The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. 

3/5 rating. 389 pages.

Book #43 of 2020. Read June 29, 2020.

This is one of those books that I’m torn on how to rate. Because of Malcolm’s prominence as a Civil Rights Leader, I think it is important, but it’s a long book to get through that I’m sure will turn many people off because of its content and Malcolm’s beliefs (especially his views while in the Nation of Islam). I really believe that this should be required reading in high school history as our history so often passes over the hard-to-hear parts, and Malcolm spent his “second life” after prison preaching on just that.

Malcolm’s life was certainly an interesting up-and-down ride. His father was killed by white men and his mom driven to a mental breakdown by the pressure put on her by the state and her family life. Malcolm showed a lot of promise in school at a young age, but realized that because of his race he was constantly looked down on.

As a teenager and up until he went to prison for 7 years, he was hustling (both in legal and increasingly illegal forms) in Harlem and Boston. While in prison, Elijah Muhammad made an impact on him from the Nation of Islam. Their belief that white men were devils who were poisoning and deceiving non-whites (especially black people) stayed with Malcolm for the rest of his life.

While Malcolm’s trip to Mecca allowed him to see that some white people could be trusted, he still had a difficult time seeing any as real allies. These views made him viewed as “hateful” by whites and the media, but Malcolm’s biggest push always was the education and strengthening of black people and their lots in life through lifting them up and un-teaching the self-hate that had been drilled into them in America. Malcolm was truly one of the most influential people for Civil Rights in this country and he deserves his due!

Quotes:

“Let us learn to live together in justice and love.”

“No man in our time aroused fear and hatred in the white man as did Malcolm, because in him the white man sensed an implacable foe who could not be had for any price – a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.”

“It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.”

“So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”

“I knew I wouldn’t be back to see my mother again because it could make me a very vicious and dangerous person – knowing how they had looked at us as numbers and as a case in their book, not as human beings. And knowing that my mother in there 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.”

“What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned upon them that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. 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.”

“It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn’t, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be.”

“The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a a hustle.”

“This was my first really big step toward self-degredation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are ‘inferior’ – and white people ‘superior’ – that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.”

“Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars – caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.”

“I remember how, some time later, reading the Bible in the Norfolk Prison Colony library, I came upon, then I read, over and over, how Paul on the road to Damascus, upon hearing the voice of Christ, was so smitten that he was knocked off his horse, in a daze. I do not now, and I did not then, liken myself to Paul. But I do understand his experience.”

“You can hardly show me a black adult in America – or a white one, for that matter – who knows from the history books anything like the truth about the black man’s role.”

“I read, I saw, how the white man never has gone among the non-white peoples bearing the Cross in the true manner and spirit of Christ’s teachings – meek, humble, and Christ-like.”

“Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.’”

“Four hundred years of black blood and sweat invested here in America, and the white man still has the black man begging for what every immigrant fresh off the ship can take for granted the minute he walks down the gangplank.”

“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.”

“I hope I never again have to withstand seeing another case of sheer police brutality like that.”

“‘Unless we call one white man, by name, a “devil,” we are not speaking of any individual white man. We are speaking of the collective white man’s historical record. We are speaking of the collective white man’s cruelties, and evils, and greeds, that have seen him act like a devil toward the non-white man.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But if you ever intend to do anything worthwhile, you have to start with a worthwhile plan.”

“You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”

“When whites had rifles in their homes, the Constitution gave them the right to protect their home and themselves. But when black people even spoke of having rifles in their homes, that was ‘ominous.’”

“The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.

“Yes, I have been convinced that some American whites do want to help cure the rampant racism which is on the path to destroying this country!”

“I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man’s problem – just to avoid violence. I don’t go for non-violence if it also means a delayed solution.”

“That discussion with the ambassador gave me a new insight – one which I like: that the white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.”

“Sometimes, I have dared to dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice – which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency – that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.”

“I want you to just watch and see if I’m right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with ‘hate.’ He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of ‘hatred’ – and that will help him to escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race.”

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