Top Quotes: “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
Background: I’ve wanted to read this for a long time, and it did not disappoint! An incredible and incredibly misunderstood man tells his own story — and the part before the fame was the most engrossing for me. The very simple yet astounding method he used to educate himself in prison, the way he was treated as the only black kid in his town growing up, his stunning risks he took as a self-described ‘hustler’! I also came to understand the Black Muslim experience in America a lot more. Highly recommend!
Introduction
“Malcolm’s attitude toward the white man underwent a marked change in 1964 — a change that contributed to his break with Elijah Muhammed and his racist doctrines. Malcolm’s meteoric eruption on the national scene brought him into contact with white men who were not the ‘devils’ he had thought they were. He was much in demand as a speaker at student forums in Eastern universities and had appeared at many as a national figure. He always spoke respectfully and with a certain surprise of the positive response of white students to his lectures.”
“Assassins’ bullets ended Malcolm’s career before he was able to develop this new approach, which in essence recognized the Negroes as an integral part of the American community — a far cry from Elijah Muhammed’s doctrine of separation. Malcolm no longer inveighed against the U.S. but against a segment of the U.S. represented by overt white supremacists in the South and covert white supremacists in the North.”
“It was Malcolm’s intention to raise Negro militancy to a new high point with the main thrust aimed at both the Southern and Northern white supremacists. The Negro problem, which he had always said should be the renamed ‘the white man’s problem,’ was beginning to assume new dimensions for him in the last months of his life.”
“To the very end, Malcolm sought to refashion the broken strands between the American Negroes and African culture. He saw in this the road to a new sense of group identity, a self-conscious role in history, and above all a sense of man’s own worth which he claimed the white man had destroyed in the Negro.”
Childhood
“My [Malcolm X’s] father believed, as did Marcus Garvey, that freedom, independence, and self-respect could never be achieved by the Negro in America, and that therefore the Negro should leave America to the white man and return to his African land of origin. Among the reasons my father had decided to risk and dedicate his life to help disseminate this philosophy among his people was that he had seen four of his six brothers die by violence, three of them killed by white man, including one by lynching. And my father was finally himself to die by the white man’s hands.”
“In the summertime, at night, some of us boys would slip down the road, or across the pastures, and go ‘cooning’ watermelmons. White people always associated watermelons with Negroes, and they sometimes called Negroes ‘coons’ among all other names, and so stealing watermelons became ‘cooning’ them. If white boys were doing it, it implied that they were only acting like Negroes. Whites have always hidden or justified all of the guilts they could by ridiculing or blaming Negroes.”
“Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business, you know that they’re doing something that you aren’t.”
“Knowing that my mother in [the mental hospital] was a statistic that didn’t have to be, that existed because of a society’s failure, hypocrisy, greed, and lack of mercy and compassion. Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
“I noticed how white people smelled different from us, and how their food tasted different, not seasoned like Negro cooking.”
“[My white host family] all liked my attitude, and it was out of their liking for me that I soon became accepted by them — as a mascot, I know now. They would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, the same way people would talk freely in front of a pet canary. They would even talk about me, or about ‘n*****rs,’ as though I wasn’t there, as if I wouldn’t understand what the word meant. A hundred times a day, they used the word ‘n*****r.’ I suppose that in their own minds, they meant no harm; in fact they probably meant well. I remember once day when Mr. Swerlin, nice as he was, came in and said to Mrs. Swerlin right in front of me, ‘I just can’t see how those n*****rs can be so happy and be so poor.’ He talked about how they lived in shacks, but had those big, shining cars out front. And Mrs. Swerlin said, me standing right there, ‘N*****rs are just that way…’ That scene always stuck with me.”
“It was the same with the other white people, most of them local politicians, when they would come visiting. One of their favorite parlor topics was ‘n****rs.’ One of them was a judge who was in charge of me in Lansing. When he came over, he would look me up and down, his expression approving, like he was examining a fine colt, or a pedigreed pup.”
“They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position. But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered of them. Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me.”
“Some of the white kids at school were very friendly. Though some, including the teachers, called me ‘n*****r,’ it was easy to see that they didn’t mean any harm by it. As the ‘n*****r’ of my class, I was in fact extremely popular — I suppose partly because I was kind of a novelty. I was in demand. I had top priority.”
“My teacher was a great one for ‘n*****r’ jokes. One day during my first week at school, I walked into the room and he started singing to the class, as a joke, ‘Way down yonder in the cotton field, some folks say that a n*****r won’t steal.’ Very funny. Later, I remember, we came to the history textbook section on Negro history. It was exactly one paragraph long. Mr. Williams laughed through it practically in a single breath, reading aloud how the Negroes had been slaves, and then were freed, and how they were usually lazy and dumb and shiftless.”
“I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was math. I think the reason was that math leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.”
“Even at our own school, I could sense it almost as a physical barrier, that despite all the beaming and smiling, the mascot wasn’t supposed to dance with any of the white girls. It was some of kind of psychic message — not just from them, but also from within myself. I would just stand around and smile and talk and drink punch and eat sandwiches at school dances, and then I would make some excuse and get away early.”
Hustling
“The way [my aunt] sat, moved, talked, did everything, bespoke somebody who did and got exactly what she wanted.”
“Harlem hadn’t always been a community of Negroes. It first had been a Dutch settlement. Then began the massive waves of poor and half-starved and ragged immigrants from Europe, arriving with everything they owned in the world in bags and sacks on their backs. The Germans came first; the Dutch edged away from them, and Harlem became all German. Then came the Irish and the Germans ran. Next, the Italians; same thing. The Italians had Harlem when the Jews came down the gangplanks — and then the Italians left. Today, all these same immigrants’ descendants are running as hard as they can to escape the descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships.”
“Negroes had been in NYC since 1683, and had been ghettoed all over the city. They’d first been in the Wall Street area; then they were pushed into Greenwich Village. The next shove was up to the Penn Station area. And then the last stop before Harlem, the black ghetto was concentrated around 52nd Street.”
“In 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got 2–3 Negro families into one Jewish Harlem apartment. The Jews fled from that house, then from that block, and more Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran, and still more Negroes came uptown, until in a short time, Harlem was like it is today — virtually all black.”
“In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view everyday living as survival — and in that kind of a community, survival is what is respected. In any average white neighborhood bar, you couldn’t imagine a known cat-man thief regularly exposing himself, as one of the most popular people in there.”
“I’d guess that everybody who lived in that house used dope of some kind. This shouldn’t reflect too badly on that particular building, because almost everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way to forget what they had to do to survive.”
“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 prostitutes have for pay. And I’m talking both black and white. 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 hard as prostitutes — with their husbands and children right there in New York.”
“When the downtown nightclubs had closed, most of the Harlem after-hours places and speakeasies crawled with white people. These whites were just mad for Negro ‘atmosphere,’ especially some of the places which had what you might call Negro soul. Sometimes Negroes would talk about how a lot of whites seemed unable to have enough of being close around us, and among us — in groups. Both white men and women, it seemed, would get almost mesmerized by Negroes. I remember one really peculiar case of this — a white girl who never missed a single night in the Savoy Ballroom. Dancing only with Negroes, she seemed to go nearly into a trance. If a white man asked her to dance, she would refuse. Then when the place was ready to close, early in the morning, she would let a Negro take her as far as the subway entrance. And that was it. She never would tell anyone her name, let alone reveal where she lived.”
“When a woman came in to eat alone, and he found out she was really alone, not married or living with anybody, it was generally 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.”
“So many of those so-called ‘upper-class’ Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are ‘different from those others’ that they can’t see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.”
“I was a true hustler — uneducated, unskilled at anything honorable, and I considered myself nervy and cunning enough to live by my wits, exploiting any prey that presented itself. I would risk just about anything.”
“Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school drop-outs are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did. And they inevitably move into more and more, worse and worse, illegality and immorality. Full-time hustlers can never relax to appraise what they’re doing and where they’re bound. As is the case in the jungle, the hustler’s every waking hour is lived with both the practical and the subconscious knowledge that if he ever relaxes, if he ever slows down, the other hungry, restless foxes, ferrets, wolves, and vultures out there with him won’t hesitate to make him their prey.”
“A fellow whom the riot has left with the nickname of ‘Left Feet’ in a scramble in a women’s shoe store had somehow grabbed five shoes, all of them for left feet! And we laughed about the scared little Chinese whose restaurant didn’t have a hand laid on it, because the rioters just about convulsed laughing when they saw the sign the Chinese had hastily stuck on his front door: ‘Me Colored Too.’”
“West Indian Archie had the kind of photographic memory that put him among the elite of numbers runners. He never wrote down your number; even in the case of combo plays, he would just nod. He was able to file all the numbers in this head, and write them down for the banker only when he turned in his money. This made him the ideal runner because cops could never catch him with any betting slips. I’ve often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as him. If they’d lived in another kind of society, their exceptional math talents might have been better used. But they were black.”
“This Lesbian, a beautiful white woman, had a male Negro stable. Her vocabulary was all profanity. She supplied Negro males, on order, to well-to-do white women. As a Harlem habitue, she’d known Harlem Negroes who liked white women. Her role developed from a pattern of talk she often heard from bored, well-to-do white women where she worked, in an East Side beauty salon. Hearing the women complain about sexually inadequate mates, she’d tell them what she’d ‘heard’ about Negro men. Observing how excited some of the women seemed to become, she finally arranged some dates with some of the Harlem Negroes she knew at her own apartment. She noticed a color preference — she’d tell me with a laugh that I was too light. She told me nearly every white woman in clientele would specify ‘a black one’; sometimes they would say ‘a real one,’ meaning black, no brown Negroes, no red Negroes. Some of her trade wanted the Negroes to come to their homes. Because white society never thinks about challenging any Negro in a servant role, doormen would telephone up and hear, ‘Oh yes, send him right up, James’; service elevators would speed those neatly dressed Negro messenger boys right up — so that they could ‘deliver’ what had been ordered by some of the most privileged white women in Manhattan. The irony is that those white women had no more respect for those Negroes than white men have had for the Negro women they have been ‘using’ since slavery times. And, in turn, Negroes have no respect for the whites they get into bed with.”
“The hypocritical white man will talk about the Negro’s ‘low morals.’ But who has the world’s lowest morals if not whites? And not only that, but the ‘upper-class’ whites! Recently, details were published about a group of suburban NYC white housewives and mothers operating as a professional call-girl ring. In some cases, these wives were out prostituting with the agreement, even the cooperation, of husbands, some of whom even waited at home, attending the children. I’ve also read recently about groups of young white couples who get together, the husbands throw their house keys in a hat, then, blindfolded, the husbands draw out a key and spend the night with the wife that the house key matches. I’ve never heard of anything like that being done by Negroes, even Negroes who live in the worst ghettoes and alleys and gutters.”
“Looking back, I think I really was at least slightly out of my mind. I viewed narcotics as most people regard food. I wore my guns as today I wear my neckties. Deep down, I actually believed that living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then, as I still expect today, to die at any time. But then, I think I deliberately invited death in many, sometimes insane, ways.”
“I can give you a very good tip if you want to keep burglars out of your house. A light on for the burglar to see is the very best single means of protection. One of the ideal things is to leave a bathroom light on all night. The bathroom is the one place where somebody could be, for any length of time, at any time of night, and he would be likely to hear the slightest strange sound. The burglar, knowing this, won’t try to enter. It’s also the cheapest possible protection. The kilowatts are a lot cheaper than your valuables.”
“I had gotten to the point where I was walking on my own coffin.”
“It’s the law of rackets that every criminal expects to get caught. He tries to stave off the inevitable as long as he can. Drugs helped me push the thought to the back of my mind. They were the center of my life. I had gotten to the stage where every day I used enough drugs — reefers, cocaine, or both — so that I felt above any worries, any strains. If any worries did manage to push their way through to the surface of my consciousness, I could float them back where they came from until tomorrow, and then until the next day.”
Prison
“He told me that this God had come to America, and that he had made himself known to a man named Elijah — ’a black man, just like us.’ This God had let Elijah know that the devil’s ‘time was up.’ ‘The devil is also a man,’ he said, ‘The white man is the devil.’ He told me that all white men knew they were devils — ‘especially Masons.’ The white people I had known marched before my mind’s eye. From the start of my life. The state white people always in our house after the other whites I didn’t know had killed my father…the white people who kept calling my mother ‘crazy’ to her face and before me and my siblings, until she finally was taken off by white people to the Kalamazoo asylum…the white judge and others who had split up the children…white youngsters I was in school there with, and the teachers — the one who told me in eighth grade to ‘be a carpenter’ because thinking of being a lawyer was foolish for a Negro.”
“‘The ‘true knowledge’ was that history had been ‘whitened’ in the white man’s history books, and that the black man had been ‘brainwashed for hundreds of years.’ Original Man was black, in Africa where the human race had emerged. The black man, original man, built great empires and civilizations and cultures while the white man was still living on all fours in caves. ‘The devil white man,’ down through history, out of his devilish nature, had pillaged, murdered, raped, and exploited every race of man not white. Human history’s greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children who were tortured as slaves. The devilish white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth’s only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity. In one generation, the black slave women in America had been raped by the slavemaster white man until there had begun to emerge a homemade, handmade, brainwashed race that was no longer even of its true color, that no longer even knew its true family names. The slavemaster forced his family name upon this rape-mixed race, which the slavemaster began to call ‘Negro.’ This ‘Negro’ was taught of his native Africa that it was peopled by heathen, black savages, swinging like monkeys from trees. This ‘Negro’ accepted this along with every other teaching of the slavemaster that was designed to make him accept and obey and worship the white man. 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 in 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 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 slavemaster white man enjoyed his heaven.”
“The key lesson of Mr. Elijah Muhammed’s teachings, which I later learned was the demonology that every religion has, is called ‘Yacub’s History.’ Muhammed teaches his followers that, first, the moon separated from the earth. Then, the first humans, Original Man, were a black people. They founded the Holy City Mecca. Among this black race were 24 wise scientists. One of them, at odds with the rest, created the especially strong black tribe of Shabazz, from which American Negroes descend. About 6,500 years ago, when 70% of the people were satisfied and 30% weren’t, one of the dissatisfied was born a ‘Mr. Yacub.’ He was born to create trouble, to break the peace, and to kill. His head was unusually large. At 18, he had finished all of his nation’s colleges and universities. He was known as the ‘big-head scientist.’ Among many other things, he’d learned how to breed races scientifically. This big-head scientist began preaching in the streets of Mecca, making such hosts of converts that the authorities, increasingly concerned, finally exiled him with this 59,999 followers to the island of Patmos. Though he was a black man, Mr. Yacub, embittered toward Allah now, decided, as revenge, to create upon the earth a devil race — a bleached-out, white race of people. From his studies, he knew that the black man contained two germs, black and brown. He knew that the brown germ stayed dormant as, being the lighter of the two germs, it was weaker. Mr. Yabuc, to upset the law of nature, conceived the idea of employing what we know today as the recessive genes structure, to separate from each other the two germs, black and brown, and then grafting the brown germ to be progressively lighter, weaker, stages. The humans resulting, he knew, would be, as they became lighter, and weaker, progressively also more susceptible to wickedness and evil. And in this way finally he would achieve the intended bleached-out white race of devils. He knew that it would take several total color-change stages to get from black to white. He began his work by setting up a eugenics law on the island of Patmos. Among Mr. Yacub’s 59,999 all-black followers, every third child or so that was born would show some trace of brown. As these became adult, only brown and brown, or black and brown, were permitted to marry. As their children were born, Mr. Yacub’s law dictated that, if a black child, the attending nurse should stick a needle into its brain and give the body to cremators. The mothers were told that it was an ‘angel baby,’ which had gone to heaven, to prepare a place for her. But a brown child’s mother was told to take very good care of it. Others, assistants, were trained by Mr. Yacub to continue his objective after he died, leaving laws and rules for them to follow. A 200-year span was needed to eliminate on the island all of the black people — until only brown people remained. The next 200 were needed to create from the brown race the red race — with no more browns left. In another 200, from the red race was created the yellow race. 200 years later — the white race had at last been created. On the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils — savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they walked on all fours and they lived in trees. 600 more years passed before this race of people returned to the mainland, among the natural black people. Within six months time, through telling lies that set the black men fighting among each other, this devil race had turned what had been a peaceful heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarreling and fighting. But finally the original black people recognized that their sudden troubles stemmed from this devil white race. They rounded them up, put them in chains. With little aprons to cover their nakedness, this devil race was marched across the Arabian desert to the caves of Europe. (The lambskin and cable-tow used in Masonry today are symbolic of how the nakedness of the white man was covered when he was chained and driven across the hot sand.) The white devil race in Europe’s caves was savage. The animals tried to kill him. He climbed trees outside his cave, made clubs, trying to protect his family from the wild beasts outside trying to get in. When this devil race had spent 2,000 years in the caves, Allah raised up Moses to civilize them, and bring them out of the caves. It was written that this devil white race would rule the world for 6,000 years. (The Books of Moses are missing. That’s why it’s not known he was in the caves.) When Moses arrived, the first of these devils to accept his teachings of civilization were those we call today the Jews. It was written that after Yacub’s bleached white race had ruled the world for 6,000 years — down to our time — the black original race would give birth to one whose wisdom, knowledge, and power would be infinite. It was written that some of the original black people should be brought as slaves to North America — to learn to better understand, at first hand, the white devil’s true nature, in modern times.”
“Every book I picked up had a few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said. I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary. I spent two days just rifling through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying everything printed on that first page. I believe it took me a day. Then aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting. I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words — immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn’t remember. (Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that ‘aardvark’ springs to my mind.) I was so fascinated that I went on — I copied the dictionary’s next page. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events form history. Finally, the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet — and I went on to the Bs. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.”
“When I’d progressed to really serious reading, very night at about 10pm, I’d be outraged with the ‘lights out.’ It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of something engrossing.”
“The collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world’s collective non-white man. When the white man professes ignorance about why the Chinese hate him so, my mind can’t help flashing back to what I read, there in prison, about how the blood forebears of this same white man raped China at a time when China was trusting and helpless. These original white ‘Christian traders’ sent into China millions of pounds of opium. By 1839, so many of the Chinese were addicts that China’s desperate government destroyed 20,000 chests of opium. The first Opium War was promptly declared by the white man. Imagine! Declaring war on someone who objects to being narcoticized! The Chinese were severely beaten, with Chinese-invented gunpowder. The Treaty of Nanking made China pay the British white man for the destroyed opium; forced open China’s major ports to British trade; forced China to abandon Hong Kong; fixed China’s import tariffs so low that cheap British articles soon flooded in, maiming China’s industrial development.”
“I knew right there in prsion that reading had forever changed the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. An English writer asked me, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.’ You’ll never catch me with a free 15 minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.”
“If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity — because you can hardly mention something I’m not curious about. I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison that I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently, and I’d attended some college.”
The Nation of Islam
“My application had, 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 ‘X’ meant that forever after in the nation of Islam, I would be known as Malcolm X. Mr. Muhammed taught that he would keep this ‘X’ until God Himself returned and gave us a Holy Name from His own mouth.”
“My brothers and sisters, our white slavemaster’s Christian religion has taught us black people here in the wilderness of North America that we will sprout wings when we die and fly up into the sky where God will have for us a special place called heaven. This is white man’s Christian religion used to brainwash us black people! We have accepted it! We have embraced it! We have believed it! We have practiced it! And while we are doing all of that, for himself, this blue-eyed devil has twisted his Christianity, to keep his foot on our backs…to keep our eyes fixed on the pie in the sky and heaven in the hereafter…while he enjoys his heaven right here…on this earth…in this life.”
“Not even in the Bible is there such a crime! God in His wrath struck down with fire the perpetrators of lesser crimes! 100 million of us black people! Your grandparents! Mine! Murdered by this white man. To get 15 million of us here to make us his slaves, on the way he murdered 100 million. I wish it was possible for me to show you the sea bottom in those days — the black bodies, the blood, the bones broken by boots and clubs! The pregnant black women who were thrown overboard if they got too sick! Thrown overboard to the sharks that had learned that following the slave ships was the way to grow fat! Why, the white man’s raping of the black race’s woman began right on those slave ships! The blue-eyed devil could not even wait until he got them here! Why, brothers and sisters, civilized mankind has never known such an orgy of greed and lust and murder…”
“The dramatization of slavery never failed intensely to arouse Negroes hearing its horrors spelled out for the first time. It’s unbelievable how many black people have let the white man fool them into holding an almost romantic idea of what slave days were like. And once I had them fired up with slavery, I’d shift the scene to themselves. ‘I want you to start to see all this whenever you see this devil white man. Oh, yes, he’s a devil! I want you to start watching him, in his places where he doesn’t want you around; watch him reveling in his preciousness, and his exclusiveness, and his vanity, while he continues to subjugate you and me.’”
“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 other cheek.”
“He didn’t know if I was serious, or if I was another of the hustling preacher-pimps to be found in every black ghetto, the ones with some little storefront churches of mostly hardworking, older women, who kept their ‘pretty boy’ young preacher dressed in ‘sharp’ clothes and driving a fancy bar.”
“For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, ‘Do you hate me?’ The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate! Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I’m snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?”
On Brown v. Board: “That was one of the greatest magical feats ever performed in America! Do you mean to tell me that nine Supreme Court judges, who are past masters of legal phraseology, couldn’t have worked their decision to make it stick as law? No! It was trickery and magic that told Negroes they were desegregated — Hooray! Hooray! — and at the same time it told whites ‘Here are your loopholes.’”
“Segregation is when your life and liberty and controlled, regulated, by someone else. To segregate means to control. Segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. But separation is that which is done voluntarily, by two equals — for the good of both!”
“Every time I mentioned ‘separation,’ some of them would cry that we Muslims were standing for the same thing that white racists and demagogues stood for. I would explain the difference. ‘No! We reject segregation!’”
“How can white society atone for enslaving, for raping, for unmanning, for otherwise brutalizing millions of human beings, for centuries? What atonement would the God of Justice demand for the robbery of the black people’s labor, their lives, their true identities, their culture, their history — and even their human dignity? A desegregated cup of coffee, a theater, public toilets — the whole range of hypocritical ‘integration’ — these are not atonement.”
“I know that I could suddenly die at the hands of some white racists. Or I could die at the hands of some Negros hired by the white man. Or it could be some brainwashed Negro acting on his own idea that by eliminating me he would be helping out the white man, because I talk about white men the way that I do. Anyway, 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’ll make use of me dead, as he’s 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.”
“Let me tell you how I’d get those white devil convicts and the guards, too, to do anything I wanted. I’d whisper to them, ‘If you don’t, I’ll start a rumor that you’re really a light Negro just passing as white.’ That shows you what the white devil really thinks about the black man. He’d rather die than be thought a Negro!”
