God’s price? And, if not, what will be the alternative?
The handwriting is on the wall for America. As America faces crisis
after crisis ... as America sees dangerous troubles mounting on all
sides ... and as America stares with stubborn blindness, refusing
to read the handwriting on the wall ... since her “experts” have
shown they are unable to read its meaning, will America now accept
an ambassador from God, a Divine Messenger, a Warner, to read the
handwriting for her and tell her what solution she must accept...?
Or, will America blindly reject God’s Messenger, and in so doing bring
on her own Divine Destruction? I trust you will weigh well these
words.
A SUMMING-UP: LOUIS LOMAX INTERVIEWS MALCOLM X
LOMAX: Minister Malcolm, we are all by now familiar with your basic
philosophy; we have heard you speak, seen you on television, and read
your remarks in magazines and newspapers. By now, I think, everybody
knows your position that the white man is a devil, a man incapable of
doing right; you hold that the black man is of God’s divine nature,
that he fell from power because of weakness; you hold further that the
white man’s rule over the earth was scheduled to end in 1914, but that
his end has been delayed because of the need to get the American Negro
into the fold of black brotherhood.
MALCOLM X: Yes, sir, that is what The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches
us. The white devil’s time is up; it has been up for almost fifty years
now. It has taken us that long to get the deaf, dumb, and blind black
men in the wilderness of North America to wake up and understand who
they are. You see, sir, when a man understands who he is, who God is,
who the devil is ... then he can pick himself up out of the gutter;
he can clean himself up and stand up like a man should before his
God. This is why we teach that in order for a man to really understand
himself he must be part of a nation; he must have some land of his own,
a God of his own, a language of his own. Most of all he must have love
and devotion for his own kind.
LOMAX: Wouldn’t you say the Negro has a nation--America?
MALCOLM X: Sir, how can a Negro say America is _his_ nation? He was
brought here in chains; he was put in slavery and worked like a mule
for three hundred years; he was separated from his land, his culture,
his God, his language!
The Negro was taught to speak the white man’s tongue, worship the white
God, and accept the white man as his superior.
This is a white man’s country, and the Negro is nothing but an ex-slave
who is now trying to get himself integrated into the slave master’s
house.
And the slave master doesn’t want you! You fought and bled and died in
every war the white man waged, and he still won’t give you justice.
You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won’t
give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you
and raped your women, but he still won’t give you equality. Now, you
integration-minded Negroes are trying to force yourselves on your
former slave master, trying to make him accept you in his drawing room;
you want to hang out with his women rather than with women of your own
kind.
LOMAX: Are you suggesting that all of us who fight for integration are
after a white woman?
MALCOLM X: I wouldn’t say _all_ of you, but let the evidence speak
for itself. Check up on these integration leaders, and you will find
that most of them are either married to or hooked up with some white
woman. Take that meeting between James Baldwin and Robert Kennedy;
practically everybody there was interracially married. Harry Belafonte
is married to a white woman; Lorraine Hansberry is married to a white
man; Lena Horne is married to a white man.
Now how can any Negro, man or woman, who sleeps with a white person
speak for me? No black person married to a white person can speak for
me!
LOMAX: Why?
MALCOLM X: Why? Because only a man who is ashamed of what he is will
marry out of his race. There has to be something wrong when a man or a
woman leaves his own people and marries somebody of another kind. Men
who are proud of being black marry black women; women who are proud of
being black marry black men.
This is particularly true when you realize that these Negroes who go
for integration and intermarriage are linking up with the very people
who lynched their fathers, raped their mothers, and put their kid
sisters in the kitchen to scrub floors. Why would any black man in
his right mind want to marry a lyncher, a murderer, a rapist, a dope
peddler, a gambler, a hog eater.... Why would any black man want to
marry a _devil_ ... for that’s just what the white man is.
LOMAX: I have heard you say that a thousand times, but it always jolts
me. Why do you call the white man a devil?
MALCOLM X: Because that’s what he is. What do you want me to call him,
a saint? Anybody who rapes, and plunders, and enslaves, and steals, and
drops hell bombs on people ... anybody who does these things is nothing
but a devil.
Look, Lomax, history rewards all research. And history fails to record
one single instance in which the white man--as a people--did good. They
have always been devils; they always will be devils, and they are about
to be destroyed. The final proof that they are devils lies in the fact
that they are about to destroy themselves. Only a devil--and a stupid
devil at that--would destroy himself!
Now why would I want to integrate with somebody marked for destruction?
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us to get away from the devil as
soon and as fast as we can. This is why we are demanding a separate
state. Tell the slave master we will no longer beg for crumbs from his
table; let him give us some land of our own so we can go for ourselves.
If he doesn’t give us some land, there is going to be hell to pay. As
I said at Howard University and Queens College, once the white man let
the Negro get an education, the Negro began to want what the white
man has. But he let Negroes get education and now they are demanding
integration; they want to have exactly what he has. And the white man
is not going to give it to them!
LOMAX: But we have made some gains....
MALCOLM X: What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism--one or two
Negroes in a job or at a lunch counter so the rest of you will
be quiet. It took the United States Army to get one Negro in the
University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in white
schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South. It has
been nine years since the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated
schools, yet less than ten per cent of the Negro students in the South
are in integrated schools. That isn’t integration, that’s tokenism! In
spite of all the dogs, and fire hoses, and club-swinging policemen,
I have yet to read of anybody eating an integrated hamburger in
Birmingham.
You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not
work. Why, it is against the white man’s nature to integrate you into
his house. Even if he wanted to, he could no more do it than a Model T
can sprout wings and fly. It isn’t in him.
Now The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says it would be the easiest thing in
the world for the white man to destroy the Black Muslims. We contend
that the white man is a devil. If he is not a devil, let him prove it!
He can’t do it, Lomax; it isn’t in him; it is against his nature.
He’ll keep on granting tokenism; a few big Negroes will get big jobs,
but the black masses will catch hell as long as they stay in the white
man’s house.
The only possible way out for the white man is to give us some land
of our own; let us get out, get away from his wicked reign and go for
ourselves.
But the white man will not do that, either. He is going to keep you
integration-minded Negroes cooped up here in this country, and when you
discover that the white man is a trickster, a devil, that he has no
intentions of integrating, then you Negroes will run wild. That will be
the time....
LOMAX: The time for what?
MALCOLM X: Only The Honorable Elijah Muhammad can answer that!
LOMAX: This is strong gospel, Minister Malcolm; many people, Negro
and white, say what you preach amounts to hate, that your theology is
actually anti-Semitic. What is your comment to that?
MALCOLM X: The white people who are guilty of white supremacy are
trying to hide their own guilt by accusing The Honorable Elijah
Muhammad of teaching black supremacy when he tries to uplift the
mentality, the social, mental, and economic condition of the black
people in this country. Jews who have been guilty of exploiting the
black people in this country, economically, civically, and otherwise,
hide behind--hide their guilt by accusing The Honorable Elijah Muhammad
of being anti-Semitic, simply because he teaches our people to go into
business for ourselves and try and take over the economic leadership
in our own community.
And since the white people collectively have practiced the worst form
of hatred against Negroes in this country and they know that they are
guilty of it, now when The Honorable Elijah Muhammad comes along and
begins to list the historic deed--the historic attitude, the historic
behavior of the white man in this country toward the black people in
this country, again, the white people are so guilty, and they can’t
stop doing these things to make Mr. Muhammad appear wrong, so they
hide their wrong by saying “he is teaching hatred.” History is not
hatred. Actually we are Muslims because we believe in the religion of
Islam. We believe in one God. We believe in Muhammad as the Apostle
of God. We practice the principles of the religion of Islam, which
mean prayer, charity, fasting, brotherhood, and The Honorable Elijah
Muhammad teaches us that since the Western society is deteriorating, it
has become overrun with immorality, that God is going to judge it and
destroy it, and the only way the black people who are in this society
can be saved is not to integrate into this corrupt society but separate
ourselves from it, reform ourselves, lift up our moral standards and
try and be godly--try to integrate with God--instead of trying to
integrate with the white man, or try and imitate God instead of trying
to imitate the white man.
LOMAX: It is suggested also that your movement preaches violence.
MALCOLM X: No, sir. The black people of this country have been victims
of violence at the hands of the white men for four hundred years, and
following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was
godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.
Today The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is showing black people in this
country that, just as the white man and every other person on this
earth has God-given rights, natural rights, civil rights, any kind
of rights that you can think of, when it comes to defending himself,
black people--we should have the right to defend ourselves also. And,
because The Honorable Elijah Muhammad makes black people brave enough,
men enough to defend ourselves no matter what the odds are, the white
man runs around here with a doctrine that Mr. Muhammad is advocating
violence when he is actually telling Negroes to defend themselves
against violent people.
LOMAX: Reverend Martin Luther King teaches a doctrine of nonviolence.
What is your attitude toward this philosophy?
MALCOLM X: The white man supports Reverend Martin Luther King,
subsidizes Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther
King can continue to teach the Negroes to be defenseless--that’s what
you mean by nonviolent--be defenseless in the face of one of the most
cruel beasts that has ever taken people into captivity--that’s this
American white man, and they have proved it throughout the country by
the police dogs and the police clubs. A hundred years ago they used to
put on a white sheet and use a bloodhound against Negroes. Today they
have taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms and traded
in the bloodhounds for police dogs, and they’re still doing the same
thing. Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery, used to keep the Negroes
from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching
them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them despitefully,
today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle
Tom or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep
Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the
plantation to keep _those_ Negroes defenseless in the face of the
attack of the Klan in that day.
Now, the goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance
to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who has
brutalized them for four hundred years. The goal of Martin Luther King
is to get Negroes to forgive the people, the people who have brutalized
them for four hundred years, by lulling them to sleep and making them
forget what those whites have done to them, but the masses of black
people today don’t go for what Martin Luther King is putting down.
LOMAX: Minister Malcolm, you often speak of unity among our people.
Unity for what?
MALCOLM X: The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God now is
about to establish a kingdom on this earth based upon brotherhood and
peace, and the white man is against brotherhood and the white man is
against peace. His history on this earth has proved that. Nowhere
in history has he been brotherly toward anyone. The only time he is
brotherly toward you is when he can use you, when he can exploit you,
when he will oppress you, when you will submit to him, and since his
own history makes him unqualified to be an inhabitant or a citizen in
the kingdom of brotherhood, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us
that God is about to eliminate that particular race from this earth.
Since they are due for elimination, we don’t want to be with them. We
are not trying to integrate with that which we know has come to the end
of its rope. We are trying to separate from it and get with something
that is more lasting, and we think that God is more lasting than the
white man.
LOMAX: Then your movement does not share the integration goals of the
NAACP, CORE, Martin Luther King’s movement, and the Student Nonviolent
movement.
MALCOLM X: You don’t integrate with a sinking ship. You don’t do
anything to further your stay aboard a ship that you see is going
to go down to the bottom of the ocean. Moses tried to separate his
people from Pharaoh, and when he tried, the magicians tried to fool
the people into staying with Pharaoh, and we look upon these other
organizations that are trying to get Negroes to integrate with this
doomed white man as nothing but modern-day magicians, and The Honorable
Elijah Muhammad is a modern-day Moses trying to separate us from the
modern-day Pharaoh. Until the white man in America sits down and talks
with The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he won’t even know what the race
problem--what makes the race problem what it is. Just like Pharaoh
couldn’t get a solution to his problem until he talked to Moses, or
Nebuchadnezzar or Belshazzar couldn’t get a solution to his problem
until he talked to Daniel, the white man in America today will never
understand the race problem or come anywhere near getting a solution
to the race problem until he talks to The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
Mr. Muhammad will give him God’s analysis, not some kind of political
analysis or psychologist’s analysis, or some kind of clergyman’s
analysis, but God’s analysis. That’s the analysis that Moses gave
Pharaoh; that’s the analysis that Daniel gave Belshazzar. Today we have
a modern Belshazzar and a modern Pharaoh sitting in Washington, D. C.
LOMAX: I am struck by the fact that each of the biblical figures you
mentioned--Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, and Belshazzar--came to a rather
sorry end. Are you willing to complete the analogy and say the American
white establishment will come to a bitter end, perhaps be destroyed?
MALCOLM X: I have spoken on this many times, and I am sure you know
what The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches on this. But since we are on
record I will--as they sometimes say in Harlem--make it plain.
Now, sir, God is going to punish this wicked devil for his misdeeds
toward black people. Just as plagues were visited on Pharaoh so will
pestilences and disasters be visited on the white man. Why, it has
already started: God has begun to send them heat when they expect cold;
he sends them cold when they expect heat. Their crops are dying, their
children are being born with all kinds of deformities, the rivers and
the lakes are coming out of the belly of the earth to wash them away.
Not only that, but God has started slapping their planes down from the
sky. Last year [1962] God brought down one of their planes loaded with
crackers whose fathers had lynched your and my brothers and sisters.
They were from your state, Lomax, down there in Georgia where both
you and Mr. Muhammad come from. Now, long before that plane crash I
predicted [in Los Angeles] that God was going to strike back at the
devil for the way white cops brutalized our brothers in Los Angeles.
When the plane fell, I said this was God’s way of letting his wrath be
known. Now for that I was called names--some of these Uncle Tom Negroes
rushed into print to condemn me for what I said. But what was wrong
with what I said? Everybody has a God and believes that his God will
deliver him and protect him from his enemies! Why can’t the black man
have a God? What’s so wrong when a black man says his God will protect
him from his white foe? If Jehovah can slay Philistines for the Jews,
why can’t Allah slay crackers for the so-called Negro.
I said much the same thing when that submarine--the _Thresher_--went
down to the bottom of the sea. I realize that there were some originals
[Negroes] on board, but that simply underlines my point that the
so-called Negro should not integrate with white people. He should stay
as far as possible from them at all times.
LOMAX: Just a moment, if I may, Minister Malcolm. Now, you talk about
separation from the white man.
MALCOLM X: Yes, sir.
LOMAX: You even take it so far as to suggest that we shouldn’t even
get on airplanes and ships with white people. Am I correct in that?
MALCOLM X: Yes, sir, on the whole. Yes.
LOMAX: But Minister Malcolm, few people, Negro or white, travel as
much as you and I do. You spend much of your life getting on and off
aircraft. Don’t you fear that you just might be aboard when God sees
fit to slap down a jet and kill a few score white people?
MALCOLM X: Sir, my faith in God is such that I am not afraid. I know
that I will not die until my time comes. But if I am aboard one of
these vessels, I will be happy to give my life to see some of these
white devils die. Like Samson, I am ready to pull down the white man’s
temple, knowing full well that I will be destroyed by the falling
rubble.
LOMAX: But Minister Malcolm, you make no accommodation for the changes
that have come about as a result of the Negro Revolt. What do you think
will be the results of the current demonstrations against segregation?
MALCOLM X: Lomax, as you know, these Negro leaders have been telling
the white man everything is all right, everything is under control,
and they have been telling the white man that Mr. Muhammad is wrong,
don’t listen to him. But everything that Mr. Muhammad has been saying
is going to come to pass, is now coming to pass. Now the Negro leaders
are standing up saying that we are about to have a racial explosion.
You’re going to have a racial explosion, and a racial explosion is more
dangerous than an atomic explosion. It’s going to explode because black
people are dissatisfied; they’re dissatisfied not only with the white
man, but they’re dissatisfied with these Negroes who have been sitting
around here posing as leaders and spokesmen for black people and
actually making the problem worse instead of making the problem better.
LOMAX: Do you deny that Negroes are now getting the protection of the
Federal Government; after all, both the President and the Attorney
General have come to our aid.
MALCOLM X: You never will get protection from the Federal Government.
Just like King is asking Kennedy to go to Alabama to stand in a
doorway--to put his body in a doorway. That’s like asking the fox to
protect you from the wolf! The masses of black people can see this, and
it is only the Negro leadership, the bourgeois, hand-picked, handful
of Negroes who think that they’re going to get some kind of respect,
recognition, or protection from the Government. The Government is
responsible for what is happening to black people in this country.
The President has power. You notice he didn’t send any troops into
Birmingham to protect the Negroes when the dogs were biting the
Negroes. The only time he sent troops into Birmingham was when the
Negroes erupted, and then the President sent the troops in there, not
to protect the Negroes, but to protect them white people down there
from those erupting Negroes.
LOMAX: Are not Negroes American citizens?
MALCOLM X: If they were citizens, you wouldn’t have a race problem. If
the Emancipation Proclamation was authentic, you wouldn’t have a race
problem. If the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution
were authentic, you wouldn’t have a race problem. If the Supreme Court
desegregation decision was authentic, you wouldn’t have a race problem.
All of this is hypocrisy that has been practiced by the so-called white
so-called liberal for the past four hundred years that compounds the
problem, makes it more complicated, instead of eliminating the problem.
LOMAX: What, then, do you see as the final result of all these
demonstrations?
MALCOLM X: Any time you put too many sparks around a powder keg, the
thing is going to explode, and if the thing that explodes is still
inside the house, then the house will be destroyed. So The Honorable
Elijah Muhammad is telling the white man, “Get this powder keg out of
your house--let the black people in this country separate from you,
while there’s still time.” If the black man is allowed to separate and
go into some land of his own where he can solve his own problems, there
won’t be any explosion, and the Negroes who want to stay with the white
man, let them stay with the white man--but those who want to leave, let
them go with The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
LOMAX: Now that you have mentioned the Messenger, I would like to ask
you about this article in the [New York] _Amsterdam News_....
MALCOLM X: It’s a lie. Any article that says there is a “minor”
difference between Mr. Muhammad and me is a lie. There is no such thing
as a “minor” difference with the Messenger. Any difference with him is
_major_. It is a lie, a lie, a lie somebody paid [the author] to write.
I was up there in his office yesterday and I was ready to waste [harm,
or kill] him for that. He planted a false seed, and it could start
trouble. He [the author] knows my telephone number. If he ran on talk
of a difference between me and the Messenger, he could have called me.
No, he went ahead and printed this lie.
He was not there, but I told the editor of the paper that I was out to
find him; I told them to call the police then, because as soon as I
found the man who wrote this I was going to do him in.
How could there be any difference between the Messenger and me? I am
his slave, his servant, his son. He is the leader, the only spokesman
for the Black Muslims.
But I will tell you this: The Messenger has seen God. He was with Allah
and was given divine patience with the devil. He is willing to wait for
Allah to deal with this devil. Well, sir, the rest of us Black Muslims
have not seen God, we don’t have this gift of divine patience with the
devil. The younger Black Muslims want to see some action.
LOMAX: What kind of action?
MALCOLM X: Some things are better done than said.
LOMAX: According to your own newspaper, one of the things you Muslims
may _do_ in the near future is vote.
MALCOLM X: Yes. After long and prayerful consideration, The Honorable
Elijah Muhammad allowed us to announce the possibility of Muslims
voting. The announcement came at our annual Saviour’s Day convention in
Chicago.
LOMAX: What does it mean?