented itself to her, but still I told her that too many organizations had been destroyed by leaders who tried to benefit personally, often goaded into it by their wives. We nearly broke up over this argument. I finally convinced Betty that if anything ever happened to me, the Nation of Islam would take care of her for the rest of her life, and of our children until they were grown. I could never have been a bigger fool!

  In every radio or television appearance, in every newspaper interview, I always made it crystal clear that I was Mr. Muhammad’s representative. Anyone who ever heard me make a public speech during this time knows that at least once a minute I said, “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches—” I would refuse to talk with any person who ever tried any so-called “joke” about my constant reference to Mr. Muhammad. Whenever anyone said, or wrote, “Malcolm X, the number two Black Muslim—” I would recoil. I have called up reporters and radio and television newscasters long-distance and asked them never to use that phrasing again, explaining to them: “All Muslims are number two—after Mr. Muhammad.”

  My briefcase was stocked with Mr. Muhammad’s photographs. I gave them to photographers who snapped my picture. I would telephone editors asking them, “Please use Mr. Muhammad’s picture instead of mine.” When, to my joy, Mr. Muhammad agreed to grant interviews to white writers, I rarely spoke to a white writer, or a black one either, whom I didn’t urge to visit Mr. Muhammad in person in Chicago—“Get the truth from the Messenger in person”—and a number of them did go there and meet and interview him.

  Both white people and Negroes—even including Muslims—would make me uncomfortable, always giving me so much credit for the steady progress that the Nation of Islam was making. “All praise is due to Allah,” I told everybody. “Anything creditable that I do is due to Mr. Elijah Muhammad.”

  I believe that no man in the Nation of Islam could have gained the international prominence I gained with the wings Mr. Muhammad had put on me—plus having the freedom that he granted me to take liberties and do things on my own—and still have remained as faithful and as selfless a servant to him as I was.

  I would say that it was in 1962 when I began to notice that less and less about me appeared in our Nation’s Muhammad Speaks. I learned that Mr. Muhammad’s son, Herbert, now the paper’s publisher, had instructed that as little as possible be printed about me. In fact, there was more in the Muslim paper about integrationist Negro “leaders” than there was about me. I could read more about myself in the European, Asian, and African press.

  I am not griping about publicity for myself. I already had received more publicity than many world personages. But I resented the fact that the Muslims’ own newspaper denied them news of important things being done in their behalf, simply because it happened that I had done the things. I was conducting rallies, trying to propagate Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, and because of jealousy and narrow-mindedness finally I got no coverage at all—for by now an order had been given to completely black me out of the newspaper. For instance, I spoke to eight thousand students at the University of California, and the press there gave big coverage to what I said of the power and program of Mr. Muhammad. But when I got to Chicago, expecting at least a favorable response and some coverage, I met only a chilly reaction. The same thing happened when, in Harlem, I staged a rally that drew seven thousand people. At that time, Chicago headquarters was even discouraging me from staging large rallies. But the next week, I held another Harlem rally that was even bigger and more successful than the first one—and obviously this only increased the envy of the Chicago headquarters.

  But I would put these things out of my mind, as they occurred. At least, as much as I humanly could, I put them out of my mind. I am not trying to make myself seem right and noble. I am telling the truth. I loved the Nation, and Mr. Muhammad. I lived for the Nation, and for Mr. Muhammad.

  It made other Muslim officials jealous because my picture was often in the daily press. They wouldn’t remember that my picture was there because of my fervor in championing Mr. Muhammad. They wouldn’t simply reason that as vulnerable as the Nation of Islam was to distorted rumors and outright lies, we needed nothing so little as to have our public spokesman constantly denying the rumors. Common sense would have told any official that certainly Mr. Muhammad couldn’t be running all over the country as his own spokesman. And whoever he appointed as his spokesman couldn’t avoid a lot of press focus.

  Whenever I caught any resentful feelings hanging on in my mind, I would be ashamed of myself, considering it a sign of weakness in myself. I knew that at least Mr. Muhammad knew that my life was totally dedicated to representing him.

  But during 1963, I couldn’t help being very hypersensitive to my critics in high posts within our Nation. I quit selecting certain of my New York brothers and giving them money to go and lay groundwork for new mosques in other cities—because slighting remarks were being made about “Malcolm’s ministers.” In a time in America when it was of arch importance for a militant black voice to reach mass audiences, Life magazine wanted to do a personal story of me, and I refused. I refused again when a cover story was offered by Newsweek. I refused again when I could have been a guest on the top-rated “Meet the Press” television program. Each refusal was a general loss for the black man, and, for the Nation of Islam, each refusal was a specific loss—and each refusal was made because of Chicago’s attitude. There was jealousy because I had been requested to make these featured appearances.

  When a high-powered-rifle slug tore through the back of the N.A.A.C.P. Field Secretary Medgar Evers in Mississippi, I wanted to say the blunt truths that needed to be said. When a bomb was exploded in a Negro Christian church in Birmingham, Alabama, snuffing out the lives of those four beautiful little black girls, I made comments—but not what should have been said about the climate of hate that the American white man was generating and nourishing. The more hate was permitted to lash out when there were ways it could have been checked, the more bold the hate became—until at last it was flaring out at even the white man’s own kind, including his own leaders. In Dallas, Texas, for instance, the then Vice President and Mrs. Johnson were vulgarly insulted. And the U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevens
on, was spat upon and hit on the head by a white woman picket.

  Mr. Muhammad made me the Nation’s first National Minister. At a late 1963 rally in Philadelphia, Mr. Muhammad, embracing me, said to that audience before us, “This is my most faithful, hardworking minister. He will follow me until he dies.”

  He had never paid such a compliment to any Muslim. No praise from any other earthly person could have meant more to me.

  But this would be Mr. Muhammad’s and my last public appearance together.

  Not long before, I had been on the Jerry Williams radio program in Boston, when someone handed me an item hot off the Associated Press machine. I read that a chapter of the Louisiana Citizens Council had just offered a $10,000 reward for my death.

  But the threat of death was much closer to me than somewhere in Louisiana.

  What I am telling you is the truth. When I discovered who else wanted me dead, I am telling you—it nearly sent me to Bellevue.

  —

  In my twelve years as a Muslim minister, I had always taught so strongly on the moral issues that many Muslims accused me of being “anti-woman.” The very keel of my teaching, and my most bone-deep personal belief, was that Elijah Muhammad in every aspect of his existence was a symbol of moral, mental, and spiritual reform among the American black people. For twelve years, I had taught that within the entire Nation of Islam; my own transformation was the best example I knew of Mr. Muhammad’s power to reform black men’s lives. From the time I entered prison until I married, about twelve years later, because of Mr. Muhammad’s influence upon me, I had never touched a woman.

  But around 1963, if anyone had noticed, I spoke less and less of religion. I taught social doctrine to Muslims, and current events, and politics. I stayed wholly off the subject of morality.

  And the reason for this was that my faith had been shaken in a way that I can never fully describe. For I had discovered Muslims had been betrayed by Elijah Muhammad himself.

  I want to make this as brief as I can, only enough so that my position and my reactions will be understood. As to whether or not I should reveal this, there’s no longer any need for any question in my mind—for now the public knows. To make it concise, I will quote from one wire service story as it appeared in newspapers, and was reported over radio and television, across the United States:

  “Los Angeles, July 3 (UPI)—Elijah Muhammad, 67-year-old leader of the Black Muslim movement, today faced paternity suits from two former secretaries who charged he fathered their four children….Both women are in their twenties….Miss Rosary and Miss Williams charged they had intimacies with Elijah Muhammad from 1957 until this year. Miss Rosary alleged he fathered her two children and said she was expecting a third child by him…the other plaintiff said he was the father of her daughter….”

  As far back as 1955, I had heard hints. But believe me when I tell you this: for me even to consider believing anything as insane-sounding as any slightest implication of any immoral behavior of Mr. Muhammad—why, the very idea made me shake with fear.

  And so my mind simply refused to accept anything so grotesque as adultery mentioned in the same breath with Mr. Muhammad’s name.

  Adultery! Why, any Muslim guilty of adultery was summarily ousted in disgrace. One of the Nation’s most closely kept scandals was that a succession of the personal secretaries of Mr. Muhammad had become pregnant. They were brought before Muslim courts and charged with adultery and they confessed. Humiliated before the general body, they received sentences of from one to five years of “isolation.” That meant they were to have no contact whatsoever with any other Muslims.

  I don’t think I could say anything which better testifies to my depth of faith in Mr. Muhammad than that I totally and absolutely rejected my own intelligence. I simply refused to believe. I didn’t want Allah to “burn my brain” as I felt the brain of my brother Reginald had been burned for harboring evil thoughts about Mr. Elijah Muhammad. The last time I had seen Reginald, one day he walked into the Mosque Seven restaurant. I saw him coming in the door. I went and met him. I looked into my own brother’s eyes; I told him he wasn’t welcome among Muslims, and he turned around and left, and I haven’t seen him since. I did that to my own blood brother because, years before, Mr. Muhammad had sentenced Reginald to “isolation” from all other Muslims—and I considered that I was a Muslim before I was Reginald’s brother.

  No one in the world could have convinced me that Mr. Muhammad would betray the reverence bestowed upon him by all of the mosques full of poor, trusting Muslims nickeling and diming up to faithfully support the Nation of Islam—when many of these faithful were scarcely able to pay their own rents.

  But by late 1962, I learned reliably that numerous Muslims were leaving Mosque Two in Chicago. The ugly rumor was spreading swiftly—even among non-Muslim Negroes. When I thought how the press constantly sought ways to discredit the Nation of Islam, I trembled to think of such a thing reaching the ears of some newspaper reporter, either black or white.

  I actually began to have nightmares…I saw headlines.

  I was burdened with a leaden fear as I kept speaking engagements all over America. Any time a reporter came anywhere near me, I could hear him ask, “Is it true, Mr. Malcolm X, this report we hear, that…” And what was I going to say?

  There was never any specific moment when I admitted the situation to myself. In the way that the human mind can do, somehow I slid over admitting to myself the ugly fact, even as I began dealing with it.

  Both in New York and Chicago, non-Muslims whom I knew began to tell me indirectly they had heard—or they would ask me if I had heard. I would act as if I had no idea whatever of what they were talking about—and I was grateful when they chose not to spell out what they knew. I went around knowing that I looked to them like a total fool, out there every day preaching, and apparently not knowing what was going on right under my nose, in my own organization, involving the very man I was praising so. To look like a fool unearthed emotions I hadn’t felt since my Harlem hustler days. The worst thing in the hustler’s world was to be a dupe.

  I will give you an example. Backstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem one day, the comedian Dick Gregory looked at me. “Man,” he said, “Muhammad’s nothing but a…”—I can’t say the word he used. Bam! Just like that. My Muslim instincts said to attack Dick—but, instead, I felt weak and hollow. I think Dick sensed how upset I was and he let me get him off the subject. I knew Dick, a Chicagoan, was wise in the ways of the streets, and blunt-spoken. I wanted to plead with him not to say to anyone else what he had said to me—but I couldn’t; it would have been my own admission.

  I can’t describe the torments I went through.

  Always before, in any extremity, I had caught the first plane to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. He had virtually raised me from the dead. Everything I was that was creditable, he had made me. I felt that no matter what, I could not let him down.

  There was no one I could turn to with this problem, except Mr. Muhammad himself. Ultimately that had to be the case. But first I went to Chicago to see Mr. Muhammad’s second youngest son, Wallace Muhammad. I felt that Wallace was Mr. Muhammad’s most strongly spiritual son, the son with the most objective outlook. Always, Wallace and I had shared an exceptional closeness and trust.

  And Wallace knew, when he saw me, why I had come to see him. “I know,” he said. I said I thought we should rally to help his father. Wallace said he didn’t feel that his father would welcome any efforts to help him. I told myself that Wallace must be crazy.

  Next, I broke the rule that no Muslim is supposed to have any contact with another Muslim in the “isolated” state. I looked up, and I talked with three of the former secretaries to Mr. Muhammad. From their own mouths, I heard their stories of who had fathered their children. And from their own mouths I heard that Elijah Muhammad had told them I was the best, the greatest minister he ever had, but that someday I would leave him, turn against him—so I was “dangerous.” I learned from thes
e former secretaries of Mr. Muhammad that while he was praising me to my face, he was tearing me apart behind my back.

  That deeply hurt me.

  Every day, I was meeting the microphones, cameras, press reporters, and other commitments, including the Muslims of my own Mosque Seven. I felt almost out of my mind.

  Finally, the thing crystallized for me. As long as I did nothing, I felt it was the same as being disloyal. I felt that as long as I sat down, I was not helping Mr. Muhammad—when somebody needed to be standing up.

  So one night I wrote to Mr. Muhammad about the poison being spread about him. He telephoned me in New York. He said that when he saw me he would discuss it.

  I desperately wanted to find some way—some kind of a bridge—over which I was certain the Nation of Islam could be saved from self-destruction. I had faith in the Nation: we weren’t some group of Christian Negroes, jumping and shouting and full of sins.

  I thought of one bridge that could be used if and when the shattering disclosure should become public. Loyal Muslims could be taught that a man’s accomplishments in his life outweigh his personal, human weaknesses. Wallace Muhammad helped me to review the Quran and the Bible for documentation. David’s adultery with Bathsheba weighed less on history’s scales, for instance, than the positive fact of David’s killing Goliath. Thinking of Lot, we think not of incest, but of his saving the people from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Or, our image of Noah isn’t of his getting drunk—but of his building the ark and teaching people to save themselves from the flood. We think of Moses leading the Hebrews from bondage, not of Moses’ adultery with the Ethiopian women. In all of the cases I reviewed, the positive outweighed the negative.

  I began teaching in New York Mosque Seven that a man’s accomplishments in his life outweighed his personal, human weaknesses. I taught that a person’s good deeds outweigh his bad deeds. I never mentioned the previously familiar subjects of adultery and fornication, and I never mentioned immoral evils.