The autobiography of malcolm x google books
Autobiography of Malcolm X
This edition published by arrangement with Grove Press, Inc. “On Malcolm X” by Ossie Davis is previously appeared in Group magazine and is reprinted by permission. One World is a registered trademark and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: ISBN eBook ISBN First Ballantine Books Edition: June First Ballantine Books Trade Edition: February v a This book I dedicate to my beloved wife Betty and to our children whose understanding and whose sacrifices made it possible for me to do my work.
CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication Introduction 1 Nightmare 2 Mascot 3 “Homeboy” 4 Laura 5 Harlemite 6 Detroit Red 7 Hustler 8 Trapped 9 Caught 10 Satan 11 Saved 12 Savior 13 Minister Malcolm X 14 Black Muslims 15 Icarus 16 Out 17 Mecca 18 El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz 19 Alex Haley: Epilogue Ossie Davis: On Malcolm X M.
S. HANDLER INTRODUCTION The Sunday before he was to officially announce his rupture with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X came to my home to discuss his plans and give me some necessary documentation. Mrs. Handler had never met Malcolm before this fateful visit. She served us coffee and cakes while Malcolm spoke in the courteous, gentle manner that was his in private.
It was obvious to me that Mrs. Handler was impressed by Malcolm. His personality filled our living room. Malcolm’s attitude was that of a man who had reached a crossroa; ds in his life and was making a choice under an inner compulsion. A wistful smile illuminated his countenance from time to time—a smile that said many things. I felt uneasy because Malcolm was evidently trying to say something which his pride and dignity prevented him from expressing.
I sensed that Malcolm was not confident he would succeed in escaping from the shadowy world which had held him in thrall.
Mrs. Handler was quiet and thoughtful after Malcolm’s departure. Looking up suddenly, she said: “You know, it was like having tea with a black panther.” The description startled me. The black panther is an aristocrat in the animal kingdom. He is beautiful. He is dangerous. As a man, Malcolm X had the physical bearing and the inner self-confidence of a born aristocrat.
And he was potentially dangerous. 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.
My first meeting with Malcolm X took place in March in the Muslim restaurant of Temple Number Seven on Lenox Avenue. I had been assigned by The New York Times to investigate the growing pressures within the Negro community. Thirty years of experience as a reporter in Western and Eastern Europe had taught me that the forces in a developing social struggle are frequently buried beneath the visible surface and make themselves felt in many ways long before they burst out into the open.
These generative forces make themselves felt through the power of an idea long before their organizational forms can openly challenge the establishment. It is the merit of European political scientists and sociologists to give a high priority to the power of ideas in a social struggle. In the United States, it is our weakness to confuse the numerical strength of an organization and the publicity attached to leaders with the germinating forces that sow the seeds of social upheaval in our community.
In studying the growing pressures within the Negro community, I had not only to seek the opinions of the established leaders of the civil rights organizations but the opinions of those working in the penumbra of the movement—“underground,” so to speak. This is why I sought out Malcolm X, whose ideas had reached me through the medium of Negro integrationists.
Their thinking was already reflecting a high degree of nascent Negro nationalism. I did not know what to expect as I waited for Malcolm. I was the only white person in the restaurant, an immaculate establishment tended by somber, handsome, uncommunicative Negroes. Signs reading “Smoking Forbidden” were pasted on the highly polished mirrors.
I was served coffee but became uneasy in this aseptic, silent atmosphere as time passed. Malcolm finally arrived.
Autobiography of malcolm x download free cracked He had plenty of change for my dollar. Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages. Of this white father of hers, I know nothing except her shame about it. I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things.He was very tall, handsome, of impressive bearing. His skin had a bronze hue. I rose to greet him and extended my hand. Malcolm’s hand came up slowly. I had the impression it was difficult for him to take my hand, but, noblesse oblige, he did. Malcolm then did a curious thing which he always repeated whenever we met in public in a restaurant in New York or Washington.
He asked whether I would mind if he took a seat facing the door. I had had similar requests put to me in Eastern European capitals. Malcolm was on the alert, he wished to see every person who entered the restaurant. I quickly realized that Malcolm constantly walked in danger. We spoke for more than three hours at this first encounter.
His views about the white man were devastating, but at no time did he transgress against my own personality and make me feel that I, as an individual, shared in the guilt. He attributed the degradation of the Negro people to the white man. He denounced integration as a fraud. He contended that if the leaders of the established civil rights organizations persisted, the social struggle would end in bloodshed because he was certain the white man would never concede full integration.
He argued the Muslim case for separation as the only solution in which the Negro could achieve his own identity, develop his own culture, and lay the foundations for a self-respecting productive community. He was vague about where the Negro state could be established. Malcolm refused to see the impossibility of the white man conceding secession from the United States; at this stage in his career he contended it was the only solution.
He defended Islam as a religion that did not recognize color bars. He denounced Christianity as a religion designed for slaves and the Negro clergy as the curse of the black man, exploiting him for their own purposes instead of seeking to liberate him, and acting as handmaidens of the white community in its determination to keep the Negroes in a subservient position.
During this first encounter Malcolm also sought to enlighten me about the Negro mentality. He repeatedly cautioned me to beware of Negro affirmations of good will toward the white man. He said that the Negro had been trained to dissemble and conceal his real thoughts, as a matter of survival. He argued that the Negro only tells the white man what he believes the white man wishes to hear, and that the art of dissembling reached a point where even Negroes cannot truthfully say they understand what their fellow Negroes believe.
The art of deception practiced by the Negro was based on a thorough understanding of the white man’s mores, he said; at the same time the Negro has remained a closed book to the white man, who has never displayed any interest in understanding the Negro. Malcolm’s exposition of his social ideas was clear and thoughtful, if somewhat shocking to the white initiate, but most disconcerting in our talk was Malcolm’s belief in Elijah Muhammad’s history of the origins of man, and in a genetic theory devised to prove the superiority of black over white—a theory stunning to me in its sheer absurdity.
After this first encounter, I realized that there were two Malcolms—the private and the public person. His public performances on television and at meeting halls produced an almost terrifying effect. His implacable marshaling of facts and his logic had something of a new dialectic, diabolic in its force. He frightened white television audiences, demolished his Negro opponents, but elicited a remarkable response from Negro audiences.
Many Negro opponents in the end refused to make any public appearances on the same platform with him. The troubled white audiences were confused, disturbed, felt themselves threatened. Some began to consider Malcolm evil incarnate. Malcolm appealed to the two most disparate elements in the Negro community—the depressed mass, and the galaxy of Negro writers and artists who have burst on the American scene in the past decade.
The Negro middle class—the Negro “establishment”—abhorred and feared Malcolm as much as he despised it. The impoverished Negroes respected Malcolm in the way that wayward children respect the grandfather image. It was always a strange and moving experience to walk with Malcolm in Harlem. He was known to all. People glanced at him shyly. Sometimes Negro youngsters would ask for his autograph.
It always seemed to me that their affection for Malcolm was inspired by the fact that although he had become a national figure, he was still a man of the people who, they felt, would never betray them. The Negroes have suffered too long from betrayals and in Malcolm they sensed a man of mission. They knew his origins, with which they could identify.
They knew his criminal and prison record, which he had never concealed. They looked upon Malcolm with a certain wonderment. Here was a man, who had come from the lower depths which they still inhabited, who had triumphed over his own criminality and his own ignorance to become a forceful leader and spokesman, an uncompromising champion of his people.
Although many could not share his Muslim religious beliefs, they found in Malcolm’s puritanism a standing reproach to their own lives. Malcolm had purged himself of all the ills that afflict the depressed Negro mass: drugs, alcohol, tobacco, not to speak of criminal pursuits. His personal life was impeccable—of a puritanism unattainable for the mass.
Human redemption—Malcolm had achieved it in his own lifetime, and this was known to the Negro community. In his television appearances and at public meetings Malcolm articulated the woes and the aspirations of the depressed Negro mass in a way it was unable to do for itself. When he attacked the white man, Malcolm did for the Negroes what they couldn’t do for themselves—he attacked with a violence and anger that spoke for the ages of misery.
It was not an academic exercise of just giving hell to “Mr. Charlie.” Many of the Negro writers and artists who are national figures today revered Malcolm for what they considered his ruthless honesty in stating the Negro case, his refusal to compromise, and his search for a group identity that had been destroyed by the white man when he brought the Negroes in chains from Africa.
The Negro writers and artists regarded Malcolm as the great catalyst, the man who inspired self-respect and devotion in the downtrodden millions. A group of these artists gathered one Sunday in my home, and we talked about Malcolm. Their devotion to him as a man was moving. One said: “Malcolm will never betray us.
We have suffered too much from betrayals in the past.” Malcolm’s attitude toward the white man underwent a marked change in —a change that contributed to his break with Elijah Muhammad and his racist doctrines. Malcolm’s meteoric eruption on the national scene brought him into wider 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 by the end of his short career as a national figure. He always spoke respectfully and with a certain surprise of the positive response of white students to his lectures. A second factor that contributed to his conversion to wider horizons was a growing doubt about the authenticity of Elijah Muhammad’s version of the Muslim religion—a doubt that grew into a certainty with more knowledge and more experience.
Certain secular practices at the Chicago headquarters of Elijah Muhammad had come to Malcolm’s notice and he was profoundly shocked. Finally, he embarked on a number of prolonged trips to Mecca and the newly independent African states through the good offices of the representatives of the Arab League in the United States.
It was on his first trip to Mecca that he came to the conclusion that he had yet to discover Islam. 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 Muhammad’s doctrine of separation.
Malcolm had reached the midpoint in redefining his attitude to this country and the white-black relationship. He no longer inveighed against the United States but against a segment of the United States 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 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.
American autobiographical literature is filled with numerous accounts of remarkable men who pulled themselves to the summit by their bootstraps. Few are as poignant as Malcolm’s memoirs. As testimony to the power of redemption and the force of human personality, the autobiography of Malcolm X is a revelation. New York, June CHAPTER 1 NIGHTMARE When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.
Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was alone with her three small children, and that my father was away, preaching, in Milwaukee. The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because “the good Christian white people” were not going to stand for my father’s “spreading trouble” among the “good” Negroes of Omaha with the “back to Africa” preachings of Marcus Garvey.
My father, the Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister, a dedicated organizer for Marcus Aurelius Garvey’s U.N.I.A. (Universal Negro Improvement Association). With the help of such disciples as my father, Garvey, from his headquarters in New York City’s Harlem, was raising the banner of black-race purity and exhorting the Negro masses to return to their ancestral African homeland—a cause which had made Garvey the most controversial black man on earth.
Still shouting threats, the Klansmen finally spurred their horses and galloped around the house, shattering every window pane with their gun butts. Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come. My father was enraged when he returned. He decided to wait until I was born—which would be soon—and then the family would move.
I am not sure why he made this decision, for he was not a frightened Negro, as most then were, and many still are today. My father was a big, six-foot-four, very black man. He had only one eye. How he had lost the other one I have never known. He was from Reynolds, Georgia, where he had left school after the third or maybe fourth grade.
He 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 men, including one by lynching.
What my father could not know then was that of the remaining three, including himself, only one, my Uncle Jim, would die in bed, of natural causes. Northern white police were later to shoot my Uncle Oscar. And my father was finally himself to die by the white man’s hands. It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence.
I have done all that I can to be prepared. I was my father’s seventh child. He had three children by a previous marriage—Ella, Earl, and Mary, who lived in Boston. He had met and married my mother in Philadelphia, where their first child, my oldest full brother, Wilfred, was born. They moved from Philadelphia to Omaha, where Hilda and then Philbert were born.
I was next in line. My mother was twenty-eight when I was born on May 19, , in an Omaha hospital. Then we moved to Milwaukee, where Reginald was born. From infancy, he had some kind of hernia condition which was to handicap him physically for the rest of his life. Louise Little, my mother, who was born in Grenada, in the British West Indies, looked like a white woman.
Her father was white. She had straight black hair, and her accent did not sound like a Negro’s. Of this white father of hers, I know nothing except her shame about it. I remember hearing her say she was glad that she had never seen him. It was, of course, because of him that I got my reddish-brown “mariny” color of skin, and my hair of the same color.
I was the lightest child in our family. (Out in the world later on, in Boston and New York, I was among the millions of Negroes who were insane enough to feel that it was some kind of status symbol to be light-complexioned—that one was actually fortunate to be born thus. But, still later, I learned to hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me.) Our family stayed only briefly in Milwaukee, for my father wanted to find a place where he could raise our own food and perhaps build a business.
The teaching of Marcus Garvey stressed becoming independent of the white man. We went next, for some reason, to Lansing, Michigan. My father bought a house and soon, as had been his pattern, he was doing freelance Christian preaching in local Negro Baptist churches, and during the week he was roaming about spreading word of Marcus Garvey.
He had begun to lay away savings for the store he had always wanted to own when, as always, some stupid local Uncle Tom Negroes began to funnel stories about his revolutionary beliefs to the local white people. This time, the get-out-of-town threats came from a local hate society called The Black Legion. They wore black robes instead of white.
Soon, nearly everywhere my father went, Black Legionnaires were reviling him as an “uppity nigger” for wanting to own a store, for living outside the Lansing Negro district, for spreading unrest and dissention among “the good niggers.” As in Omaha, my mother was pregnant again, this time with my youngest sister. Shortly after Yvonne was born came the nightmare night in , my earliest vivid memory.
I remember being suddenly snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames. My father had shouted and shot at the two white men who had set the fire and were running away. Our home was burning down around us. We were lunging and bumping and tumbling all over each other trying to escape. My mother, with the baby in her arms, just made it into the yard before the house crashed in, showering sparks.
I remember we were outside in the night in our underwear, crying and yelling our heads off. The white police and firemen came and stood around watching as the house burned down to the ground. My father prevailed on some friends to clothe and house us temporarily; then he moved us into another house on the outskirts of East Lansing. In those days Negroes weren’t allowed after dark in East Lansing proper.
There’s where Michigan State University is located; I related all of this to an audience of students when I spoke there in January, (and had the first reunion in a long while with my younger brother, Robert, who was there doing postgraduate studies in psychology). I told them how East Lansing harassed us so much that we had to move again, this time two miles out of town, into the country.
This was where my father built for us with his own hands a four-room house. This is where I really begin to remember things—this home where I started to grow up. After the fire, I remember that my father was called in and questioned about a permit for the pistol with which he had shot at the white men who set the fire. I remember that the police were always dropping by our house, shoving things around, “just checking” or “looking for a gun.” The pistol they were looking for—which they never found, and for which they wouldn’t issue a permit—was sewed up inside a pillow.
My father’s rifle and his shotgun, though, were right out in the open; everyone had them for hunting birds and rabbits and other game. — After that, my memories are of the friction between my father and mother. They seemed to be nearly always at odds. Sometimes my father would beat her. It might have had something to do with the fact that my mother had a pretty good education.
Where she got it I don’t know. But an educated woman, I suppose, can’t resist the temptation to correct an uneducated man. Every now and then, when she put those smooth words on him, he would grab her. My father was also belligerent toward all of the children, except me. The older ones he would beat almost savagely if they broke any of his rules—and he had so many rules it was hard to know them all.
Nearly all my whippings came from my mother. I’ve thought a lot about why. I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man’s brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child. Most Negro parents in those days would almost instinctively treat any lighter children better than they did the darker ones.
It came directly from the slavery tradition that the “mulatto,” because he was visibly nearer to white, was therefore “better.” My two other images of my father are both outside the home. One was his role as a Baptist preacher. He never pastored in any regular church of his own; he was always a “visiting preacher.” I remember especially his favorite sermon: “That little black train is a-comin’…an’ you better get all your business right!” I guess this also fit his association with the back-to-Africa movement, with Marcus Garvey’s “Black Train Homeward.” My brother Philbert, the one just older than me, loved church, but it confused and amazed me.
I would sit goggle-eyed at my father jumping and shouting as he preached, with the congregation jumping and shouting behind him, their souls and bodies devoted to singing and praying. Even at that young age, I just couldn’t believe in the Christian concept of Jesus as someone divine. And no religious person, until I was a man in my twenties—and then in prison—could tell me anything.
I had very little respect for most people who represented religion. It was in his role as a preacher that my father had most contact with the Negroes of Lansing. Believe me when I tell you that those Negroes were in bad shape then. They are still in bad shape—though in a different way. By that I mean that I don’t know a town with a higher percentage of complacent and misguided so-called “middle-class” Negroes—the typical status-symbol-oriented, integration-seeking type of Negroes.
Just recently, I was standing in a lobby at the United Nations talking with an African ambassador and his wife, when a Negro came up to me and said, “You know me?” I was a little embarrassed because I thought he was someone I should remember. It turned out that he was one of those bragging, self-satisfied, “middle-class” Lansing Negroes. I wasn’t ingratiated.
He was the type who would never have been associated with Africa, until the fad of having African friends became a status-symbol for “middle-class” Negroes. Back when I was growing up, the “successful” Lansing Negroes were such as waiters and bootblacks. To be a janitor at some downtown store was to be highly respected. The real “elite,” the “big shots,” the “voices of the race,” were the waiters at the Lansing Country Club and the shoeshine boys at the state capitol.
The only Negroes who really had any money were the ones in the numbers racket, or who ran the gambling houses, or who in some other way lived parasitically off the poorest ones, who were the masses. No Negroes were hired then by Lansing’s big Oldsmobile plant, or the Reo plant. (Do you remember the Reo? It was manufactured in Lansing, and R.
E. Olds, the man after whom it was named, also lived in Lansing. When the war came along, they hired some Negro janitors.) The bulk of the Negroes were either on Welfare, or W.P.A., or they starved. The day was to come when our family was so poor that we would eat the hole out of a doughnut; but at that time we were much better off than most town Negroes.
The reason was that we raised much of our own food out there in the country where we were. We were much better off than the town Negroes who would shout, as my father preached, for the pie-in-the-sky and their heaven in the hereafter while the white man had his here on earth. I knew that the collections my father got for his preaching were mainly what fed and clothed us, and he also did other odd jobs, but still the image of him that made me proudest was his crusading and militant campaigning with the words of Marcus Garvey.
As young as I was then, I knew from what I overheard that my father was saying something that made him a “tough” man. I remember an old lady, grinning and saying to my father, “You’re scaring these white folks to death!” One of the reasons I’ve always felt that my father favored me was that to the best of my remembrance, it was only me that he sometimes took with him to the Garvey U.N.I.A.
meetings which he held quietly in different people’s homes. There were never more than a few people at any one time—twenty at most. But that was a lot, packed into someone’s living room. I noticed how differently they all acted, although sometimes they were the same people who jumped and shouted in church. But in these meetings both they and my father were more intense, more intelligent and down to earth.
It made me feel the same way. I can remember hearing of “Adam driven out of the garden into the caves of Europe,” “Africa for the Africans,” “Ethiopians, Awake!” And my father would talk about how it would not be much longer before Africa would be completely run by Negroes—“by black men,” was the phrase he always used. “No one knows when the hour of Africa’s redemption cometh.
It is in the wind. It is coming. One day, like a storm, it will be here.” I remember seeing the big, shiny photographs of Marcus Garvey that were passed from hand to hand. My father had a big envelope of them that he always took to these meetings. The pictures showed what seemed to me millions of Negroes thronged in parade behind Garvey riding in a fine car, a big black man dressed in a dazzling uniform with gold braid on it, and he was wearing a thrilling hat with tall plumes.
I remember hearing that he had black followers not only in the United States but all around the world, and I remember how the meetings always closed with my father saying, several times, and the people chanting after him, “Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!” I have never understood why, after hearing as much as I did of these kinds of things, I somehow never thought, then, of the black people in Africa.
My image of Africa, at that time, was of naked savages, cannibals, monkeys and tigers and steaming jungles. My father would drive in his old black touring car, sometimes taking me, to meeting places all around the Lansing area. I remember one daytime meeting (most were at night) in the town of Owosso, forty miles from Lansing, which the Negroes called “White City.” (Owosso’s greatest claim to fame is that it is the home town of Thomas E.
Dewey.) As in East Lansing, no Negroes were allowed on the streets there after dark—hence the daytime meeting. In point of fact, in those days lots of Michigan towns were like that. Every town had a few “home” Negroes who lived there. Sometimes it would be just one family, as in the nearby county seat, Mason, which had a single Negro family named Lyons.
Mr. Lyons had been a famous football star at Mason High School, was highly thought of in Mason, and consequently he now worked around that town in menial jobs. My mother at this time seemed to be always working—cooking, washing, ironing, cleaning, and fussing over us eight children. And she was usually either arguing with or not speaking to my father.
One cause of friction was that she had strong ideas about what she wouldn’t eat—and didn’t want us to eat—including pork and rabbit, both of which my father loved dearly. He was a real Georgia Negro, and he believed in eating plenty of what we in Harlem today call “soul food.” I’ve said that my mother was the one who whipped me—at least she did whenever she wasn’t ashamed to let the neighbors think she was killing me.
For if she even acted as though she was about to raise her hand to me, I would open my mouth and let the world know about it. If anybody was passing by out on the road, she would either change her mind or just give me a few licks. Thinking about it now, I feel definitely that just as my father favored me for being lighter than the other children, my mother gave me more hell for the same reason.
She was very light herself but she favored the ones who were darker. Wilfred, I know, was particularly her angel. I remember that she would tell me to get out of the house and “Let the sun shine on you so you can get some color.” She went out of her way never to let me become afflicted with a sense of color-superiority. I am sure that she treated me this way partly because of how she came to be light herself.
I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted.
I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise. Not only did we have our big garden, but we raised chickens.
My father would buy some baby chicks and my mother would raise them. We all loved chicken. That was one dish there was no argument with my father about. One thing in particular that I remember made me feel grateful toward my mother was that one day I went and asked her for my own garden, and she did let me have my own little plot.
I loved it and took care of it well. I loved especially to grow peas. I was proud when we had them on our table. I would pull out the grass in my garden by hand when the first little blades came up. I would patrol the rows on my hands and knees for any worms and bugs, and I would kill and bury them. And sometimes when I had everything straight and clean for my things to grow, I would lie down on my back between two rows, and I would gaze up in the blue sky at the clouds moving and think all kinds of things.
At five, I, too, began to go to school, leaving home in the morning along with Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert. It was the Pleasant Grove School that went from kindergarten through the eighth grade. It was two miles outside the city limits, and I guess there was no problem about our attending because we were the only Negroes in the area. In those days white people in the North usually would “adopt” just a few Negroes; they didn’t see them as any threat.
The white kids didn’t make any great thing about us, either. They called us “nigger” and “darkie” and “Rastus” so much that we thought those were our natural names. But they didn’t think of it as an insult; it was just the way they thought about us. — One afternoon in when Wilfred, Hilda, Philbert, and I came home, my mother and father were having one of their arguments.
There had lately been a lot of tension around the house because of Black Legion threats. Anyway, my father had taken one of the rabbits which we were raising, and ordered my mother to cook it. We raised rabbits, but sold them to whites. My father had taken a rabbit from the rabbit pen. He had pulled off the rabbit’s head. He was so strong, he needed no knife to behead chickens or rabbits.
With one twist of his big black hands he simply twisted off the head and threw the bleeding-necked thing back at my mother’s feet. My mother was crying. She started to skin the rabbit, preparatory to cooking it. But my father was so angry he slammed on out of the front door and started walking up the road toward town. It was then that my mother had this vision.
She had always been a strange woman in this sense, and had always had a strong intuition of things about to happen. And most of her children are the same way, I think. When something is about to happen, I can feel something, sense something. I never have known something to happen that has caught me completely off guard—except once.
And that was when, years later, I discovered facts I couldn’t believe about a man who, up until that discovery, I would gladly have given my life for. My father was well up the road when my mother ran screaming out onto the porch. “Early! Early!” She screamed his name. She clutched up her apron in one hand, and ran down across the yard and into the road.
My father turned around. He saw her. For some reason, considering how angry he had been when he left, he waved at her. But he kept on going. She told me later, my mother did, that she had a vision of my father’s end. All the rest of the afternoon, she was not herself, crying and nervous and upset. She finished cooking the rabbit and put the whole thing in the warmer part of the black stove.
When my father was not back home by our bedtime, my mother hugged and clutched us, and we felt strange, not knowing what to do, because she had never acted like that. I remember waking up to the sound of my mother’s screaming again. When I scrambled out, I saw the police in the living room; they were trying to calm her down. She had snatched on her clothes to go with them.
And all of us children who were staring knew without anyone having to say it that something terrible had happened to our father. My mother was taken by the police to the hospital, and to a room where a sheet was over my father in a bed, and she wouldn’t look, she was afraid to look. Probably it was wise that she didn’t. My father’s skull, on one side, was crushed in, I was told later.
Negroes in Lansing have always whispered that he was attacked, and then laid across some tracks for a streetcar to run over him. His body was cut almost in half. He lived two and a half hours in that condition. Negroes then were stronger than they are now, especially Georgia Negroes. Negroes born in Georgia had to be strong simply to survive.
It was morning when we children at home got the word that he was dead. I was six. I can remember a vague commotion, the house filled up with people crying, saying bitterly that the white Black Legion had finally gotten him. My mother was hysterical. In the bedroom, women were holding smelling salts under her nose.
She was still hysterical at the funeral. I don’t have a very clear memory of the funeral, either. Oddly, the main thing I remember is that it wasn’t in a church, and that surprised me, since my father was a preacher, and I had been where he preached people’s funerals in churches. But his was in a funeral home.
And I remember that during the service a big black fly came down and landed on my father’s face, and Wilfred sprang up from his chair and he shooed the fly away, and he came groping back to his chair—there were folding chairs for us to sit on—and the tears were streaming down his face. When we went by the casket, I remember that I thought that it looked as if my father’s strong black face had been dusted with flour, and I wished they hadn’t put on such a lot of it.
Back in the big four-room house, there were many visitors for another week or so. They were good friends of the family, such as the Lyons from Mason, twelve miles away, and the Walkers, McGuires, Liscoes, the Greens, Randolphs, and the Turners, and others from Lansing, and a lot of people from other towns, whom I had seen at the Garvey meetings.
We children adjusted more easily than our mother did. We couldn’t see, as clearly as she did, the trials that lay ahead. As the visitors tapered off, she became very concerned about collecting the two insurance policies that my father had always been proud he carried. He had always said that families should be protected in case of death.
One policy apparently paid off without any problem—the smaller one. I don’t know the amount of it. I would imagine it was not more than a thousand dollars, and maybe half of that. But after that money came, and my mother had paid out a lot of it for the funeral and expenses, she began going into town and returning very upset.
The company that had issued the bigger policy was balking at paying off. They were claiming that my father had committed suicide. Visitors came again, and there was bitter talk about white people: how could my father bash himself in the head, then get down across the streetcar tracks to be run over? So there we were.
My mother was thirty-four years old now, with no husband, no provider or protector to take care of her eight children. But some kind of a family routine got going again. And for as long as the first insurance money lasted, we did all right. Wilfred, who was a pretty stable fellow, began to act older than his age. I think he had the sense to see, when the rest of us didn’t, what was in the wind for us.
He quietly quit school and went to town in search of work. He took any kind of job he could find and he would come home, dog-tired, in the evenings, and give whatever he had made to my mother. Hilda, who always had been quiet, too, attended to the babies. Philbert and I didn’t contribute anything. We just fought all the time—each other at home, and then at school we would team up and fight white kids.
Sometimes the fights would be racial in nature, but they might be about anything. Reginald came under my wing. Since he had grown out of the toddling stage, he and I had become very close. I suppose I enjoyed the fact that he was the little one, under me, who looked up to me. My mother began to buy on credit. My father had always been very strongly against credit.
Autobiography of malcolm x full text It was then that my mother had this vision. I was the only white person in the restaurant, an immaculate establishment tended by somber, handsome, uncommunicative Negroes. Texts Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. She had snatched on her clothes to go with them.“Credit is the first step into debt and back into slavery,” he had always said. And then she went to work herself. She would go into Lansing and find different jobs—in housework, or sewing—for white people. They didn’t realize, usually, that she was a Negro. A lot of white people around there didn’t want Negroes in their houses.
She would do fine until in some way or other it got to people who she was, whose widow she was. And then she would be let go. I remember how she used to come home crying, but trying to hide it, because she had lost a job that she needed so much. Once when one of us—I cannot remember which—had to go for something to where she was working, and the people saw us, and realized she was actually a Negro, she was fired on the pot, and she came home crying, this time not hiding it.
When the state Welfare people began coming to our house, we would come from school sometimes and find them talking with our mother, asking a thousand questions. They acted and looked at her, and at us, and around in our house, in a way that had about it the feeling—at least for me—that we were not people. In their eyesight we were just things, that was all.
My mother began to receive two checks—a Welfare check and, I believe, widow’s pension. The checks helped. But they weren’t enough, as many of us as there were. When they came, about the first of the month, one always was already owed in full, if not more, to the man at the grocery store. And, after that, the other one didn’t last long.
We began to go swiftly downhill. The physical downhill wasn’t as quick as the psychological. My mother was, above everything else, a proud woman, and it took its toll on her that she was accepting charity. And her feelings were communicated to us. She would speak sharply to the man at the grocery store for padding the bill, telling him that she wasn’t ignorant, and he didn’t like that.
She would talk back sharply to the state Welfare people, telling them that she was a grown woman, able to raise her children, that it wasn’t necessary for them to keep coming around so much, meddling in our lives. And they didn’t like that. But the monthly Welfare check was their pass. They acted as if they owned us, as if we were their private property.
As much as my mother would have liked to, she couldn’t keep them out. She would get particularly incensed when they began insisting upon drawing us older children aside, one at a time, out on the porch or somewhere, and asking us questions, or telling us things—against our mother and against each other. We couldn’t understand why, if the state was willing to give us packages of meat, sacks of potatoes and fruit, and cans of all kinds of things, our mother obviously hated to accept.
We really couldn’t understand.
Autobiography of malcolm x download free His skin had a bronze hue. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. The reason was that we raised much of our own food out there in the country where we were. It was the Pleasant Grove School that went from kindergarten through the eighth grade.What I later understood was that my mother was making a desperate effort to preserve her pride—and ours. Pride was just about all we had to preserve, for by , we really began to suffer. This was about the worst depression year, and no one we knew had enough to eat or live on. Some old family friends visited us now and then.
At first they brought food. Though it was charity, my mother took it. Wilfred was working to help.
Autobiography of malcolm x download free fortnite pc I would patrol the rows on my hands and knees for any worms and bugs, and I would kill and bury them. The file will be sent to your email address. Open Library American Libraries. If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in.My mother was working, when she could find any kind of job. Our mother knew, I guess, dozens of ways to cook things with bread and out of bread. Stewed tomatoes with bread, maybe that would be a meal. Something like French toast, if we had any eggs. Bread pudding, sometimes with raisins in it. If we got hold of some hamburger, it came to the table more bread than meat.
But there were times when there wasn’t even a nickel and we would be so hungry we were dizzy. My mother would boil a big pot of dandelion greens, and we would eat that. I remember that some small-minded neighbor put it out, and children would tease us, that we ate “fried grass.” Sometimes, if we were lucky, we would have oatmeal or cornmeal mush three times a day.
Or mush in the morning and cornbread at night. Philbert and I were grown up enough to quit fighting long enough to take the caliber rifle that had been our father’s, and shoot rabbits that some white neighbors up or down the road would buy. I know now that they just did it to help us, because they, like everyone, shot their own rabbits.
Sometimes, I remember, Philbert and I would take little Reginald along with us. He wasn’t very strong, but he was always so proud to be along. We would trap muskrats out in the little creek in back of our house. And we would lie quiet until unsuspecting bullfrogs appeared, and we would spear them, cut off their legs, and sell them for a nickel a pair to people who lived up and down the road.
The whites seemed less restricted in their dietary tastes. Then, about in late , I would guess, something began to happen. Some kind of psychological deterioration hit our family circle and began to eat away our pride. Perhaps it was the constant tangible evidence that we were destitute. We had known other families who had gone on relief.
We had known without anyone in our home ever expressing it that we had felt prouder not to be at the depot where the free food was passed out. And, now, we were among them. At school, the “on relief” finger suddenly was pointed at us, too, and sometimes it was said aloud. It seemed that everything to eat in our house was stamped Not To Be Sold.
All Welfare food bore this stamp to keep the recipients from selling it. It’s a wonder we didn’t come to think of Not To Be Sold as a brand name. Sometimes, instead of going home from school, I walked the two miles up the road into Lansing. I began drifting from store to store, hanging around outside where things like apples were displayed in boxes and barrels and baskets, and I would watch my chance and steal me a treat.
You know what a treat was to me? Anything! Or I began to drop in about dinnertime at the home of some family that we knew. I knew that they knew exactly why I was there, but they never embarrassed me by letting on. They would invite me to stay for supper, and I would stuff myself. Especially, I liked to drop in and visit at the Gohannas’ home. They were nice, older people, and great churchgoers.
I had watched them lead the jumping and shouting when my father preached. They had, living with them—they were raising him—a nephew whom everyone called “Big Boy,” and he and I got along fine. Also living with the Gohannases was old Mrs. Adcock, who went with them to church. She was always trying to help anybody she could, visiting anyone she heard was sick, carrying them something.
She was the one who, years later, would tell me something that I remembered a long time: “Malcolm, there’s one thing I like about you. You’re no good, but you don’t try to hide it. You are not a hypocrite.” The more I began to stay away from home and visit people and steal from the stores, the more aggressive I became in my inclinations. I never wanted to wait for anything.
I was growing up fast, physically more so than mentally. As I began to be recognized more around the town, I started to become aware of the peculiar attitude of white people toward me. I sensed that it had to do with my father. It was an adult version of what several white children had said at school, in hints, or sometimes in the open, which really expressed what their parents had said—that the Black Legion or the Klan had killed my father, and the insurance company had pulled a fast one in refusing to pay my mother the policy money.
When I began to get caught stealing now and then, the state Welfare people began to focus on me when they came to our house. I can’t remember how I first became aware that they were talking of taking me away. What I first remember along that line was my mother raising a storm about being able to bring up her own children. She would whip me for stealing, and I would try to alarm the neighborhood with my yelling.
One thing I have always been proud of is that I never raised my hand against my mother. In the summertime, at night, in addition to all the other things we did, some of us boys would slip out down the road, or across the pastures, and go “cooning” watermelons. White people always associated watermelons with Negroes, and they sometimes called Negroes “coons” among all the 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. One Halloween night, I remember that a bunch of us were out tipping over those old country outhouses, and one old farmer—I guess he had tipped over enough in his day—had set a trap for us.
Always, you sneak up from behind the outhouse, then you gang together and push it, to tip it over. This farmer had taken his outhouse off the hole, and set it just in front of the hole. Well, we came sneaking up in single file, in the darkness, and the two white boys in the lead fell down into the outhouse hole neck deep.
They smelled so bad it was all we could stand to get them out, and that finished us all for that Halloween. I had just missed falling in myself. The whites were so used to taking the lead, this time it had really gotten them in the hole. Thus, in various ways, I learned various things. I picked strawberries, and though I can’t recall what I got per crate for picking, I remember that after working hard all one day, I wound up with about a dollar, which was a whole lot of money in those times.
I was so hungry, I didn’t know what to do. I was walking away toward town with visions of buying something good to eat, and this older white boy I knew, Richard Dixon, came up and asked me if I wanted to match nickels. He had plenty of change for my dollar. In about a half hour, he had all the change back, including my dollar, and instead of going to town to buy something, I went home with nothing, and I was bitter.
Autobiography of malcolm x analysis: He attributed the degradation of the Negro people to the white man. We were much better off than the town Negroes who would shout, as my father preached, for the pie-in-the-sky and their heaven in the hereafter while the white man had his here on earth. Want to add your book store? He frightened white television audiences, demolished his Negro opponents, but elicited a remarkable response from Negro audiences.
But that was nothing compared to what I felt when I found out later that he had cheated. There is a way that you can catch and hold the nickel and make it come up the way you want. This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn’t gambling, he’s cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.
It’s like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He’s a professional gambler; he ha