The Autobiography Of Malcolm X - by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Published:
The Autobiography Of Malcolm X - by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Read: 2025-05-03
Recommend: 10/10
I watched Spike Lee’s Malcolm X film a few years ago. Denzel Washington, my favorite actor, brilliantly portrayed Malcolm X, while Giancarlo Esposito (known for playing Gus in Breaking Bad) played one of his assassins. Malcolm X was multifaceted: a talented actor who once feigned insanity to avoid military service; a powerful orator who moved people with his honesty; a former criminal involved in theft and pimping; and ultimately, a courageous individual who stood firmly for his beliefs.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
In those days white people in the North usually would “adopt” just a few Negroes; they didn’t see them as any threat. The white kids didn’t make any great thing about us, either. They called us “nigger” and “darkie” and “Rastus” so much that we thought those were our natural names. But they didn’t think of it as an insult; it was just the way they thought about us.
But the monthly Welfare check was their pass. They acted as if they owned us, as if we were their private property. As much as my mother would have liked to, she couldn’t keep them out. She would get particularly incensed when they began insisting upon drawing us older children aside, one at a time, out on the porch or somewhere, and asking us questions, or telling us things- against our mother and against each other. We couldn’t understand why, if the state was willing to give us packages of meat, sacks of potatoes and fruit, and cans of all kinds of things, our mother obviously hated to accept. We really couldn’t understand. What I later understood was that my mother was making a desperate effort to preserve her pride-and ours.
This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn’t gambling, he’s cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely. It’s like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He’s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.
How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair now looking “white,” reflected in the mirror in Shorty’s room. I vowed that I’d never again be without a conk, and I never was for many years. This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”-and white people“superior”-that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.
Never ask a woman about other men. Either she’ll tell you a lie, and you still won’t know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.
It was in this house that I learned more about women than I ever did in any other single place. It was these working prostitutes who schooled me to things that every wife and every husband should know. Later on, it was chiefly the women who weren’t prostitutes who taught me to be very distrustful of most women; there seemed to be a higher code of ethics and sisterliness among those prostitutes than among numerous ladies of the church who have more men for kicks than the prostitutes have for pay. And I am talking about both black andwhite. Many of the black ones in those wartime days were right in step with the white ones in having husbands fighting overseas while they were laying up with other men, even giving them their husbands’ money. And many women just faked as mothers and wives, while playing the field as hand as prostitutes-with their husbands and children right there in New York.
The prostitutes had to make it their business to be students of men. They said that after most men passed their virile twenties, they went to bed mainly to satisfy their egos, and because a lot of women don’t understand it that way, they damage and wreck a man’s ego. No matter how little virility a man has to offer, prostitutes make him feel for a time that he is the greatest man in the world. That’s why these prostitutes had that morning rush of business. More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men.
Bill could cook rice like the Chinese-I mean rice that stood every grain on its own, but I never knew the Chinese to do what Bill could with seafood and beans.
And musicians, among whom I had so many good contacts, were the heaviest consistent market for reefers. And then, musicians also used the heavier narcotics, if I later wanted to graduate to them. That would be more risky, but also more money. Handling heroin and cocaine could earn one hundreds of dollars a day, but it required a lot of experience with the narcotics squad for one to be able to last long enough to make anything.
When a woman came in to eat alone, and he found she really was alone, not married, or living with somebody, it generally was not hard for smooth Sammy to get invited to her apartment. He’d insist on going out to a nearby restaurant to bring back some dinner, and while he was out he would have her key duplicated. Then, when he knew she was away, Sammy would go in and clean out all her valuables. Sammy was then able to offer some little stake, to help her back on her feet. This could be the beginning of an emotional and financial dependency, which Sammy knew how to develop until she was his virtual slave.
It was then that I began carrying a little .25 automatic. I got it, for some reefers, from an addict who I knew had stolen it somewhere. I carried it pressed under my belt right down the center of my back. Someone had told me that the cops never hit there in any routine patting-down. And unless I knew who I was with, I never allowed myself to get caught in any crush of people. The narcotics cops had been known to rush up and get their o hands on you and plant evidence while “searching.” I felt that as long as I kept on the go, and in the open, I had a good chance. I don’t know now what my real thoughts were about carrying the pistol. But I imagine I felt that I wasn’t going to get put away if somebody tried framing me in any situation that I could help.
Suddenly, I sprang up and peeped under both doors, the one I’d entered and another that probably was a closet. And then I bent and whispered fast in his ear. “Daddy-o, now you and me, we’re from up North here, so don’t you tell nobody. . . . I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!” That psychiatrist’s blue pencil dropped, and his professional manner fell off in all directions. He stared at me as if I were a snake’s egg hatching, fumbling forhis red pencil. I knew I had him. I was going back out past Miss First when he said, “That will be all.” A 4-F card came to me in the mail, and I never heard from the Army anymore, and never bothered to ask why I was rejected.
The suits that I wore, the finest, I bought hot for about thirty-five to fifty dollars. I made it my rule never to go after more than I needed to live on. Any experienced hustler will tell you that getting greedy is the quickest road to prison. I kept “cased” in my head vulnerable places and situations and I would perform the next job only when my bankroll in my pocket began to get too low.
I wouldn’t tell all the things I’ve seen. I used to wonder, later on, when I was in prison, what a psychiatrist would make of it all. And so many of these men held responsible positions; they exercised guidance, influence, and authority over others.
And where the religion of every other people on earth taught its believers of a God with whom they could identify, a God who at least looked like one of their own kind, the slavemaster injected his Christian religion into this “Negro.” This “Negro” was taught to worship an alien God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slavemaster. This religion taught the “Negro” that black was a curse. It taught him to hate everything black, including himself. It taught him that everything white was good, to be admired, respected, and loved. It brainwashed this “Negro” to think he was superior if his complexion showed more of the white pollution of the slavemaster. This white man’s Christian religion further deceived and brainwashed this “Negro” to always turn the other cheek, and grin, and scrape, and bow, and be humble, and to sing, and to pray, and to take whatever was dished out by the devilish white man; and to look for his pie in the sky, and for his heaven in the hereafter, while right here on earth the slave-master white man enjoyed his heaven.
You know what my life had been. Picking a lock to rob someone’s house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before. I had to force myself to bend my knees. And waves of shame and embarrassment would force me back up. For evil to bend its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God, is the hardest thing in the world. It’s easy for me to see and to say thatnow. But then, when I was the personification of evil, I was going through it. Again, again, I would force myself back down into the praying-to-Allah posture. When finally I was able to make myself stay down-I didn’t know what to say to Allah.
Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation. I saw how since the sixteenth century, the so-called “Christian trader” white man began to ply the seas in his lust for Asian and African empires, and plunder, and power. I read, I saw, how the white man never has gone among the non-white peoples bearing the Cross in the true manner and spirit of Christ’s teachings-meek, humble, and Christ-like. I perceived, as I read, how the collective white man had been actually nothing but a piratical opportunist who used Faustian machinations to make his own Christianity his initial wedge in criminal conquests. First, always “religiously,” he branded “heathen” and “pagan” labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations. The stage thus set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons of war. I read how, entering India-half a billion deeply religious brown people-the British white man, by 1759, through promises, trickery and manipulations, controlled much of India through Great Britain’s East India Company.
History has been so “whitened” by the white man that even the black professors have known little more than the most ignorant black man about the talents and rich civilizations and cultures of the black man of millenniums ago. Ihave lectured in Negro colleges and some of these brainwashed black Ph.D.’s, with their suspenders dragging the ground with degrees, have run to the white man’s newspapers calling me a “black fanatic.” Why, a lot of them are fifty years behind the times. If I were president of one of these black colleges, I’d hock the campus if I had to, to send a bunch of black students off digging in Africa for more, more and more proof of the black race’s historical greatness. The white man now is in Africa digging and searching. An African elephant can’t stumble without falling on some white man with a shovel. Practically every week, we read about some great new find from Africa’s lost civilizations. All that’s new is white science’s attitude. The ancient civilizations of the black man have been buried on the Black Continent all the time.
But I will tell you that, right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been. Standing up there, the faces looking up at me, things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate-once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating. Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I’d track down andstudy everything I could find on it. I’d put myself in my opponent’s place and decide how I’d try to win if I had the other side; and then I’d figure a way to knock down those points. And if there was any way in the world, I’d work into my speech the devilishness of the white man.
My application had, of course, been made and during this time I received from Chicago my “X.” The Muslim’s “X” symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my “X” replaced the white slavemaster name of “Little” which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears. The receipt of my “X” meant that forever after in the nation of Islam, I would be known as Malcolm X. Mr. Muhammad taught that we would keep this “X” until God Himself returned and gave us a Holy Name from His own mouth.
This white man always has controlled us black people by keeping us running to him begging, ‘Please, lawdy, please, Mr. White Man, boss, would you push me off another crumb down from your table that’s sagging with riches . . . .’ “. . . my beautiful, black brothers and sisters! And when we say ‘black,’ wemean everything not white, brothers and sisters! Because look at your skins! We’re all black to the white man, but we’re a thousand and one different colors. Turn around, look at each other! What shade of black African polluted by devil white man are you?
“Do you know why the white man really hates you? It’s because every time he sees your face, he sees a mirror of his crime-and his guilty conscience can’t bear to face it! “Every white man in America, when he looks into a black man’s eyes, should fall to his knees and say ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry-my kind has committed history’s greatest crime against your kind; will you give me the chance to atone?’ But do you brothers and sisters expect any white man to do that? No, you know better! And why won’t he do it? Because he can’t do it. The white man has created a devil, to bring chaos upon this earth. . . .”
he pointed to the glasses of water. “Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,” he said, “just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won’t have to say that yours is better.”
“Do nothing unto anyone that you would not like to have done unto yourself. Seek peace, and never be the aggressor-but if anyone attacks you, we do not teach you to turn the othercheek. May Allah bless you to be successful and victorious in all that you do.”
The blond-haired, blue-eyed white man has taught you and me to worship a white Jesus, and to shout and sing and pray to this God that’s his God, the white man’s God. The white man has taught us to shoutand sing and pray until we die, to wait until death, for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter, when we’re dead, while this white man has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!
I had learned early one important thing, and that was to always teach in terms that the people could understand. Also, where the Nationalists whom we had “fished” were almost all men, among the storefront Christians, a heavy preponderance were women, and I had the sense to offer something special for them. “Beautiful black woman! The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that the black man is going around saying he wants respect; well, the black man never will get anybody’s respect until he first learns to respect his own women! The black man needs today to stand up and throw off the weaknesses imposed upon him by the slavemaster white man! The black man needs to start today to shelter and protect and respect his black women!”
Then I usually read from Job; two passages, in the seventh and fourteenth chapters, where Job speaks of no life after death. Then another passage where David, when his son died, spoke also of no life after death. To the audience before me, I explained why no tears were to be shed, and why we had no flowers, or singing, or organ-playing. “We shed tears for our brother, and gave him our music and our tears while he was alive. If he wasn’t wept for and given our music and flowers then, well, now there is no need, because he is no longer aware. We now will give his family any money we might have spent.” Appointed Muslim Sisters quickly passed small trays from which everyone took a thin, round patty of peppermint candy. At my signal, the candy was put into mouths. “We will file by now for a last look at our brother. We won’t cry-just as we don’t cry over candy. Just as this sweet candy will dissolve, so will our brother’s sweetness that we have enjoyed when he lived now dissolve into a sweetness in our memories.”
I knew one good thing; she had few relatives. My feeling about in-laws was that they were outlaws. Right among the Temple Seven Muslims, I had seen more marriages destroyed by in- laws, usually anti-Muslim, than any other single thing I knew of. I wasn’t about to say any of that romance stuff that Hollywood and television had filled women’s heads with.
Here was one of the white man’s most characteristic behavior patterns-where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion. In America for centuries it had been just fine as long as the victimized, brutalized and exploited black people had been grinning and begging and “Yessa, Massa” and Uncle Tomming. But now, things were different. First came the white newspapers- feature writers and columnists: “Alarming” . . .“hate-messengers” . . .“threat to the good relations between the races” . . .“black segregationists” . . .“black supremacists,” and the like. And the newspapers’ ink wasn’t dry before the big national weekly news magazines started: “Hate-teachers” . . .“violence-seekers” . . .“black racists” . . .“black fascists” . . .“anti-Christian” . . . “possibly Communist-inspired . . . .” It rolled out of the presses of the biggest devil in the history of mankind. And then the aroused white man made his next move. Since slavery, the American white man has always kept some handpicked Negroes who fared much better than the black masses suffering and slaving out in the hot fields. The white man had these “house” and “yard” Negroes for his special servants. He threw them more crumbs from his rich table, he even let them eat in his kitchen. He knew that he could always count on them to keep “good massa” happy in his self-image of being so “good” and “righteous.” “Good massa” always heard just what he wanted to hear from these “house” and “yard” blacks. “You’re such a good, fine massa!” Or, “Oh, massa, those old black nigger fieldhands out there, they’re happy just like they are; why, massa, they’renot intelligent enough for you to try and do any better for them, massa-” Well, slavery time’s “house” and “yard” Negroes had become more sophisticated, that was all. When now the white man picked up his telephone and dialed his “house” and “yard” Negroes- why, he didn’t even need to instruct the trained black puppets. They had seen the television program; had read the newspapers. They were already composing their lines. They knew what to do. I’m not going to call any names. But if you make a list of the biggest Negro “leaders,” so-called, in 1960, then you’ve named the ones who began to attack us “field” Negroes who were sounding insane, talking that way about “good massa.”
Every addict takes junk to escape something, the Muslim explains. He explains that most black junkies really are trying to narcotize themselves against being a black man in the white man’s America. But, actually, the Muslim says, the black man taking dope is only helping the white man to “prove” that the black man is nothing.
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.
It had become an outing, a picnic. The morning of the March, any rickety carloads of angry, dusty, sweating small-town Negroes would have gotten lost among the chartered jet planes, railroad cars, and air-conditioned buses. What originally was planned to be an angry riptide, one English newspaper aptly described now as “the gentle flood.” Talk about “integrated”! It was like salt and pepper. And, by now, there wasn’t a single logistics aspect uncontrolled. The marchers had been instructed to bring no signs-signs were provided. They had been told to sing one song: “We Shall Overcome.” They had been told how to arrive, when, where to arrive, where to assemble, when to start marching, the route to march. First-aid stations were strategically located-even where to faint! Yes, I was there. I observed that circus. Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “We Shall Overcome . . . Suum Day . . .” while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and “I Have, A Dream” speeches? And the black masses in America were-and still are-having a nightmare. These “angry revolutionists” even followed their final instructions: to leave early. With all of those thousands upon thousands of “angry revolutionists,” so few stayed over that the next morning the Washington hotel association reported a costly loss in empty rooms. Hollywood couldn’t have topped it.
At the outset, always I’d confront such panels with something such as: “Gentlemen, I finished the eighth grade in Mason, Michigan. My high school was the black ghetto of Roxbury, Massachusetts. My college was in the streets of Harlem, and my master’s was taken in prison. Mr. Muhammad has taught me that I never need fear any man’s intellect who tries to defend or to justify the white man’s criminal record against the non-white man-especially the white man and the black man here in North America.” It was like being on a battlefield-with intellectual and philosophical bullets. It was an exciting battling with ideas. I got so I could feel my audiences’ temperaments. I’ve talked with other public speakers; they agree that this ability is native to any person who has the “mass appeal” gift, who can get through to and move people. It’s a psychic radar. As a doctor, with his finger against a pulse, is able to feel the heart rate, when I am up there speaking, I can feel the reaction to what I am saying.
Speaking in these colleges and universities was good for the Nation of Islam, I would report to Mr. Muhammad, because the devilish white man’s best minds were developed and influenced in the colleges and universities. But for some reason that I could never understand until much later, Mr. Muhammad never really wanted me to speak at these colleges and universities. I was to learn later, from Mr. Muhammad’s own sons, that he was envious because he felt unequipped to speak at colleges himself. But nevertheless, in Mr. Muhammad’s behalf at this time, I was finding these highly intelligent audiences amazingly open-minded and objective in their receptions of the raw, naked truths that I would tell them: “Time and time again, the black, the brown, the red, and the yellow races have witnessed and suffered the white man’s small ability to understand the simple notes of the spirit. The white man seems tone deaf to the total orchestration of humanity. Every day, his newspapers’ front pages show us the world that he has created.
The collective white man’s history has left the non-white peoples no alternative, either, but to draw closer to each other. Characteristically, as always, the devilish white man lacks the moral strength and courage to cast off his arrogance. He wants, today, to ‘buy’ friends among the non- whites. He tries, characteristically, to cover up his past record. He does not possess the humility to admit his guilt, to try and atone for his crimes. The white man has perverted the simple message of love that the Prophet Jesus lived and taught when He walked upon this earth.
What began to break my faith was that, try as I might, I couldn’t hide, I couldn’t evade, that Mr. Muhammad, instead of facing what he had done before his followers, as a human weakness or as fulfillment of prophecy-which I sincerely believe that Muslims would have understood, or at least they would have accepted-Mr. Muhammad had, instead, been willing to hide, to cover up what he had done. That was my major blow. That was how I first began to realize that I had believed in Mr. Muhammad more than he believed in himself. And that was how, after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength, to start facing the facts, to think for myself.
The pilgrimage to Mecca, known as Hajj, is a religious obligation that every orthodox Muslim fulfills, if humanly able, at least once in his or her lifetime. The Holy Quran says it, “Pilgrimage to the Ka’ba is a duty men owe to God; those who are able, make the journey.”
“America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered ‘white’-but the ‘white’ attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color.
“I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man-and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their ‘differences’ in color. “With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called ‘Christian’ white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem. Perhaps it could be in time to save America from imminent disaster-the same destruction brought upon Germany by racism that eventually destroyed the Germans themselves. “Each hour here in the Holy Land enables me to have greater spiritual insights into what is happening in America between black and white. The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities-he is only reacting to fourhundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites. But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth-the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.
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” complexions 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 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.
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.
“I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man’s problem-just to avoid violence. I don’t go for non-violence if it also means a delayed solution. To me a delayed solution is a non-solution. Or I’ll say it another way. If it must take violence to get the black man his human rights in this country, I’m for violence exactly as you know the Irish, the Poles, or Jews would be if they were flagrantly discriminated against. I am just as they would be in that case, and they would be for violence-no matter what the consequences, no matter who was hurt by the violence.”
That discussion with the ambassador gave me a new insight-one which I like:that the white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.
“Conservatism” in America’s politics means “Let’s keep the niggers in their place.” And “liberalism” means “Let’s keep the knee-grows in their place-but tell them we’ll treat them a little better; let’s fool them more, with more promises.” With these choices, I felt that the American black man only needed to choose which one to be eaten by, the “liberal” fox or the “conservative” wolf-because both of them would eat him.
Sometimes, I have dared to dream to, myself that one day, history may even say that my voice- which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency-that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe. The goal has always been the same, with the approaches to it as different as mine and Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent marching, that dramatizes the brutality and the evil of the white man against defenseless blacks. And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody’s guess which of the“extremes” in approach to the black man’s problems might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first-“non-violent” Dr. King, or so-called “violent” me.
To speculate about dying doesn’t disturb me as it might some people. I never have felt that I would live to become an old man. Even before I was a Muslim-when I was a hustler in the ghetto jungle, and then a criminal in prison, it always stayed on my mind that I would die a violent death. In fact, it runs in my family. My father and most of his brothers died by violence-my father because of what he believed in. To come right down to it, if I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred per cent dedication I have to whatever I believe in-these are ingredients which make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.
For the freedom of my 22 million black brothers and sisters here in America, I do believe that I have fought the best that I knew how, and the best that I could, with the shortcomings that I have had. I know that my shortcomings are many. My greatest lack has been, I believe, that I don’t have the kind of academic education I wish I had been able to get-to have been a lawyer, perhaps. I do believe that I might have made a good lawyer. I have always loved verbal battle, and challenge. You can believe me that if I had the time right now, I would not be one bit ashamed to go back into any New York City public school and start where I left off at the ninth grade, and go on through a degree. Because I don’t begin to be academically equipped for so many of the interests that I have. For instance, I love languages. I wish I were an accomplished linguist. I don’t know anything more frustrating than to be around people talking something you can’t understand. Especially when they are people who look just like you. In Africa, I heard original mother tongues, such as Hausa, and Swahili, being spoken, and there I was standing like some little boy, waiting for someone to tell me what had been said; I never will forget how ignorant I felt. Aside from the basic African dialects, I would try to learn Chinese, because itlooks as if Chinese will be the most powerful political language of the future. And already I have begun studying Arabic, which I think is going to be the most powerful spiritual language of the future. I would just like to study. I mean ranging study, because I have a wide-open mind. I’m interested in almost any subject you can mention. I know this is the reason I have come to really like, as individuals, some of the hosts of radio or television panel programs I have been on, and to respect their minds-because even if they have been almost steadily in disagreement with me on the race issue, they still have kept their minds open and objective about the truths of things happening in this world.
Anyway, now, each day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do. When I am dead-I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form-I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with “hate.” He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of “hatred”-and that will help him to escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race. You watch. I will be labeled as, at best, an “irresponsible” black man. I have always felt about this accusation that the black “leader” whom white men consider to be “responsible” is invariably the black “leader” who never gets any results. You only get action as a black man if you are regarded by the white man as “irresponsible.” In fact, this much I had learned when I was just a little boy. And since I have been some kind of a “leader” of black people here in the racist society of America, I have been more reassured each time the white man resisted me, or attacked me harder-because each time made me more certain that I was on the right track in the American black man’s best interests. The racistwhite man’s opposition automatically made me know that I did offer the black man something worthwhile. Yes, I have cherished my “demagogue” role. I know that societies often have killed the people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America-then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.