Who taught you to hate the color of your skin?
Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair?
Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose? And the shape of your lips?
Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?
Who taught you to hate your own kind?
Who taught you to hate the race you belong to?
So much so that you don't want to be around each other.
Befor you come asking Mr. Muhammed, does he teach hate you should ask yourself who taught you to hate being what god made you.
Most of us blacks, or negroes as they call us really thought we were free.
Without being aware that in our subconscious all those change we thought we had ??? was still there.
And there were many ways where what really motivated us was our desire to be loved by the white man.
Malcolm meant to ??? that sense of inferiority.
He knew it would be painful. He knew that people would kill you because of it.
But he dared to take that risk.
He was saying something over and above than of any other leader of that day,
While the other leaders were begging for entry into the house of their oppressor he was telling you to build your own house.
He expelled fear for african americans. He said: "I'll speak out loud what you've been thinking."
And he said: "You'll see. People will hear and they won't do anything to us necessarily. Okay.
"But I will not speak it for the masses of people."
But he said it in a very strong fashion. ???
in a fashion that said: "I am not afraid to say what you've been thinking all these years."
That's why we loved him. He said it out loud. Not behind closed doors.
He took on America for us.
And I, for one, as a muslim belief the white man is intelligent enough.
If he were made to realize how black people really feel and how fed up we are without all that compromising sweet-talk.
??? you the one that makes it hard for himself.
The white man beliefs you when you go to him with all that sweet talk, because you've been sweet talking
ever since he brought you here. Stop sweet talking.
Tell him how you feel. Tell him how what kind of hell you been catching ??? and let him know that if he's not ready
to clean his house up. He shouldn't have a house. It should catch ??? on fire and burn down.
On these harlem street corners, for most of the century, black people had celebrated their culture
and argued the question of race in america.
It was here that Malcolm first joined the street orders who gave voice to harlems hope and its anger.
I fought ???. And that means that I ?? this white man's country, because integration
will never happen.
You'll never as long as you live integrate into the white man's system.
125th Str. and 7th Ave. was the center of activity among the black street artists ??.
When Malcolm arrived, technically he had no corner.
So he established his base you might say in front of ??? bookstore.
When Malcolm would ascend the little platform he couldn't talk for the first four or five minutes.
The people would be making such a ??? shout to him. And he was standing, taking his due.
And then he would open his mouth.
They call Mr. Muhammed a hate teacher. Because he makes you hate dope and alcohol.
They call Mr. Muhammed a black surpremacist, because he teaches you and me not only that
we are as good as the white man, but better than the white man.
You are better than the white man.
And that's not saying anything. You don't ?? to be equal to him. Who is he to be equal with?
Look as his skin. You can't compare your skin with his skin, while your skin looks like gold beside his skin.
There was a time when we used to drool in the mouth over white people.
We thought that they ??? and that we were ??? We were dumb.
We couldn't see them as they are.
Since the honorable Elijah Muhammed has come and taught us the religion of islam ?? clean us up
and ?? so we can see for ourselves. Now we can see ?? pale things to look exactly as we look.
Nothing but an old pale thing/face ??
I came away from that rally feeling that with him, once you heard him speak you never went back
to where you were before. Even if you kept your position you had to re-think it.
We weren't accustomed of being told that we were devils and that we were oppressors up here in our northern ???
He was speaking for a silent mass of black people.
And saying it out front on the devils own airwaves.
And that was an acto of war.
When he came off the stage I jumped off the ???, walked up to him
and of course when I got to him the Bodyguards moved in front.
And he just pushed them away and I went in front of him, extended my hand
and said: "I like some of what you said. I didn't agree with all what you said, but
I liked some of what you said."
He looked at me, held my hand in a very gentle fasion and said: "One day you will, siter". And he smiled.
To make his message clear, Malcolm used his own life as a lesson to all black americans.
He preched it in fables and parables. And later in writing his autobiography with Alex Haley,
he sought some control in how his life would be interpreted in the future.
I would be rather ??? taken by a statement that he made of himself.
He would say: "I am a part of all I admit." And by that he meant that all the things
he had done in his earlier life had exposed him to things, that taught him skills of ???
...all of which had synthesized ??? into the Malcolm who became the spokesman for the
Nation of Islam.
You were born in Omaha, is that right? - Yes sir.
And your family left Omaha when you were about one year old? ???
I imagine about a year old.
Why did they leave Omaha? - To my understanding the Ku Klux Klan burned down one of their homes in Omaha.
This made your family very unhappy I'm sure. - Well, insecure if not unhappy.
So you must have a somewhat prejudiced POV, a personally prejudiced POV.
You cannot look at this in a broad academic sort of way. - I think this ain't correct.
Because despite the fact that that happened in Ohama and then when we moved to
Lansing, Michigan our home was burned down again. My father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan.
And despite all of that no one was more thoroughly integrated with whites than I.
No one had lived more so in the society with whites than I.
We were the only black children in the neighbourhood.
On the back of our property we had a wooded area.
So the white kids would all come to our house and they'd go back and play in the woods.
So Malcolm would say: "Let's go play Robin Hood." So we would go back there and play
Robin Hood and Robin Hood was Malcolm.
And these white kids ???.
Malcolm said he was the lightest skinned of the seven children born to Earl and Louis Little.
A reminder, he said, of the white man who had raped his mothers mother.
In 1929, when Malcolm was 4 years old his father, a carpenter and preacher moved the family
to Lansing Michigan.
Lansing was a small town and the west side was the side of town the blacks lived on.
Malcolm and his family lived outside of the city.
And they had a four acre parcel with a small house on it.
So they were sort of considered as farmers.
Three months after the Littles moved in white neighbours took legal action to evict them.
A county judge ruled that the farm property was restricted to whites only.
But Earl Little refused to move.
Here in Michigan, Klu Klux Klan Membership was at least 7.000.
Five times more than in Mississippi.
For Malcolms family white hostility was a fact of life.
Everybody was asleep in our house and all of a sudden we heard a big boom.
And when we woke up fire was everywhere.
And everybody was running into the walls and into each other, you know?
What I recall about that was my mother telling us: "Get up, get up, get up! The house is on fire! Get out!"
That's what I actually recall.
I could hear my mother yelling, I could hear my father yelling.
And so they made sure they got us all rounded up and got us out.
The house burned down to the ground. No fire wagon came. Nothing. We were burned out.
Malcolms father Earl Little accused local whites of setting the fire. The police accuse Earl and
arrested him on suspicion on arson. The charges were later dropped.
In the city where we grew up whites would refer to us as "Those uppity Niggers" or
"Those smart Niggers who live outside of town."
In those days whenever a white person refered to you as a "Smart Nigger" that was their way
of saying a "Nigger you have to watch" because he's not dumb.
My father was independent. He didn't want anybody to feed him.
He wanted to raise his own food. He didn't want anybody to exercise authority over his children.
He wanted to exercise the authority and he did.
He was always speaking in terms of Marcus Garvey's way of thinking and trying to get black
people to organize themselves. Not to cause any trouble but just to work in unity with each other
toward improving their conditions.
But in those days if you did that you were still considered a trouble maker.
In the 1920's Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist preached that black americans should build