The Auto Biography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley

segment from pg.14

Malcolm's attitude toward the white man underwent a marked change in 1964-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.

Pg 173

Yes, I will pull off that liberal's halo that he spends such efforts cultivating! The North's liberals
have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they
have fits when they are exposed as the world's worst hypocrites.
I believe my own life _mirrors_ this hypocrisy. I know nothing about the South. I am a creation of
the Northern white man and of his hypocritical attitude toward the Negro.
The white Southerner was always given his due by Mr. Muhammad. The white Southerner, you
can say one thing-he is honest. He bares his teeth to theblack man; he tells the black man, to his
face, that Southern whites never will accept phony "integration." The Southern white goes further,
to tell the black man that he means to fight him every inch of the way-against even the so-called
"tokenism." The advantage of this is the Southern black man never has been under any illusions
about the opposition he is dealing with.
You can say for many Southern white people that, individually, they have been paternalistically
helpful to many individual Negroes. But the Northern white man, he grins with his teeth, and his
mouth has always been full of tricks and lies of "equality" and "integration." When one day all over
America, a black hand touched the white man's shoulder, and the white man turned, and there
stood the Negro saying "Me, too . . ." why, that Northern liberal shrank from that black man with
as much guilt and dread as any Southern white man.
Actually, America's most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept
sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettoes-the Northern white power structure's system to
keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the comer.
The word "integration" was invented by a Northern liberal. The word has no real meaning. I ask
you: in the racial sense in which it's used so much today, whatever "integration" is supposed to
mean, can it precisely be defined? The truth is that "integration" is an _image_, it's a foxy
Northern liberal's smokescreen that confuses the true wants of the American black man. Here in
these fifty racist and neo-racist states of North America, this word "integration" has millions of
white people confused, and angry, believing wrongly that the black masses want to live mixed up
with the white man. That is the case only with the relative handful of these "integration"-mad
Negroes.
I'm talking about these "token-integrated" Negroes who flee from their poor, downtrodden black
brothers-from their own self-hate, which is what they'rereally trying to escape. I'm talking about
these Negroes you will see who can't get enough of nuzzling up to the white man. These "chosen
few" Negroes are more white-minded, more anti-black, than even the white man is.
Human rights! Respect as _human beings_! That's what America's black masses want. That's the
true problem. The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden.
They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettoes, like animals. They want to live in an
open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women!

Pg 226

My pilgrimage broadened my scope. It blessed me with a new insight. In two weeks in the Holy
Land, I saw what I never had seen in thirty-nine years here in America. I saw all _races_, all
_colors_,-blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans-in _true_ brotherhood! In unity! Living as
one! Worshiping as one! No segregationists-no liberals; they would not have known how to
interpret the meaning of those words.
"In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I never will be guilty of
that again-as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of
being brotherly toward a black man. 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!

Pg 227

The next day I was in my car driving along the freeway when at a red light another car pulled
alongside. A white woman was driving and on the passenger's side, next to me, was a white man.
"_Malcolm X_!" he called out-and when I looked, he stuck his hand out of his car, across at me,
grinning. "Do you mind shaking hands with a white man?" Imagine that! Just as the traffic light
turned green, I told him, "I don't mind shaking hands with human beings. Are you one?"

I must be honest. Negroes-Afro-Americans-showed no inclination to rush to the United Nations

and demand justice for themselves here in America. I really had known in advance that they
wouldn't. The American white man has so thoroughly brainwashed the black man to see himself
as only a domestic "civil rights" problem that it will probably take longer than I live before the
Negro sees that the struggle of the American black man is international.

Pg 228

My thinking had been opened up wide in Mecca. In the long letters I wrote to friends, I tried to
convey to them my new insights into the American black man's struggle and his problems, as well
as the depths of my search for truth and justice.
"I've had enough of someone else's propaganda," I had written to these friends. "I'm for truth, no
matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and
foremost, and as such I'm for whoever andwhatever benefits humanity _as a whole_."

"I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being-neither white, black, brown, or red;
and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or
intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living
around and with another human being. I may say, though, that I don't think it should ever be put
upon a black man, I don't think the burden to defend any position should ever be put upon the
black man, because it is the white man collectively who has shown that he is hostile toward
integration and toward intermarriage and toward these other strides toward oneness. So as a
black man and especially as a black American, any stand that I formerly took, I don't think that I
would have to defend it because it's still a reaction to the society, and it's a reaction that was
produced by the society; and I think that it is the society that produced this that should be
attacked, not the reaction that develops among the people who are the victims of that negative
society."