The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  This is the situation which permitted Negro combustion to slowly build up to the revolution-point, without the white man realizing it. All over America, the local Negro “leader,” in order to survive as a “leader,” kept reassuring the local white man, in effect, “Everything’s all right, everything’s right in hand, boss!” When the “leader” wanted a little something for his people: “Er, boss, some of the people talking about we sure need a better school, boss.” And if the local Negroes hadn’t been causing any “trouble,” the “benevolent” white man might nod and give them a school, or some jobs.

  The white men belonging to the power structures in thousands of communities across America know that I’m right! They know that I am describing what has been the true pattern of “communications” between the “local whites of good-will” and the local Negroes. It has been a pattern created by domineering, ego-ridden whites. Its characteristic design permitted the white man to feel “noble” about throwing crumbs to the black man, instead of feeling guilty about the local community’s system of cruelly exploiting Negroes.

  But I want to tell you something. This pattern, this “system” that the white man created, of teaching Negroes to hide the truth from him behind a façade of grinning, “yessir-bossing,” foot-shuffling and head-scratching—that system has done the American white man more harm than an invading army would do to him.

  Why do I say this? Because all this has steadily helped this American white man to build up, deep in his psyche, absolute conviction that he is “superior.” In how many, many communities have, thus, white men who didn’t finish high school regarded condescendingly university-educated local Negro “leaders,” principals of schools, teachers, doctors, other professionals?

  The white man’s system has been imposed upon non-white peoples all over the world. This is exactly the reason why wherever people who are anything but white live in this world today, the white man’s governments are finding themselves in deeper and deeper trouble and peril.

  Let’s just face truth. Facts! Whether or not the white man of the world is able to face truth, and facts, about the true reasons for his troubles—that’s what essentially will determine whether or not he will now survive.

  Today we are seeing this revolution of the non-white peoples, who just a few years ago would have frozen in horror if the mighty white nations so much as lifted an eyebrow. What it is, simply, is that black and brown and red and yellow peoples have, after hundreds of years of exploitation and imposed “inferiority” and general misuse, become, finally, do-or-die sick and tired of the white man’s heel on their necks.

  How can the white American government figure on selling “democracy” and “brotherhood” to non-white peoples—if they read and hear every day what’s going on right here in America, and see the better-than-a-thousand-words photographs of the American white man denying “democracy” and “brotherhood” even to America’s native-born non-whites? The world’s non-whites know how this Negro here has loved the American white man, and slaved for him, tended to him, nursed him. This Negro has jumped into uniform and gone off and died when this America was attacked by enemies both white and non-white. Such a faithful, loyal non-white as this—and still America bombs him, and sets dogs on him, and turns fire hoses on him, and jails him by the thousands, and beats him bloody, and inflicts upon him all manner of other crimes.

  Of course these things, known and refreshed every day for the rest of the world’s non-whites, are a vital factor in these burnings of ambassadors’ limousines, these stonings, defilings, and wreckings of embassies and legations, these shouts of “White man, go home!” these attacks on white Christian missionaries, and these bombings and tearing down of flags.

  Is it clear why I have said that the American white man’s malignant superiority complex has done him more harm than an invading army?

  —

  The American black man should be focusing his every effort toward building his own businesses, and decent homes for himself. As other ethnic groups have done, let the black people, wherever possible, however possible, patronize their own kind, hire their own kind, and start in those ways to build up the black race’s ability to do for itself. That’s the only way the American black man is ever going to get respect. One thing the white man never can give the black man is self-respect! The black man never can become independent and recognized as a human being who is truly equal with other human beings until he has what they have, and until he is doing for himself what others are doing for themselves.

  The black man in the ghettoes, for instance, has to start self-correcting his own material, moral, and spiritual defects and evils. The black man needs to start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution. The black man in America has to lift up his own sense of values.

  Only a few thousands of Negroes, relatively a very tiny number, are taking any part in “integration.” Here, again, it is those few bourgeois Negroes, rushing to throw away their little money in the white man’s luxury hotels, his swanky nightclubs, and big, fine, exclusive restaurants. The white people patronizing those places can afford it. But these Negroes you see in those places can’t afford it, certainly most of them can’t. Why, what does some Negro one installment payment away from disaster look like somewhere downtown out to dine, grinning at some headwaiter who has more money than the Negro? Those bourgeois Negroes out draping big tablecloth-sized napkins over their knees and ordering quail under glass and stewed snails—why, Negroes don’t even like snails! What they’re doing is proving they’re integrated.

  If you want to get right down to the real outcome of this so-called “integration,” what you’ve got to arrive at is intermarriage.

  I’m right with the Southern white man who believes that you can’t have so-called “integration,” at least not for long, without intermarriage increasing. And what good is this for anyone? Let’s again face reality. In a world as color-hostile as this, man or woman, black or white, what do they want with a mate of the other race?

  Certainly white people have served enough notice of their hostility to any blacks in their families and neighborhoods. And the way most Negroes feel today, a mixed couple probably finds that black families, black communities, are even more hostile than the white ones. So what’s bound to face “integrated” marriages, except being unwelcomed, unwanted, “misfits” in whichever world they try to live in? What we arrive at is that “integration,” socially, is no good for either side. “Integration,” ultimately, would destroy the white race…and destroy the black race.

  The white man’s “integrating” with black women has already changed the complexion and characteristics of the black race in America. What’s been proved by the “blacks” whose complexions are “whiter” than many “white” people? I’m told that there are in America today between two and five million “white Negroes,” who are “passing” in white society. Imagine their torture! Living in constant fear that some black person they’ve known might meet and expose them. Imagine every day living a lie. Imagine hearing their own white husbands, their own white wives, even their own white children, talking about “those Negroes.”

  I would doubt if anyone in America has heard Negroes more bitter against the white man than some of those I have heard. But I will tell you that, without any question, the most bitter anti-white diatribes that I have ever heard have come from “passing” Negroes, living as whites, among whites, exposed every day to what white people say among themselves regarding Negroes—things that a recognized Negro never would hear. Why, if there was a racial showdown, these Negroes “passing” within white circles would become the black side’s most valuable “spy” and ally.

  Europe’s “brown babies,” now young men and women who are starting to marry, and produce families of their own…have their experiences throughout their lives, scarred as racial freaks, proved anything positive for “integration”?

  “Integration” is called “assimilation” if white ethnic groups
alone are involved: it’s fought against tooth and nail by those who want their heritage preserved. Look at how the Irish threw the English out of Ireland. The Irish knew the English would engulf them. Look at the French-Canadians, fanatically fighting to keep their identity.

  In fact, history’s most tragic result of a mixed, therefore diluted and weakened, ethnic identity has been experienced by a white ethnic group—the Jew in Germany.

  He had made greater contributions to Germany than Germans themselves had. Jews had won over half of Germany’s Nobel Prizes. Every culture in Germany was led by the Jew; he published the greatest newspaper. Jews were the greatest artists, the greatest poets, composers, stage directors. But those Jews made a fatal mistake—assimilating.

  From World War I to Hitler’s rise, the Jews in Germany had been increasingly intermarrying. Many changed their names and many took other religions. Their own Jewish religion, their own rich Jewish ethnic and cultural roots, they anesthetized, and cut off…until they began thinking of themselves as “Germans.”

  And the next thing they knew, there was Hitler, rising to power from the beer halls—with his emotional “Aryan master race” theory. And right at hand for a scapegoat was the self-weakened, self-deluded “German” Jew.

  Most mysterious is how did those Jews—with all of their brilliant minds, with all of their power in every aspect of Germany’s affairs—how did those Jews stand almost as if mesmerized, watching something which did not spring upon them overnight, but which was gradually developed—a monstrous plan for their own murder.

  Their self-brainwashing had been so complete that not long after, in the gas chambers, a lot of them were still gasping, “It can’t be true!”

  If Hitler had conquered the world, as he meant to—that is a shuddery thought for every Jew alive today.

  The Jew never will forget that lesson. Jewish intelligence eyes watch every neo-Nazi organization. Right after the war, the Jews’ Haganah mediating body stepped up the longtime negotiations with the British. But this time, the Stern gang was shooting the British. And this time the British acquiesced and helped them to wrest Palestine away from the Arabs, the rightful owners, and then the Jews set up Israel, their own country—the one thing that every race of man in the world respects, and understands.

  —

  Not long ago, the black man in America was fed a dose of another form of the weakening, lulling and deluding effects of so-called “integration.” It was that “Farce on Washington,” I call it.

  The idea of a mass of blacks marching on Washington was originally the brainchild of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ A. Philip Randolph. For twenty or more years the March on Washington idea had floated around among Negroes. And, spontaneously, suddenly now, that idea caught on.

  Overalled rural Southern Negroes, small town Negroes, Northern ghetto Negroes, even thousands of previously Uncle Tom Negroes began talking “March!”

  Nothing since Joe Louis had so coalesced the masses of Negroes. Groups of Negroes were talking of getting to Washington any way they could—in rickety old cars, on buses, hitch-hiking—walking, even, if they had to. They envisioned thousands of black brothers converging together upon Washington—to lie down in the streets, on airport runways, on government lawns—demanding of the Congress and the White House some concrete civil rights action.

  This was a national bitterness; militant, unorganized, and leaderless. Predominantly, it was young Negroes, defiant of whatever might be the consequences, sick and tired of the black man’s neck under the white man’s heel.

  The white man had plenty of good reasons for nervous worry. The right spark—some unpredictable emotional chemistry—could set off a black uprising. The government knew that thousands of milling, angry blacks not only could completely disrupt Washington—but they could erupt in Washington.

  The White House speedily invited in the major civil rights Negro “leaders.” They were asked to stop the planned March. They truthfully said they hadn’t begun it, they had no control over it—the idea was national, spontaneous, unorganized, and leaderless. In other words, it was a black powder keg.

  Any student of how “integration” can weaken the black man’s movement was about to observe a master lesson.

  The White House, with a fanfare of international publicity, “approved,” “endorsed,” and “welcomed” a March on Washington. The big civil rights organizations right at this time had been publicly squabbling about donations. The New York Times had broken the story. The N.A.A.C.P. had charged that other agencies’ demonstrations, highly publicized, had attracted a major part of the civil rights donations—while the N.A.A.C.P. got left holding the bag, supplying costly bail and legal talent for the other organizations’ jailed demonstrators.

  It was like a movie. The next scene was the “big six” civil rights Negro “leaders” meeting in New York City with the white head of a big philanthropic agency. They were told that their money-wrangling in public was damaging their image. And a reported $800,000 was donated to a United Civil Rights Leadership council that was quickly organized by the “big six.”

  Now, what had instantly achieved black unity? The white man’s money. What string was attached to the money? Advice. Not only was there this donation, but another comparable sum was promised, for sometime later on, after the March…obviously if all went well.

  The original “angry” March on Washington was now about to be entirely changed.

  Massive international publicity projected the “big six” as March on Washington leaders. It was news to those angry grass-roots Negroes steadily adding steam to their March plans. They probably assumed that now those famous “leaders” were endorsing and joining them.

  Invited next to join the March were four famous white public figures: one Catholic, one Jew, one Protestant, and one labor boss.

  The massive publicity now gently hinted that the “big ten” would “supervise” the March on Washington’s “mood,” and its “direction.”

  The four white figures began nodding. The word spread fast among so-called “liberal” Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and laborites: it was “democratic” to join this black March. And suddenly, the previously March-nervous whites began announcing they were going.

  It was as if electrical current shot through the ranks of bourgeois Negroes—the very so-called “middle-class” and “upper-class” who had earlier been deploring the March on Washington talk by grass-roots Negroes.

  But white people, now, were going to march.

  Why, some downtrodden, jobless, hungry Negro might have gotten trampled. Those “integration”-mad Negroes practically ran over each other trying to find out where to sign up. The “angry blacks” March suddenly had been made chic. Suddenly it had a Kentucky Derby image. For the status-seeker, it was a status symbol. “Were you there?” You can hear that right today.

  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.

  In a subsequent press poll, not one Congressman or Senator with a previous record of opposition to civil rights said he had changed his views. What did anyone expect? How was a one-day “integrated” picnic going to counter-influence these representatives of prejudice rooted deep in the psyche of the American white man for four hundred years?

  The very fact that millions, black and white, believed in this monumental farce is another example of how much this country goes in for the surface glossing over, the escape ruse, surfaces, instead of truly dealing with its deep-rooted problems.

  What that March on Washington did do was lull Negroes for a while. But inevitably, the black masses started realizing they had been smoothly hoaxed again by the white man. And, inevitably, the black man’s anger rekindled, deeper than ever, and there began bursting out in different cities, in the “long, hot summer” of 1964, unprecedented racial crises.

  —

  About a month before the “Farce on Washington,” the New York Times reported me, according to its poll conducted on college and university campuses, as “the second most sought after” speaker at colleges and universities. The only speaker ahead of me was Senator Barry Goldwater.

  I believe that what had generated such college popularity for me was Dr. Lincoln’s book, The Black Muslims in America. It had been made required reading in numerous college courses. Then a long, candid interview with me was carried by Playboy magazine, whose circulation on college campuses is the biggest of any magazine’s. And many students, having studied first the book and then the Playboy interview, wanted to hear in person this so-called “fiery Black Muslim.”