UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
WASHINGTON 25, D.C.
May 23, 1963
MALCOLM K. LITTLE ALSO KNOWN AS MALCOLM X INTERNAL SECURITY - NATION OF ISLAM
MALCOLM X was interviewed in the studio of radio station WUST, Washington, D. C. between 1:00 P.M. and 1:30 P.M. on 5/12/63. He appeared on a weekly program of WUST called “Focus,” and was introduced as Minister of Muhammad’s Mosque No. 4 (MM No. 4), 1519 4th Street, N. W., Washington, D. C.
For the sake of brevity, the interviewer will be identified, by the letter “I.” The subject will be identified by the letter “M.” The interview is as follows:
I.
Would we be correct in assuming here that your being sent here to Washington is not only for the exhilaration of the program locally, but to also create across the country influence here or get national attention to your program.
M.
Not so much national attention. I don’t think any more attention could be drawn to Mr. MUHAMMAD than has already been drawn, not only nationally but internationally. Our people are confronted today with a very grave problem and many whites who pose as liberals and use Negroes who pose as leaders, to make our people think that integration is going to solve our problem, and as Muslims we look upon this as only a trick designed to blind the black man in this country, to what is really facing the white man. And the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD teaches us that the only salvation for our people is not integration into a white society, of a society that is on its way out and is on its way down, but separation from that society. And that righteous effort be put forth among our people to solve our own problems; to get on God’s side and to integrate with God and imitate God instead of running around here foolishly trying to integrate with the white man or imitate the white man or get on the white man’s side.
I.
Well, what is the thinking of ELIJAH MUHAMMAD? There are rapid strides being made in the field of integration.
M.
I don’t see how you could call rapid strides being made in the field of integration when you don’t have one city in this country that can honestly say it is an example of sincere integration. The most, the first city to integrate was Washington, D. C. and it has become, because of integration, the only city in the country, according to government statistics, which has a majority population of so-called Negroes. Which shows you that when the black people come in the white men run out and the white liberals run out faster than the white conservatives. The white northerners run out more swiftly than white southerners, so we just don’t see where integration has worked in any city, North, South, East or West. It is only a very hypocritical approach to the problem.
I.
Now with your being sent here to Washington, what do you propose to do to help this situation?
M.
What situation?
I.
This matter of having the Negro race, if I understand it correctly, here now, to segregate themselves.
M.
Not segregate themselves. MUHAMMAD teaches us there is a difference between separation and segregation. Segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals. You notice that whenever you have an all-white school, it is not referred to as a segregated school. The Negro school is the segregated school; the Negro community is the segregated community. Chinatown isn’t even called a segregated community and only Chinese live there. But because the Chinese voluntarily live among themselves in their own community and control their own economy, their own business and own banks and own schools in their Chinese community, it is never called a segregated community. But the Negro schools in the Negro community are controlled by whites; the businesses in the Negro community are controlled by whites; the economy of the Negro community is controlled by whites; even the mind of the Negro community is controlled by whites; and since the Negro society or community is a controlled or regulated community by outsiders it is a segregated community. But if it was a separate entity, it would be something that we would voluntarily do. Separation, as I said, is that which is voluntarily done by two people, but segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors, and Muslims who follow the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD are as much against segregation as we are against integration. We are against segregation because it is unjust and we are against integration because its hypothesis is a false solution to a real problem, and you can talk integration but you can’t show me anyplace where it is being practiced.
I.
Mr. MALCOLM X, your arrival and stay in Washington has stirred the community, the white and the Negro race. The question is raised by our leading Negro publications: “Why should he come here?” Another question is raised: “Do we need Malcolm here?” If you are a religious sect who submits to the will of God, then why all the concern over the Muslims?
M.
Well, I think you will find there was an article in the New York Herald Tribune recently, in a series of articles called “Ten Negroes,” and one of your leading educators right here in this city, Nabrit, I think that is the way you pronounce his name, the President of Howard University, in this article he pointed out that one of the things that is dangerous about the Muslims is that we don’t drink or we don’t smoke, we don’t, and that the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD is able to exercise control over his followers that is not matched by any other religious group, and Nabrit went on to point out that we don’t drink, we don’t smoke, we have no crime, we pay our debts, we take care of our families. . . . Now if Nabrit is in a city that is complaining of crime, not only youth crime but adult crime, and they also confess their own inability to solve this dreadful condition, and they see that MR. MUHAMMAD is able to solve it, yet they don’t want MR. MUHAMMAD’s doctrine to spread, this shows you the hypocrisy of the Negro leadership; that the Negro isn’t the Negro leaders whether they are educators, politicians, or religious leaders, they are not concerned with elevating the condition of the masses of black people or correcting the problem faced by the masses of black people in this country. Most of these Negro leaders are only interested in keeping friendship with the white man, and pleasing the white liberal element with whom they are identified and with whom they are associated. And therefore because these white liberals won’t go along with what the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD is teaching, despite the fact that what he is teaching is able to reform our people, since the white liberals don’t endorse MR. MUHAMMAD, these Negro educators and politicians and religious leaders don’t endorse the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD either, and this is why they express fear and concern over my, over the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD sending me to Washington. They should be happy that a man who has been reformed himself by MR. MUHAMMAD and who in turn has reformed others, why, they should be happy to see the entry into the city of such a man.
I.
Let’s take this matter of crime now. How do we account for some of the Muslims being in one institution here, the Lorton Reformatory, where we had a considerable amount of trouble here sometime ago.
M.
I am glad you asked that. What the press fails to point out is that no Muslims go to prison. Those men weren’t Muslims before they went to prison. These men were Christians before they went to prison. They were Christians, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Negroes, and this type of religious concept that they had in the society in which they traveled, circles in which they traveled, led them into a life of crime; and the inability of that religion to reform them of these criminal tendencies is what made them wind up in prison. And after getting in prison they heard about the teachings of the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD, and then became Muslims, then reformed themselves and were then rehabilitated and changed, and became better men. But despite the fact that the Christian psychologists, the Christian theologists were unable to reform these men and rehabilitate these men ... It was the Muslims who went in prison and reformed them and are bringing them out of prison and making them
better men.
I.
… Visiting the Mosque or visiting the building here where you are going to hold your meeting later this afternoon: There are some procedures that individuals have to go through before they enter, such as frisking an individual. Why is this necessary?
M.
… It is not a case of frisking, anyone who enters a Muslim meeting is checked because we don’t allow weapons to enter any of our services; we don’t allow anyone who comes with alcohol on his breath to enter—everyone who comes is not only checked for weapons but is also checked for alcohol—and this is good because people who attend our meetings over a period of time, it means that these automatically, whenever they did carry weapons, they leave their weapons at home when they come around us, and after forming the habit of leaving their weapons at home when they come around us they realize that they don’t need weapons after all. So actually in a psychological sense, this teaches our people not to carry weapons, it teaches our people that they don’t need any type of alcohol; and it reforms —it puts them on a path toward reformation without them even realizing it.
I.
About the meeting here this afternoon, why aren’t white people allowed to attend?
M.
Well, this is another thing, we have had meetings plenty of times that white people attended, and it didn’t help them. We have had meetings where we let white reporters come in. They did nothing but distort what was said or took it out of context, or blew up what they considered to be negative. They don’t come to listen objectively and then go out and report objectively; they go out to project us as a racist group, as a black supremacist group, or as a group that is advocating violence. … If they want to cover our meetings, let them get someone black who looks like us to come in and cover our meetings. … I heard that one television network is flying a Negro in all the way from New York City just to cover this meeting because we won’t let the white reporters in, and this means that this particular network, which is one of the largest in the country, here in this city, the Capitol, doesn’t even have one Negro in this city working for them. So they have to go out of town and bring one in. Why, this only further proves what Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD is teaching is true. Any kind of job that the white man even gives to a Negro usually is tokenism, and is window dressing to try to make the Negro think he is sincere in trying to solve this problem when he is actually not. …
I.
You are advocating that twenty million Muslims will be in the sect by 1970; that is about seven years away. And that, and also you are advocating that more than ninety percent of the Negroes will have turned to the Muslim religion. That is such a short time. How do you think you can get so many?
M.
The Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD has taught us that Islam is the religion of God. There is only one God, the creator of the Universe.
I.
Let us take the matter of the religion of Islam now. How do you differentiate, if I may interrupt here, Muslim, M-U-S-L-I-M from Moslem, M-O-S-L-E-M.
M.
Well, if you were to go to the Moslem world and ask them what they are, they would say they are Muslims. Muslims is how it is pronounced in the Moslem world. Moslem itself, that word is only to apologize or westernize or white man’s way for saying Muslim. So a Moslem is a Muslim, a Muslim and Moslem is just the way the white man says it. And because most Negroes don’t understand this and they believe in imitating the white man, they go around saying that we are not Moslems, we are Muslims, because actually they don’t understand, they are just parroting what their white master has put inside their mouth.
I.
There is a separate language, is there not?
M.
Arabic is, well, Arabic is the language that is spoken, that is most commonly spoken in the Muslim world, although the Muslim world stretches from China to the shores of West Africa. … The people in the Muslim world don’t regard a man according to the color of his skin. When you are a Muslim, you don’t look at the color of a man’s skin whether he is black, red, white or green or something like that; when you are a Muslim you look at the man and judge him according to his conscious behavior. And many people in this country think we are against the white man because he is white. No, as a Muslim we don’t look at the color of a man’s skin; we are against the white man because of what he has done to the black man; we are against the white man in America because of his enslavement of our people and his oppression of our people and his exploitation of our people, and today, his continued hypocrisy, his refusal to stop doing this. But his forked tongue that he uses to make the world think that he is getting better now when all he has done is allowed us to advance from ancient slavery to modern slavery.
I.
You, in this discussion here this afternoon, are talking in terms of collective white people, are you not?
M.
The problem is collective, but we are not interested in these little individual whites who run around here with a halo around their heads. This is not a problem that can be solved on an individual basis.
I.
There are many, many people, whom I think you will agree, who have done much toward the advancement of the Negro. There are many people who are sincere, who are concerned about Negro problems, and who have tried to do something about it. What about the gentlemen who made the trip south and was killed in Gaston, Alabama?
M.
We are not interested in these little white individuals. Lincoln was supposed to have been sincere in his efforts to solve the problem and today the students of Lincoln agree that he was a hypocrite who wasn’t interested in freeing the black people. He was posing as a liberal. He was interested in saving the Union and he said that if he could keep them slaves and save the Union he would keep them slaves and if he had to let them go to save the Union he would let them go. … He was interested in perpetuating the power of the white man. … Also the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t designed to free the Negro. If it was, we would be free. We wouldn’t still be around here begging for civil rights. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were other acts by white liberals that didn’t solve our problems because if they were enacted in sincerity, we wouldn’t have the problem today. Then you have nine more hypocrites posing as Supreme Court justices who came up with the so-called desegregation decision in 1954, which was nothing but a doctrine of hypocrisy because those judges, who were masters of the English language and legal phraseology, if they really wanted the black man to be desegregated in this country on an educational basis, they would have come up and worded that decision in a legal terminology. They would have made it impossible for the crackers in the South to sidestep it. … When black people begin to see that, they will get away from that white man and elect leaders themselves, and select leaders themselves, and get together among ourselves and try to solve this problem ourselves instead of waiting around here depending on these hypocrites.
I.
In talking about problems here, how about the Birmingham situation? I understand the Muslim approach would have been different to that particular situation.
M.
We don’t force ourselves upon people where we are not wanted, but anybody who sics their dog on us is nothing but a dog who will sic his dog on you, and anybody who sics a dog on children and babies is nothing but a dog himself.
I.
Would Muslims have struck back on this occasion?
M.
I think you will find a Muslim never attacks anyone, but that Muslim is within his God-given right to retaliate against anyone who attacks him. He is never to be the aggressor, but the Holy Koran teaches us to fight against those who fight against us.
I.
History has proven itself down through the years that in a situation like this that when you strike back you tend to start a riot.
M.
No, you can’t call a man defending his home a rioter. You can’t call a man who is defending his babies and his children and his wom
en, a rioter. You call the rioter the one who is attacking—those white people down there, who are policemen in uniform. The law itself is what is attacking our people and that law in Alabama could never attack black people unless the Federal Government of the United States condones it, and it is not the crackers in the South who are responsible for this … it is the President, the Attorney General, the Senators and the Congressmen and the Cabinet and the Supreme Court who are responsible for it.
I.
Dr. King’s approach in Birmingham has been one of nonviolence.
M.
His approach has been one of an Uncle Tom.
I.
We have seen as the results of the talks they have had in the past couple days where there have been some results.
M.
You can’t call it results when someone has bitten your babies and your women and your children and you are to sit down and compromise with them and negotiate with them and then have to pay your way out of prison.
I.
We are not talking about the past now. We are talking about what has been provided for the Negro in the Birmingham area for the future.
M.
Nothing has been provided for the Negro in the future in the Birmingham area. They have been given promises that they will be able to sit down and drink some coffee with some crackers in a cracker restaurant—desegregated lunch counters. Now, what kind of advancement is that. They still don’t have a job.
Malcolm X Page 20
