The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  I flew back to Miami feeling that it was Allah’s intent for me to help Cassius prove Islam’s superiority before the world—through proving that mind can win over brawn. I don’t have to remind you of how people everywhere scoffed at Cassius Clay’s chances of beating Liston.

  This time, I brought from New York with me some photographs of Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston in their fight camps, with white priests as their “spiritual advisors.” Cassius Clay, being a Muslim, didn’t need to be told how white Christianity had dealt with the American black man. “This fight is the truth,” I told Cassius. “It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in a prize ring—for the first time. It’s a modern Crusades—a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens!” I told Cassius, “Do you think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as anything but the champion?” (You may remember that at the weighing-in, Cassius was yelling such things as “It is prophesied for me to be successful! I cannot be beaten!”)

  Sonny Liston’s handlers and advisors had him fighting harder to “integrate” than he was training to meet Cassius. Liston finally had managed to rent a big, fine house over in a rich, wall-to-wall white section. To give you an idea, the owner of the neighboring house was the New York Yankees baseball club owner, Dan Topping. In the early evenings, when Cassius and I would sometimes walk where the black people lived, those Negroes’ mouths would hang open in surprise that he was among them instead of whites as most black champions preferred. Again and again, Cassius startled those Negroes, telling them, “You’re my own kind. I get my strength from being around my own black people.”

  What Sonny Liston was about to meet, in fact, was one of the most awesome frights that ever can confront any person—one who worships Allah, and who is completely without fear.

  Among over eight thousand other seat holders in Miami’s big Convention Hall, I received Seat Number Seven. Seven has always been my favorite number. It has followed me throughout my life. I took this to be Allah’s message confirming to me that Cassius Clay was going to win. Along with Cassius, I really was more worried about how his brother Rudolph was going to do, fighting his first pro fight in the preliminaries.

  While Rudolph was winning a four-round decision over a Florida Negro named “Chip” Johnson, Cassius stood at the rear of the auditorium watching calmly, dressed in a black tuxedo. After all of his months of antics, after the weighing-in act that Cassius had put on, this calmness should have tipped off some of the sportswriters who were predicting Clay’s slaughter.

  Then Cassius disappeared, dressing to meet Liston. As we had agreed, I joined him in a silent prayer for Allah’s blessings. Finally, he and Liston were in their corners in the ring. I folded my arms and tried to appear the coolest man in the place, because a television camera can show you looking like a fool yelling at a prizefight.

  Except for whatever chemical it was that got into Cassius’ eyes and blinded him temporarily in the fourth and fifth rounds, the fight went according to his plan. He evaded Liston’s powerful punches. The third round automatically began the tiring of the aging Liston, who was overconfidently trained to go only two rounds. Then, desperate, Liston lost. The secret of one of fight history’s greatest upsets was that months before that night, Clay had out-thought Liston.

  There probably never has been as quiet a new-champion party. The boyish king of the ring came over to my motel. He ate ice cream, drank milk, talked with football star Jimmy Brown and other friends, and some reporters. Sleepy, Cassius took a quick nap on my bed, then he went back home.

  We had breakfast together the next morning, just before the press conference when Cassius calmly made the announcement which burst into international headlines that he was a “Black Muslim.”

  But let me tell you something about that. Cassius never announced himself a member of any “Black Muslims.” The press reporters made that out of what he told them, which was this: “I believe in the religion of Islam, which means I believe there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Apostle. This is the same religion that is believed in by over seven hundred million dark-skinned peoples throughout Africa and Asia.”

  Nothing in all of the furor which followed was more ridiculous than Floyd Patterson announcing that as a Catholic, he wanted to fight Cassius Clay—to save the heavyweight crown from being held by a Muslim. It was such a sad case of a brainwashed black Christian ready to do battle for the white man—who wants no part of him. Not three weeks later, the newspapers reported that in Yonkers, New York, Patterson was offering to sell his $140,000 house for a $20,000 loss. He had “integrated” into a neighborhood of whites who had made his life miserable. None were friendly. Their children called his children “niggers.” One neighbor trained his dog to deface Patterson’s property. Another erected a fence to hide the Negroes from sight. “I tried, it just didn’t work,” Patterson told the press.

  —

  The first direct order for my death was issued through a Mosque Seven official who previously had been a close assistant. Another previously close assistant of mine was assigned to do the job. He was a brother with a knowledge of demolition; he was asked to wire my car to explode when I turned the ignition key. But this brother, it happened, had seen too much of my total loyalty to the Nation to carry out his order. Instead, he came to me. I thanked him for my life. I told him what was really going on in Chicago. He was stunned almost beyond belief.

  This brother was close to others in the Mosque Seven circle who might subsequently be called upon to eliminate me. He said he would take it upon himself to enlighten each of them enough so that they wouldn’t allow themselves to be used.

  This first direct death-order was how, finally, I began to arrive at my psychological divorce from the Nation of Islam.

  I began to see, wherever I went—on the streets, in business places, on elevators, sidewalks, in passing cars—the faces of Muslims whom I knew, and I knew that any of them might be waiting the opportunity to try and put a bullet into me.

  I was racking my brain. What was I going to do? My life was inseparably committed to the American black man’s struggle. I was generally regarded as a “leader.” For years, I had attacked so many so-called “black leaders” for their shortcomings. Now, I had to honestly ask myself what I could offer, how I was genuinely qualified to help the black people win their struggle for human rights. I had enough experience to know that in order to be a good organizer of anything which you expect to succeed—including yourself—you must almost mathematically analyze cold facts.

  I had, as one asset, I knew, an international image. No amount of money could have bought that. I knew that if I said something newsworthy, people would read or hear of it, maybe even around the world, depending upon what it was. More immediately, in New York City, where I would naturally base any operation, I had a large, direct personal following of non-Muslims. This had been building up steadily ever since I had led Muslims in the dramatic protest to the police when our brother Hinton was beaten up. Hundreds of Harlem Negroes had seen, and hundreds of thousands of them had later heard how we had shown that almost anything could be accomplished by black men who would face the white man without fear. All of Harlem had seen how from then on, the police gave Muslims respect. (This was during the time that the Deputy Chief Inspector at the 28th Precinct had said of me, “No one man should have that much power.”)

  Over the ensuing years, I’d had various kinds of evidence that a high percentage of New York City’s black people responded to what I said, including a great many who would not publicly say so. For instance, time and again when I spoke at street rallies, I would draw ten and twelve times as many people as most other so-called “Negro leaders.” I knew that in any society, a true leader is one who earns and deserves the following he enjoys. True followers are bestowed by themselves, out of their own volition and emotions. I knew that the great lack of most of the big-named “Negro leaders”
was their lack of any true rapport with the ghetto Negroes. How could they have rapport when they spent most of their time “integrating” with white people? I knew that the ghetto people knew that I never left the ghetto in spirit, and I never left it physically any more than I had to. I had a ghetto instinct; for instance, I could feel if tension was beyond normal in a ghetto audience. And I could speak and understand the ghetto’s language. There was an example of this that always flew to my mind every time I heard some of the “big name” Negro “leaders” declaring they “spoke for” the ghetto black people.

  After a Harlem street rally, one of these downtown “leaders” and I were talking when we were approached by a Harlem hustler. To my knowledge I’d never seen this hustler before; he said to me, approximately: “Hey, baby! I dig you holding this all-originals scene at the track…I’m going to lay a vine under the Jew’s balls for a dime—got to give you a play…Got the shorts out here trying to scuffle up on some bread…Well, my man, I’ll get on, got to go peck a little, and cop me some z’s—” And the hustler went on up Seventh Avenue.

  I would never have given it another thought, except that this downtown “leader” was standing, staring after that hustler, looking as if he’d just heard Sanskrit. He asked me what had been said, and I told him. The hustler had said he was aware that the Muslims were holding an all-black bazaar at Rockland Palace, which is primarily a dancehall. The hustler intended to pawn a suit for ten dollars to attend and patronize the bazaar. He had very little money but he was trying hard to make some. He was going to eat, then he would get some sleep.

  The point I am making is that, as a “leader,” I could talk over the ABC, CBS, or NBC microphones, at Harvard or at Tuskegee; I could talk with the so-called “middle class” Negro and with the ghetto blacks (whom all the other leaders just talked about). And because I had been a hustler, I knew better than all whites knew, and better than nearly all of the black “leaders” knew, that actually the most dangerous black man in America was the ghetto hustler.

  Why do I say this? The hustler, out there in the ghetto jungles, has less respect for the white power structure than any other Negro in North America. The ghetto hustler is internally restrained by nothing. He has no religion, no concept of morality, no civic responsibility, no fear—nothing. To survive, he is out there constantly preying upon others, probing for any human weakness like a ferret. The ghetto hustler is forever frustrated, restless, and anxious for some “action.” Whatever he undertakes, he commits himself to it fully, absolutely.

  What makes the ghetto hustler yet more dangerous is his “glamor” image to the school-dropout youth in the ghetto. These ghetto teen-agers see the hell caught by their parents struggling to get somewhere, or see that they have given up struggling in the prejudiced, intolerant white man’s world. The ghetto teen-agers make up their own minds they would rather be like the hustlers whom they see dressed “sharp” and flashing money and displaying no respect for anybody or anything. So the ghetto youth become attracted to the hustler worlds of dope, thievery, prostitution, and general crime and immorality.

  It scared me the first time I really saw the danger of these ghetto teen-agers if they are ever sparked to violence. One sweltering summer afternoon, I attended a Harlem street rally which contained a lot of these teen-agers in the crowd. I had been invited by some “responsible” Negro leaders who normally never spoke to me; I knew they had just used my name to help them draw a crowd. The more I thought about it on the way there, the hotter I got. And when I got on the stand, I just told that crowd in the street that I wasn’t really wanted up there, that my name had been used—and I walked off the speaker’s stand.

  Well, what did I want to do that for? Why, those young, teenage Negroes got upset, and started milling around and yelling, upsetting the older Negroes in the crowd. The first thing you know traffic was blocked in four directions by a crowd whose mood quickly grew so ugly that I really got apprehensive. I got up on top of a car and began waving my arms and yelling at them to quiet down. They did quiet, and then I asked them to disperse—and they did.

  This was when it began being said that I was America’s only Negro who “could stop a race riot—or start one.” I don’t know if I could do either one. But I know one thing: it had taught me in a very few minutes to have a whole lot of respect for the human combustion that is packed among the hustlers and their young admirers who live in the ghettoes where the Northern white man has sealed-off the Negro—away from whites—for a hundred years.

  The “long hot summer” of 1964 in Harlem, in Rochester, and in other cities, has given an idea of what could happen—and that’s all, only an idea. For all of those riots were kept contained within where the Negroes lived. You let any of these bitter, seething ghettoes all over America receive the right igniting incident, and become really inflamed, and explode, and burst out of their boundaries into where whites live! In New York City, you let enraged blacks pour out of Harlem across Central Park and fan down the tunnels of Madison and Fifth and Lexington and Park Avenues. Or, take Chicago’s South Side, an older, even worse slum—you let those Negroes swarm downtown. You let Washington, D.C.’s festering blacks head down Pennsylvania Avenue. Detroit has already seen a peaceful massing of more than a hundred thousands blacks—think about that. You name the city. Black social dynamite is in Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles…the black man’s anger is there, fermenting.

  —

  I’ve strayed off onto some of the incidents and situations which have taught me to respect the danger in the ghettoes. I had been trying to explain how I honestly evaluated my own qualifications to be worthy of presenting myself as an independent “leader” among black men.

  In the end, I reasoned that the decision already had been made for me. The ghetto masses already had entrusted me with an image of leadership among them. I knew the ghetto instinctively extends that trust only to one who had demonstrated that he would never sell them out to the white man. I not only had no such intention—to sell out was not even in my nature.

  I felt a challenge to plan, and build, an organization that could help to cure the black man in North America of the sickness which has kept him under the white man’s heel.

  The black man in North America was mentally sick in his cooperative, sheeplike acceptance of the white man’s culture.

  The black man in North America was spiritually sick because for centuries he had accepted the white man’s Christianity—which asked the black so-called Christian to expect no true Brotherhood of Man, but to endure the cruelties of the white so-called Christians. Christianity had made black men fuzzy, nebulous, confused in their thinking. It had taught the black man to think if he had no shoes, and was hungry, “we gonna get shoes and milk and honey and fish fries in Heaven.”

  The black man in North America was economically sick and that was evident in one simple fact: as a consumer, he got less than his share, and as a producer gave least. The black American today shows us the perfect parasite image—the black tick under the delusion that he is progressing because he rides on the udder of the fat, three-stomached cow that is white America. For instance, annually, the black man spends over $3 billion for automobiles, but America contains hardly any franchised black automobile dealers. For instance, forty per cent of the expensive imported Scotch whisky consumed in America goes down the throats of the status-sick black man; but the only black-owned distilleries are in bathtubs, or in the woods somewhere. Or for instance—a scandalous shame—in New York City, with over a million Negroes, there aren’t twenty black-owned businesses employing over ten people. It’s because black men don’t own and control their own community’s retail establishments that they can’t stabilize their own community.

  The black man in North America was sickest of all politically. He let the white man divide him into such foolishness as considering himself a black “Democrat,” a black “Republican,” a black “Conservative,” or a black “Liberal”…when a ten-million black
vote bloc could be the deciding balance of power in American politics, because the white man’s vote is almost always evenly divided. The polls are one place where every black man could fight the black man’s cause with dignity, and with the power and the tools that the white man understands, and respects, and fears, and cooperates with. Listen, let me tell you something! If a black bloc committee told Washington’s worst “nigger-hater,” “We represent ten million votes,” why, that “nigger-hater” would leap up: “Well, how are you? Come on in here!” Why, if the Mississippi black man voted in a bloc, Eastland would pretend to be more liberal than Jacob Javits—or Eastland would not survive in his office. Why else is it that racist politicians fight to keep black men from the polls?

  Whenever any group can vote in a bloc, and decide the outcome of elections, and it fails to do this, then that group is politically sick. Immigrants once made Tammany Hall the most powerful single force in American politics. In 1880, New York City’s first Irish Catholic Mayor was elected and by 1960 America had its first Irish Catholic President. America’s black man, voting as a bloc, could wield an even more powerful force.

  U.S. politics is ruled by special-interest blocs and lobbies. What group has a more urgent special interest, what group needs a bloc, a lobby, more than the black man? Labor owns one of Washington’s largest non-government buildings—situated where they can literally watch the White House—and no political move is made that doesn’t involve how Labor feels about it. A lobby got Big Oil its depletion allowance. The farmer, through his lobby, is the most government-subsidized special-interest group in America today, because a million farmers vote, not as Democrats, or Republicans, liberals, conservatives, but as farmers.