The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  Sick about Sammy, I queried from bar to bar among old-timers for West Indian Archie. The wire hadn’t reported him dead, or living somewhere else, but none seemed to know where he was. I heard the usual hustler fates of so many others. Bullets, knives, prison, dope, diseases, insanity, alcoholism. I imagined it was about in that order. And so many of the survivors whom I knew as tough hyenas and wolves of the streets in the old days now were so pitiful. They had known all the angles, but beneath that surface they were poor, ignorant, untrained black men; life had eased up on them and hyped them. I ran across close to twenty-five of these old-timers I had known pretty well, who in the space of nine years had been reduced to the ghetto’s minor, scavenger hustles to scratch up room rent and food money. Some now worked downtown, messengers, janitors, things like that. I was thankful to Allah that I had become a Muslim and escaped their fate.

  There was Cadillac Drake. He was a big jolly, cigar-smoking, fat, black, gaudy-dressing pimp, a regular afternoon character when I was waiting on tables in Small’s Paradise. Well, I recognized him shuffling toward me on the street. He had gotten hooked on heroin; I’d heard that. He was the dirtiest, sloppiest bum you ever laid eyes on. I hurried past because we would both have been embarrassed if he recognized me, the kid he used to toss a dollar tip.

  The wire worked to locate West Indian Archie for me. The wire of the streets, when it wants to, is something like Western Union with the F.B.I. for messengers. At one of my early services at Temple Seven, an old scavenger hustler, to whom I gave a few dollars, came up when services were dismissed. He told me that West Indian Archie was sick, living up in a rented room in the Bronx.

  I took a taxi to the address. West Indian Archie opened the door. He stood there in rumpled pajamas and barefooted, squinting at me.

  Have you ever seen someone who seemed a ghost of the person you remembered? It took him a few seconds to fix me in his memory. He claimed, hoarsely, “Red! I’m so glad to see you!”

  I all but hugged the old man. He was sick in that weak way. I helped him back. He sat down on the edge of his bed. I sat in his one chair, and I told him how his forcing me out of Harlem had saved my life by turning me in the direction of Islam.

  He said, “I always liked you, Red,” and he said that he had never really wanted to kill me. I told him it had made me shudder many times to think how close we had come to killing each other. I told him I had sincerely thought I had hit that combinated six-way number for the three hundred dollars he had paid me. Archie said that he had later wondered if he had made some mistake, since I was so ready to die about it. And then we agreed that it wasn’t worth even talking about, it didn’t mean anything anymore. He kept saying, over and over, in between other things, that he was so glad to see me.

  I went into a little of Mr. Muhammad’s teaching with Archie. I told him how I had found out that all of us who had been in the streets were victims of the white man’s society. I told Archie what I had thought in prison about him; that his brain, which could tape-record hundreds of number combinations a day, should have been put at the service of mathematics or science. “Red, that sure is something to think about,” I can remember him saying.

  But neither of us would say that it was not too late. I have the feeling that he knew, as I could see, that the end was closing in on Archie. I became too moved about what he had been and what he had now become to be able to stay much longer. I didn’t have much money, and he didn’t want to accept what little I was able to press on him. But I made him take it.

  I keep having to remind myself that then, in June, 1954, Temple Seven in New York City was a little storefront. Why, it’s almost unbelievable that one bus couldn’t have been filled with the Muslims in New York City! Even among our own black people in the Harlem ghetto, you could have said “Muslim” to a thousand, and maybe only one would not have asked you “What’s that?” As for white people, except for that relative handful privy to certain police or prison files, not five hundred white people in all of America knew we existed.

  I began firing Mr. Muhammad’s teaching at the New York members and the few friends they managed to bring in. And with each meeting, my discomfort grew that in Harlem, choked with poor, ignorant black men suffering all of the evils that Islam could cure, every time I lectured my heart out and then asked those who wanted to follow Mr. Muhammad to stand, only two or three would. And, I have to admit, sometimes not that many.

  I think I was all the angrier with my own ineffectiveness because I knew the streets. I had to get myself together and think out the problem. And the big trouble, obviously, was that we were only one among the many voices of black discontent on every busy Harlem corner. The different Nationalist groups, the “Buy Black!” forces, and others like that; dozens of their step-ladder orators were trying to increase their followings. I had nothing against anyone trying to promote independence and unity among black men, but they still were making it tough for Mr. Muhammad’s voice to be heard.

  In my first effort to get over this hurdle, I had some little leaflets printed. There wasn’t a much-traveled Harlem street corner that five or six good Muslim brothers and I missed. We would step up right in front of a walking black man or woman so that they had to accept our leaflet, and if they hesitated one second, they had to hear us saying some catch thing such as “Hear how the white man kidnapped and robbed and raped our black race—”

  Next, we went to work “fishing” on those Harlem corners—on the fringes of the Nationalist meetings. The method today has many refinements, but then it consisted of working the always shifting edges of the audiences that others had managed to draw. At a Nationalist meeting, everyone who was listening was interested in the revolution of the black race. We began to get visible results almost immediately after we began thrusting handbills in people’s hands, “Come to hear us, too, brother. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us how to cure the black man’s spiritual, mental, moral, economic, and political sicknesses—”

  I saw the new faces of our Temple Seven meetings. And then we discovered the best “fishing” audience of all, by far the best-conditioned audience for Mr. Muhammad’s teachings: the Christian churches.

  Our Sunday services were held at two P.M. All over Harlem during the hour or so before that, Christian church services were dismissing. We by-passed the larger churches with their higher ratio of so-called “middle class” Negroes who were so full of pretense and “status” that they wouldn’t be caught in our little storefront.

  We went “fishing” fast and furiously when those little evangelical storefront churches each let out their thirty to fifty people on the sidewalk. “Come to hear us, brother, sister—” “You haven’t heard anything until you have heard the teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad—” These congregations were usually Southern migrant people, usually older, who would go anywhere to hear what they called “good preaching.” These were the church congregations who were always putting out little signs announcing that inside they were selling fried chicken and chitlin dinners to raise some money. And three or four nights a week, they were in their storefront rehearsing for the next Sunday, I guess, shaking and rattling and rolling the gospels with their guitars and tambourines.

  I don’t know if you know it, but there’s a whole circuit of commercial gospel entertainers who have come out of these little churches in the city ghettoes or from down South. People such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Clara Ward Singers are examples, and there must be five hundred lesser lights of the same general order. Mahalia Jackson, the greatest of them all—she was a preacher’s daughter in Louisiana. She came up there to Chicago where she worked cooking and scrubbing for white people and then in a factory while she sang in the Negro churches the gospel style that, when it caught on, made her the first Negro that Negroes ever made famous. She was selling hundreds of thousands of records among Negroes before white people ever knew who Mahalia Jackson was. Anyway, I know that somewhere I once read that Mahalia said that every time she can, she
will slip unannounced into some ghetto storefront church and sing with her people. She calls that “my filling station.”

  The black Christians we “fished” to our Temple were conditioned, I found, by the very shock I could give them about what had been happening to them while they worshiped a blond, blue-eyed God. I knew the temple that I could build if I could really get to those Christians. I tailored the teachings for them. I would start to speak and sometimes be so emotionally charged I had to explain myself:

  “You see my tears, brothers and sisters….Tears haven’t been in my eyes since I was a young boy. But I cannot help this when I feel the responsibility I have to help you comprehend for the first time what this white man’s religion that we call Christianity has done to us….

  “Brothers and sisters here for the first time, please don’t let that shock you. I know you didn’t expect this. Because almost none of us black people have thought that maybe we were making a mistake not wondering if there wasn’t a special religion somewhere for us—a special religion for the black man.

  “Well, there is such a religion. It’s called Islam. Let me spell it for you, I-s-l-a-m! Islam! But I’m going to tell you about Islam a little later. First, we need to understand some things about this Christianity before we can understand why the answer for us is Islam.

  “Brothers and sisters, the white man has brainwashed us black people to fasten our gaze upon a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus! We’re worshiping a Jesus that doesn’t even look like us! Oh, yes! Now just bear with me, listen to the teachings of the Messenger of Allah, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Now, just think of this. 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 shout and 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!

  “You don’t want to believe what I am telling you, brothers and sisters? Well, I’ll tell you what you do. You go out of here, you just take a good look around where you live. Look at not only how you live, but look at how anybody that you know lives—that way, you’ll be sure that you’re not just a bad-luck accident. And when you get through looking at where you live, then you take you a walk down across Central Park, and start to look at what this white God had brought to the white man. I mean, take yourself a look down there at how the white man is living!

  “And don’t stop there. In fact, you won’t be able to stop for long—his doormen are going to tell you ‘Move on!’ But catch a subway and keep on downtown. Anywhere you may want to get off, look at the white man’s apartments, businesses! Go right on down to the tip of Manhattan Island that this devilish white man stole from the trusting Indians for twenty-four dollars! Look at his City Hall, down there; look at his Wall Street! Look at yourself! Look at his God!”

  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 women! 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!”

  One hundred percent would stand up without hesitation when I said, “How many believe what they have heard?” But still never more than an agonizing few would stand up when I invited, “Will those stand who want to follow The Honorable Elijah Muhammad?”

  I knew that our strict moral code and discipline was what repelled them most. I fired at this point, at the reason for our code. “The white man wants black men to stay immoral, unclean and ignorant. As long as we stay in these conditions we will keep on begging him and he will control us. We never can win freedom and justice and equality until we are doing something for ourselves!”

  The code, of course, had to be explained to any who were tentatively interested in becoming Muslims. And the word got around in their little storefronts quickly, which is why they would come to hear me, yet wouldn’t join Mr. Muhammad. Any fornication was absolutely forbidden in the Nation of Islam. Any eating of the filthy pork, or other injurious or unhealthful foods; any use of tobacco, alcohol, or narcotics. No Muslim who followed Elijah Muhammad could dance, gamble, date, attend movies, or sports, or take long vacations from work. Muslims slept no more than health required. Any domestic quarreling, any discourtesy, especially to women, was not allowed. No lying or stealing, and no insubordination to civil authority, except on the grounds of religious obligation.

  Our moral laws were policed by our Fruit of Islam—able, dedicated, and trained Muslim men. Infractions resulted in suspension by Mr. Muhammad, or isolation for various periods, or even expulsion for the worst offenses “from the only group that really cares about you.”

  —

  Temple Seven grew somewhat with each meeting. It just grew too slowly to suit me. During the weekdays, I traveled by bus and train. I taught each Wednesday at Philadelphia’s Temple Twelve. I went to Springfield, Massachusetts, to try to start a new temple. A temple which Mr. Muhammad numbered Thirteen was established there with the help of Brother Osborne, who had first heard of Islam from me in prison. A lady visiting a Springfield meeting asked if I’d come to Hartford, where she lived; she specified the next Thursday and said she would assemble some friends. And I was right there.

  Thursday is traditionally domestic servants’ day off. This sister had in her housing project apartment about fifteen of the maids, cooks, chauffeurs and house men who worked for the Hartford-area white people. You’ve heard that saying, “No man is a hero to his valet.” Well, those Negroes who waited on wealthy whites hand and foot opened their eyes quicker than most Negroes. And when they went “fishing” enough among more servants, and other black people in and around Hartford, Mr. Muhammad before long was able to assign a Hartford temple the number Fourteen. And every Thursday I scheduled my teaching there.

  Mr. Muhammad, when I went to see him in Chicago, had to chastise me on some point during nearly every visit. I just couldn’t keep from showing in some manner that with his ministers equipped with the power of his message, I felt the Nation should go much faster. His patience and his wisdom in chastising me would always humble me from head to foot. He said, one time, that no true leader burdened his followers with a greater load than they could carry, and no true leader sets too fast a pace for his followers to Keep up.

  “Most people seeing a man in an old touring car going real slow think the man doesn’t want to go fast,” Mr. Muhammad said, “but the man knows that to drive any faster would destroy the old car. When he gets a fast car, then he will drive at a fast speed.” And I remember him telling me another time, when I complained about an inefficient minister at one of his mosques, “I would rather have a mule I can depend upon than a race horse that I can’t depend upon.”

  I knew that Mr. Muhammad wanted that fast car to drive. And I don’t think you could pick the same number of faithful brothers and sisters from the Nation of Islam today and find “fishing” teams to beat the efforts of those who helped to bring growth to the Boston, Philadelphia, Springfield, Hartford, and New York temples. I’m, of course, just mentioning those that I knew most about because I was directly involved. This was through 1955. And 1955 was the year I made my first trip of any distance. It was to help open the temple that today is Number Fifteen—in Atlanta, Georgia.

  Any Muslim who ever moved for personal reasons from one city to another was of course exhorted to plant seeds for Mr. Muhammad. Brother James X, one of our to
p Temple Twelve brothers, had interested enough black people in Atlanta so that when Mr. Muhammad was advised, he told me to go to Atlanta and hold a first meeting. I think I have had a hand in most of Mr. Muhammad’s temples, but I’ll never forget that opening in Atlanta.

  A funeral parlor was the only place large enough that Brother James X could afford to rent. Everything that the Nation of Islam did in those days, from Mr. Muhammad on down, was strictly on a shoestring. When we all arrived, though, a Christian Negro’s funeral was just dismissing, so we had to wait awhile, and we watched the mourners out.

  “You saw them all crying over their physical dead,” I told our group when we got inside. “But the Nation of Islam is rejoicing over you, our mentally dead. That may shock you, but, oh, yes, you just don’t realize how our whole black race in America is mentally dead. We are here today with Mr. Elijah Muhammad’s teachings which resurrect the black man from the dead….”

  And, speaking of funerals, I should mention that we never failed to get some new Muslims when non-Muslims, family and friends of a Muslim deceased, attended our short, moving ceremony that illustrated Mr. Muhammad’s teaching, “Christians have their funerals for the living, ours are for our departed.”

  As the minister of several temples, conducting the Muslim ceremony had occasionally fallen to my lot. As Mr. Muhammad had taught me, I would start by reading over the casket of the departed brother or sister a prayer to Allah. Next I read a simple obituary record of his or her life. 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.”