The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  I spoke at the University of Beirut the truth of the American black man’s condition. I’ve previously made the comment that any experienced public speaker can feel his audience’s reactions. As I spoke, I felt the subjective and defensive reactions of the American white students present—but gradually their hostilities lessened as I continued to present the unassailable facts. But the students of African heritage—well, I’ll never get over how the African displays his emotions.

  Later, with astonishment, I heard that the American press carried stories that my Beirut speech caused a “riot.” What kind of riot? I don’t know how any reporter, in good conscience, could have cabled that across the ocean. The Beirut Daily Star front-page report of my speech mentioned no “riot”—because there was none. When I was done, the African students all but besieged me for autographs; some of them even hugged me. Never have even American Negro audiences accepted me as I have been accepted time and again by the less inhibited, more down-to-earth Africans.

  From Beirut, I flew back to Cairo, and there I took a train to Alexandria, Egypt. I kept my camera busy during each brief stopover. Finally I was on a plane to Nigeria.

  During the six-hour flight, when I was not talking with the pilot (who had been a 1960 Olympics swimmer), I sat with a passionately political African. He almost shouted in his fervor. “When people are in a stagnant state, and are being brought out of it, there is no time for voting!” His central theme was that no new African nation, trying to decolonize itself, needed any political system that would permit division and bickering. “The people don’t know what the vote means! It is the job of the enlightened leaders to raise the people’s intellect.”

  In Lagos, I was greeted by Professor Essien-Udom of the Ibadan University. We were both happy to see each other. We had met in the United States as he had researched the Nation of Islam for his book, Black Nationalism. At his home, that evening, a dinner was held in my honor, attended by other professors and professional people. As we ate, a young doctor asked me if I knew that New York City’s press was highly upset about a recent killing in Harlem of a white woman—for which, according to the press, many were blaming me at least indirectly. An elderly white couple who owned a Harlem clothing store had been attacked by several young Negroes, and the wife was stabbed to death. Some of these young Negroes, apprehended by the police, had described themselves as belonging to an organization they called “Blood Brothers.” These youths, allegedly, had said or implied that they were affiliated with “Black Muslims” who had split away from the Nation of Islam to join up with me.

  I told the dinner guests that it was my first word of any of it, but that I was not surprised when violence happened in any of America’s ghettoes where black men had been living packed like animals and treated like lepers. I said that the charge against me was typical white man scapegoat-seeking—that whenever something white men disliked happened in the black community, typically white public attention was directed not at the cause, but at a selected scapegoat.

  As for the “Blood Brothers,” I said I considered all Negroes to be my blood brothers. I said that the white man’s efforts to make my name poison actually succeeded only in making millions of black people regard me like Joe Louis.

  Speaking in the Ibadan University’s Trenchard Hall, I urged that Africa’s independent nations needed to see the necessity of helping to bring the Afro-American’s case before the United Nations. I said that just as the American Jew is in political, economic, and cultural harmony with world Jewry, I was convinced that it was time for all Afro-Americans to join the world’s Pan-Africanists. I said that physically we Afro-Americans might remain in America, fighting for our Constitutional rights, but that philosophically and culturally we Afro-Americans badly needed to “return” to Africa—and to develop a working unity in the framework of Pan-Africanism.

  Young Africans asked me politically sharper questions than one hears from most American adults. Then an astonishing thing happened when one old West Indian stood and began attacking me—for attacking America. “Shut up! Shut up!” students yelled, booing, and hissing. The old West Indian tried to express defiance of them, and in a sudden rush a group of students sprang up and were after him. He barely escaped ahead of them. I never saw anything like it. Screaming at him, they ran him off the campus. (Later, I found out that the old West Indian was married to a white woman, and he was trying to get a job in some white-influenced agency which had put him up to challenging me. Then, I understood his problem.)

  This wasn’t the last time I’d see the Africans’ almost fanatic expression of their political emotions.

  Afterward, in the Students’ Union, I was plied with questions, and I was made an honorary member of the Nigerian Muslim Students’ Society. Right here in my wallet is my card: “Alhadji Malcolm X. Registration No. M-138.” With the membership, I was given a new name: “Omowale.” It means, in the Yoruba language, “the son who has come home.” I meant it when I told them I had never received a more treasured honor.

  Six hundred members of the Peace Corps were in Nigeria, I learned. Some white Peace Corps members who talked with me were openly embarrassed at the guilt of their race in America. Among the twenty Negro Peace Corpsmen I talked with, a very impressive fellow to me was Larry Jackson, a Morgan State College graduate from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who had joined the Peace Corps in 1962.

  I made Nigerian radio and television program appearances. When I remember seeing black men operating their own communications agencies, a thrill still runs up my spine. The reporters who interviewed me included an American Negro from Newsweek magazine—his name was Williams. Traveling through Africa, he had recently interviewed Prime Minister Nkrumah.

  Talking with me privately, one group of Nigerian officials told me how skillfully the U.S. Information Agency sought to spread among Africans the impression that American Negroes were steadily advancing, and that the race problem soon would be solved. One high official told me, “Our informed leaders and many, many others know otherwise.” He said that behind the “diplomatic front” of every African U.N. official was recognition of the white man’s gigantic duplicity and conspiracy to keep the world’s peoples of African heritage separated—both physically and ideologically—from each other.

  “In your land, how many black people think about it that South and Central and North America contain over eighty million people of African descent?” he asked me.

  “The world’s course will change the day the African-heritage peoples come together as brothers!”

  I never had heard that kind of global black thinking from any black man in America.

  From Lagos, Nigeria, I flew on to Accra, Ghana.

  I think that nowhere is the black continent’s wealth and the natural beauty of its people richer than in Ghana, which is so proudly the very fountainhead of Pan-Africanism.

  I stepped off the plane into a jarring note. A red-faced American white man recognized me; he had the nerve to come up grabbing my hand and telling me in a molasses drawl that he was from Alabama, and then he invited me to his home for dinner!

  My hotel’s dining room, when I went to breakfast, was full of more of those whites—discussing Africa’s untapped wealth as though the African waiters had no ears. It nearly ruined my meal, thinking how in America they sicked police dogs on black people, and threw bombs in black churches, while blocking the doors of their white churches—and now, once again in the land where their forefathers had stolen blacks and thrown them into slavery, was that white man.

  Right there at my Ghanaian breakfast table was where I made up my mind that as long as I was in Africa, every time I opened my mouth, I was going to make things hot for that white man, grinning through his teeth wanting to exploit Africa again—it had been her human wealth the last time, now he wanted Africa’s mineral wealth.

  And I knew that my reacting as I did presented no conflict with the convictions of brotherhood which I had gained in the Holy Land. The Muslims of “white” co
mplexions who had changed my opinions were men who had showed me that they practiced genuine brotherhood. And I knew that any American white man with a genuine brotherhood for a black man was hard to find, no matter how much he grinned.

  The author Julian Mayfield seemed to be the leader of Ghana’s little colony of Afro-American expatriates. When I telephoned Mayfield, in what seemed no time at all I was sitting in his home surrounded by about forty black American expatriates; they had been waiting for my arrival. There were business and professional people, such as the militant former Brooklynites Dr. and Mrs. Robert E. Lee, both of them dentists, who had given up their United States’ citizenship. Such others as Alice Windom, Maya Angelou Make, Victoria Garvin, and Leslie Lacy had even formed a “Malcolm X Committee” to guide me through a whirlwind calendar of appearances and social events.

  In my briefcase here are some of the African press stories which had appeared when it was learned that I was en route:

  “Malcolm X’s name is almost as familiar to Ghanaians as the Southern dogs, fire hoses, cattle prods, people sticks, and the ugly, hate-contorted white faces….”

  “Malcolm X’s decision to enter the mainstream of the struggle heralds a hopeful sign on the sickeningly dismal scene of brutalized, non-violent, passive resistance….”

  “An extremely important fact is that Malcolm X is the first Afro-American leader of national standing to make an independent trip to Africa since Dr. Du Bois came to Ghana. This may be the beginning of a new phase in our struggle. Let’s make sure we don’t give it less thought than the State Department is doubtless giving it right now.”

  And another: “Malcolm X is one of our most significant and miltant leaders. We are in a battle. Efforts will be made to malign and discredit him….”

  I simply couldn’t believe this kind of reception five thousand miles from America! The officials of the press had even arranged to pay my hotel expenses, and they would hear no objection that I made. They included T. D. Baffoe, the Editor-in-Chief of the Ghanaian Times; G. T. Anim, the Managing Director of the Ghana News Agency; Kofi Batsa, the Editor of Spark and the Secretary-General of the Pan-African Union of Journalists; and Mr. Cameron Duodu; and others. I could only thank them all. Then, during the beautiful dinner which had been prepared by Julian Mayfield’s pretty Puerto Rican wife, Ana Livia (she was in charge of Accra’s district health program), I was plied with questions by the eagerly interested black expatriates from America who had returned to Mother Africa.

  I can only wish that every American black man could have shared my ears, my eyes, and my emotions throughout the round of engagements which had been made for me in Ghana. And my point in saying this is not the reception that I personally received as an individual of whom they had heard, but it was the reception tendered to me as the symbol of the militant American black man, as I had the honor to be regarded.

  At a jam-packed press club conference, I believe the very first question was why had I split with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. The Africans had heard such rumors as that Elijah Muhammad had built a palace in Arizona. I straightened out that falsehood, and I avoided any criticism. I said that our disagreement had been in terms of political direction and involvement in the extra-religious struggle for human rights. I said I respected the Nation of Islam for its having been a psychologically revitalizing movement and a source of moral and social reform, and that Elijah Muhammad’s influence upon the American black man had been basic.

  I stressed to the assembled press the need for mutual communication and support between the Africans and Afro-Americans whose struggles were interlocked. I remember that in the press conference, I used the word “Negro,” and I was firmly corrected. “The word is not favored here, Mr. Malcolm X. The term Afro-American has greater meaning, and dignity.” I sincerely apologized. I don’t think that I said “Negro” again as long as I was in Africa. I said that the 22 million Afro-Americans in the United States could become for Africa a great positive force—while, in turn, the African nations could and should exert positive force at diplomatic levels against America’s racial discrimination. I said, “All of Africa unites in opposition to South Africa’s apartheid, and to the oppression in the Portuguese territories. But you waste your time if you don’t realize that Verwoerd and Salazar, and Britain and France, never could last a day if it were not for United States support. So until you expose the man in Washington, D.C., you haven’t accomplished anything.”

  I knew that the State Department’s G. Mennen Williams was officially visiting in Africa. I said, “Take my word for it—you be suspicious of all these American officials who come to Africa grinning in your faces when they don’t grin in ours back home.” I told them that my own father was murdered by whites in the state of Michigan where G. Mennen Williams once was the Governor.

  I was honored at the Ghana Club, by more press representatives and dignitaries. I was the guest at the home of the late black American author Richard Wright’s daughter, beautiful, slender, soft-voiced Julia, whose young French husband publishes a Ghanaian paper. Later, in Paris, I was to meet Richard Wright’s widow, Ellen, and a younger daughter, Rachel.

  I talked with Ambassadors, at their embassies. The Algerian Ambassador impressed me as a man who was dedicated totally to militancy, and to world revolution, as the way to solve the problems of the world’s oppressed masses. His perspective was attuned not just to Algerians, but to include the Afro-Americans and all others anywhere who were oppressed. The Chinese Ambassador, Mr. Huang Ha, a most perceptive, and also most militant man, focused upon the efforts of the West to divide Africans from the peoples of African heritage elsewhere. The Nigerian Ambassador was deeply concerned about the Afro-Americans’ plight in America. He had personal knowledge of their suffering, having lived and studied in Washington, D.C. Similarly, the most sympathetic Mali Ambassador had been in New York at the United Nations. I breakfasted with Dr. Makonnen of British Guiana. We discussed the need for the type of Pan-African unity that would also include the Afro-Americans. And I had a talk in depth about Afro-American problems with Nana Nketsia, the Ghanaian Minister of Culture.

  Once when I returned to my hotel, a New York City call was waiting for me from Mal Goode of the American Broadcasting Company. Over the telephone Mal Goode asked me questions that I answered for his beeping tape recorder, about the “Blood Brothers” in Harlem, the rifle clubs for Negroes, and other subjects with which I was being identified in the American press.

  In the University of Ghana’s Great Hall, I addressed the largest audience that I would in Africa—mostly Africans, but also numerous whites. Before this audience, I tried my best to demolish the false image of American race relations that I knew was spread by the U.S. Information Agency. I tried to impress upon them all the true picture of the Afro-American’s plight at the hands of the white man. I worked on those whites there in the audience:

  “I’ve never seen so many whites so nice to so many blacks as you white people here in Africa. In America, Afro-Americans are struggling for integration. They should come here—to Africa—and see how you grin at Africans. You’ve really got integration here. But can you tell the Africans that in America you grin at the black people? No, you can’t! And you don’t honestly like these Africans any better, either—but what you do like is the minerals Africa has under her soil….”

  Those whites out in the audience turned pink and red. They knew I was telling the truth. “I’m not anti-American, and I didn’t come here to condemn America—I want to make that very clear!” I told them. “I came here to tell the truth—and if the truth condemns America, then she stands condemned!”

  One evening I met most of the officials in Ghana—all of those with whom I had previously talked, and more—at a party that was given for me by the Honorable Kofi Baako, the Ghanaian Minister of Defense, and the Leader of the National Assembly. I was told that this was the first time such an honor was accorded to a foreigner since Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois had come to Ghana. There was m
usic, dancing, and fine Ghanaian food. Several persons at the party were laughing among themselves, saying that at an earlier party that day, U.S. Ambassador Mahomey was knocking himself out being exceptionally friendly and jovial. Some thought that he was making a strong effort to counteract the truth about America that I was telling every chance I got.

  Then an invitation came to me which exceeded my wildest dream. I would never have imagined that I would actually have an opportunity to address the members of the Ghanaian Parliament!

  I made my remarks brief—but I made them strong: “How can you condemn Portugal and South Africa while our black people in America are being bitten by dogs and beaten with clubs?” I said I felt certain that the only reason black Africans—our black brothers—could be so silent about what happened in America was that they had been misinformed by the American government’s propaganda agencies.

  At the end of my talk, I heard “Yes! We support the Afro-American…morally, physically, materially if necessary!”

  In Ghana—or in all of black Africa—my highest single honor was an audience at the Castle with Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

  Before seeing him, I was searched most thoroughly. I respected the type of security the Ghanaians erect around their leader. It gave me that much more respect for independent black men. Then, as I entered Dr. Nkrumah’s long office, he came out from behind his desk at the far end. Dr. Nkrumah wore ordinary dress, his hand was extended and a smile was on his sensitive face. I pumped his hand. We sat on a couch and talked. I knew that he was particularly well-informed on the Afro-American’s plight, as for years he had lived and studied in America. We discussed the unity of Africans and peoples of African descent. We agreed that Pan-Africanism was the key also to the problems of those of African heritage. I could feel the warm, likeable and very down-to-earth qualities of Dr. Nkrumah. My time with him was up all too soon. I promised faithfully that when I returned to the United States, I would relay to Afro-Americans his personal warm regards.