The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  That afternoon, thirty-nine miles away in Winneba, I spoke at the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute—where two hundred students were being trained to carry forward Ghana’s intellectual revolution, and here again occurred one of those astounding demonstrations of the young African’s political fervor. After I had spoken, during the question-and-answer period, some young Afro-American stood up, whom none there seemed to know. “I am an American Negro,” he announced himself. Vaguely, he defended the American white man. The African students booed and harassed him. Then instantly when the meeting was over, they cornered this fellow with verbal abuse, “Are you an agent of Rockefeller?”…“Stop corrupting our children!” (The fellow had turned out to be a local secondary school teacher, placed in the job by an American agency.)…“Come to this Institute for some orientation!” Temporarily, a teacher rescued the fellow—but then the students rushed him and drove him away, shouting, “Stooge!”…“C.I.A.”…“American agent!”

  Chinese Ambassador and Mrs. Huang Hua gave a state dinner in my honor. The guests included the Cuban and the Algerian ambassadors, and also it was here that I met Mrs. W. E. B. Du Bois. After the excellent dinner, three films were shown. One, a color film, depicted the People’s Republic of China in celebration of its Fourteenth Anniversary. Prominently shown in this film was the militant former North Carolina Afro-American Robert Williams, who has since taken refuge in Cuba after his advocacy that the American black people should take up arms to defend and protect themselves. The second film focused upon the Chinese people’s support for the Afro-American struggle. Chairman Mao Tse-tung was shown delivering his statement of that support, and the film offered sickening moments of graphic white brutality—police and civilian—to Afro-Americans who were demonstrating in various U.S. cities, seeking civil rights. And the final film was a dramatic presentation of the Algerian Revolution.

  The “Malcolm X Committee” rushed me from the Chinese Embassy dinner to where a soiree in my honor had already begun at the Press Club. It was my first sight of Ghanaians dancing the high-life. A high and merry time was being had by everyone, and I was pressed to make a short speech. I stressed again the need for unity between Africans and Afro-Americans. I cried out of my heart, “Now, dance! Sing! But as you do—remember Mandela, remember Sobokwe! Remember Lumumba in his grave! Remember South Africans now in jail!”

  I said, “You wonder why I don’t dance? Because I want you to remember twenty-two million Afro-Americans in the U.S.!”

  But I sure felt like dancing! The Ghanaians performed the high-life as if possessed. One pretty African girl sang “Blue Moon” like Sarah Vaughan. Sometimes the band sounded like Milt Jackson, sometimes like Charlie Parker.

  The next morning, a Saturday, I heard that Cassius Clay and his entourage had arrived. There was a huge reception for him at the airport. I thought that if Cassius and I happened to meet, it would likely prove embarrassing for Cassius, since he had elected to remain with Elijah Muhammad’s version of Islam. I would not have been embarrassed, but I knew that Cassius would have been forbidden to associate with me. I knew that Cassius knew I had been with him, and for him, and believed in him, when those who later embraced him felt that he had no chance. I decided to avoid Cassius so as not to put him on the spot.

  A luncheon was given for me that afternoon by the Nigerian High Commissioner, His Excellency Alhadji Isa Wali, a short, bespectacled, extremely warm and friendly man who had lived in Washington, D.C., for two years. After lunch, His Excellency spoke to the guests of his American encounters with discrimination, and of friendships he had made with Afro-Americans, and he reaffirmed the bonds between Africans and Afro-Americans.

  His Excellency held up before the luncheon guests a large and handsome issue of an American magazine, Horizon; it was opened to an article about the Nation of Islam, written by Dr. Morroe Berger of Princeton University. One full page was a photograph of me; the opposite full page was a beautiful color illustration of a black royal Nigerian Muslim, stalwart and handsome, of hundreds of years ago.

  “When I look at these photographs, I know these two people are one,” said His Excellency. “The only difference is in their attire—and one was born in America and the other in Africa.

  “So to let everyone know that I believe we are brothers, I am going to give to Alhadji Malcolm X a robe like that worn by the Nigerian in this photo.”

  I was overwhelmed by the splendor of the beautiful blue robe and the orange turban which His Excellency then presented to me. I bent over so that he, a short man, could properly arrange the turban on my head. His Excellency Alhadji Isa Wali also presented me with a two-volume translation of the Holy Quran.

  After this unforgettable luncheon, Mrs. Shirley Graham Du Bois drove me to her home, so that I could see and photograph the home where her famed late husband, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, had spent his last days. Mrs. Du Bois, a writer, was the Director of Ghanaian television, which was planned for educational purposes. When Dr. Du Bois had come to Ghana, she told me, Dr. Nkrumah had set up the aging great militant Afro-American scholar like a king, giving to Dr. Du Bois everything he could wish for. Mrs. Du Bois told me that when Dr. Du Bois was failing fast, Dr. Nkrumah had visited, and the two men had said good-bye, both knowing that one’s death was near—and Dr. Nkrumah had gone away in tears.

  My final Ghanaian social event was a beautiful party in my honor given by His Excellency Mr. Armando Entralgo Gonzalez, the Cuban Ambassador to Ghana. The next morning—it was Sunday—the “Malcolm X Committee” was waiting at my hotel, to accompany me to the airport. As we left the hotel, we met Cassius Clay with some of his entourage, returning from his morning walk. Cassius momentarily seemed uncertain—then he spoke, something almost monosyllabic, like “How are you?” It flashed through my mind how close we had been before the fight that had changed the course of his life. I replied that I was fine—something like that—and that I hoped he was, which I sincerely meant. Later on, I sent Cassius a message by wire, saying that I hoped that he would realize how much he was loved by Muslims wherever they were; and that he would not let anyone use him and maneuver him into saying and doing things to tarnish his image.

  The “Malcolm X Committee” and I were exchanging goodbyes at the Accra airport when a small motorcade of five Ambassadors arrived—to see me off!

  I no longer had any words.

  In the plane, bound for Monrovia, Liberia, to spend a day, I knew that after what I had experienced in the Holy Land, the second most indelible memory I would carry back to America would be the Africa seething with serious awareness of itself, and of Africa’s wealth, and of her power, and of her destined role in the world.

  From Monrovia, I flew to Dakar, Senegal. The Senegalese in the airport, hearing about the Muslim from America, stood in line to shake my hand, and I signed many autographs. “Our people can’t speak Arabic, but we have Islam in our hearts,” said one Senegalese. I told them that exactly described their fellow Afro-American Muslims.

  From Dakar, I flew to Morocco, where I spent a day sightseeing. I visited the famous Casbah, the ghetto which had resulted when the ruling white French wouldn’t let the dark-skinned natives into certain areas of Casablanca. Thousands upon thousands of the subjugated natives were crowded into the ghetto, in the same way that Harlem, in New York City, became America’s Casbah.

  It was Tuesday, May 19, 1964—my thirty-ninth birthday—when I arrived in Algiers. A lot of water had gone under the bridge in those years. In some ways, I had had more experiences than a dozen men. The taxi driver, while taking me to the Hotel Aletti, described the atrocities the French had committed, and personal measures that he had taken to get even. I walked around Algiers, hearing rank-and-file expressions of hatred for America for supporting the oppressors of the Algerians. They were true revolutionists, not afraid of death. They had, for so long, faced death.

  —

  The Pan American jet which took me home—it was Flight 115—landed at New York’s Kennedy Air Terminal o
n May 21, at 4:25 in the afternoon. We passengers filed off the plane and toward Customs. When I saw the crowd of fifty or sixty reporters and photographers, I honestly wondered what celebrity I had been on the plane with.

  But I was the “villain” they had come to meet.

  In Harlem especially, and also in some other U.S. cities, the 1964 long, hot summer’s predicted explosions had begun. Article after article in the white man’s press had cast me as a symbol—if not a causative agent—of the “revolt” and of the “violence” of the American black man, wherever it had sprung up.

  In the biggest press conference that I had ever experienced anywhere, the camera bulbs flashed, and the reporters fired questions.

  “Mr. Malcolm X, what about those ‘Blood Brothers,’ reportedly affiliated with your organization, reportedly trained for violence, who have killed innocent white people?”…“Mr. Malcolm X, what about your comment that Negroes should form rifle clubs?…”

  I answered the questions. I knew I was back in America again, hearing the subjective, scapegoat-seeking questions of the white man. New York white youth were killing victims; that was a “sociological” problem. But when black youth killed somebody, the power structure was looking to hang somebody. When black men had been lynched or otherwise murdered in cold blood, it was always said, “Things will get better.” When whites had rifles in their homes, the Constitution gave them the right to protect their home and themselves. But when black people even spoke of having rifles in their homes, that was “ominous.”

  I slipped in on the reporters something they hadn’t been expecting. I said that the American black man needed to quit thinking what the white man had taught him—which was that the black man had no alternative except to beg for his so-called “civil rights.” I said that the American black man needed to recognize that he had a strong, airtight case to take the United States before the United Nations on a formal accusation of “denial of human rights”—and that if Angola and South Africa were precedent cases, then there would be no easy way that the U.S. could escape being censured, right on its own home ground.

  Just as I had known, the press wanted to get me off that subject. I was asked about my “Letter From Mecca”—I was all set with a speech regarding that:

  “I hope that once and for all my Hajj to the Holy City of Mecca has established our Muslim Mosque’s authentic religious affiliation with the 750 million Muslims of the orthodox Islamic World. And I know once and for all that the Black Africans look upon America’s 22 million blacks as long-lost brothers! They love us! They study our struggle for freedom! They were so happy to hear how we are awakening from our long sleep—after so-called ‘Christian’ white America had taught us to be ashamed of our African brothers and homeland!

  “Yes—I wrote a letter from Mecca. You’re asking me ‘Didn’t you say that now you accept white men as brothers?’ Well, my answer is that in the Muslim World, I saw, I felt, and I wrote home how my thinking was broadened! Just as I wrote, I shared true, brotherly love with many white-complexioned Muslims who never gave a single thought to the race, or to the complexion, of another Muslim.

  “My pilgrimage broadened my scope. It blessed me with a new insight. In two weeks in the Holy Land, I saw what I never had seen in thirty-nine years here in America. I saw all races, all colors,—blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans—in true brotherhood! In unity! Living as one! Worshiping as one! No segregationists—no liberals; they would not have known how to interpret the meaning of those words.

  “In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I never will be guilty of that again—as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.

  “Yes, I have been convinced that some American whites do want to help cure the rampant racism which is on the path to destroying this country!

  “It was in the Holy World that my attitude was changed, by what I experienced there, and by what I witnessed there, in terms of brotherhood—not just brotherhood toward me, but brotherhood between all men, of all nationalities and complexions, who were there. And now that I am back in America, my attitude here concerning white people has to be governed by what my black brothers and I experience here, and what we witness here—in terms of brotherhood. The problem here in America is that we meet such a small minority of individual so-called ‘good,’ or ‘brotherly’ white people. Here in the United States, notwithstanding those few ‘good’ white people, it is the collective 150 million white people whom the collective 22 million black people have to deal with!

  “Why, here in America, the seeds of racism are so deeply rooted in the white people collectively, their belief that they are ‘superior’ in some way is so deeply rooted, that these things are in the national white subconsciousness. Many whites are even actually unaware of their own racism, until they face some test, and then their racism emerges in one form or another.

  “Listen! The white man’s racism toward the black man here in America is what has got him in such trouble all over this world, with other non-white peoples. The white man can’t separate himself from the stigma that he automatically feels about anyone, no matter who, who is not his color. And the non-white peoples of the world are sick of the condescending white man! That’s why you’ve got all of this trouble in places like Viet Nam. Or right here in the Western Hemisphere—probably 100 million people of African descent are divided against each other, taught by the white man to hate and to mistrust each other. In the West Indies, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, all of South America, Central America! All of those lands are full of people with African blood! On the African continent, even, the white man has maneuvered to divide the black African from the brown Arab, to divide the so-called ‘Christian African’ from the Muslim African. Can you imagine what can happen, what would certainly happen, if all of these African-heritage peoples ever realize their blood bonds, if they ever realize they all have a common goal—if they ever unite?”

  The press was glad to get rid of me that day. I believe that the black brothers whom I had just recently left in Africa would have felt that I did the subject justice. Nearly through the night, my telephone at home kept ringing. My black brothers and sisters around New York and in some other cities were calling to congratulate me on what they had heard on the radio and television news broadcasts, and people, mostly white, were wanting to know if I would speak here or there.

  The next day I was in my car driving along the freeway when at a red light another car pulled alongside. A white woman was driving and on the passenger’s side, next to me, was a white man. “Malcolm X!” he called out—and when I looked, he stuck his hand out of his car, across at me, grinning. “Do you mind shaking hands with a white man?” Imagine that! Just as the traffic light turned green, I told him, “I don’t mind shaking hands with human beings. Are you one?”

  CHAPTER 19

  1965

  I must be honest. Negroes—Afro-Americans—showed no inclination to rush to the United Nations and demand justice for themselves here in America. I really had known in advance that they wouldn’t. The American white man has so thoroughly brainwashed the black man to see himself as only a domestic “civil rights” problem that it will probably take longer than I live before the Negro sees that the struggle of the American black man is international.

  And I had known, too, that Negroes would not rush to follow me into the orthodox Islam which had given me the insight and perspective to see that the black men and white men truly could be brothers. America’s Negroes—especially older Negroes—are too indelibly soaked in Christianity’s double standard of oppression.

  So, in the “public invited” meetings which I began holding each Sunday afternoon or evening in Harlem’s well-known Audubon Ballroom, as I addressed predominantly non-Muslim Negro audiences, I did not immediately
attempt to press the Islamic religion, but instead to embrace all who sat before me:

  “—not Muslim, nor Christian, Catholic, nor Protestant…Baptist nor Methodist, Democrat nor Republican, Mason nor Elk! I mean the black people of America—and the black people all over this earth! Because it is as this collective mass of black people that we have been deprived not only of our civil rights, but even of our human rights, the right to human dignity….”

  On the streets, after my speeches, in the faces and the voices of the people I met—even those who would pump my hands and want my autograph—I would feel the wait-and-see attitude. I would feel—and I understood—their uncertainty about where I stood. Since the Civil War’s “freedom,” the black man has gone down so many fruitless paths. His leaders, very largely, had failed him. The religion of Christianity had failed him. The black man was scarred, he was cautious, he was apprehensive.

  I understood it better now than I had before. In the Holy World, away from America’s race problem, was the first time I ever had been able to think clearly about the basic divisions of white people in America, and how their attitudes and their motives related to, and affected Negroes. In my thirty-nine years on this earth, the Holy City of Mecca had been the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being.

  In that peace of the Holy World—in fact, the very night I have mentioned when I lay awake surrounded by snoring brother pilgrims—my mind took me back to personal memories I would have thought were gone forever…as far back, even, as when I was just a little boy, eight or nine years old. Out behind our house, out in the country from Lansing, Michigan, there was an old, grassy “Hector’s Hill,” we called it—which may still be there. I remembered there in the Holy World how I used to lie on the top of Hector’s Hill, and look up at the sky, at the clouds moving over me, and daydream, all kinds of things. And then, in a funny contrast of recollections, I remembered how years later, when I was in prison, I used to lie on my cell bunk—this would be especially when I was in solitary: what we convicts called “The Hole”—and I would picture myself talking to large crowds. I don’t have any idea why such previsions came to me. But they did. To tell that to anyone then would have sounded crazy. Even I didn’t have, myself, the slightest inkling….