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[music]

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Who taught you to hate the color of your skin?

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Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair?

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Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose, and the shape of your lips?

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Who taught you to hate yourself, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?

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Who taught you to hate your own kind?

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Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to

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So much so that you don't want to be around each other?

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You know. Before you come asking Mr. Muhammad does he teach hate, you should ask yourself

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who taught you to hate being what God made you.

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Most of us, blacks, or negroes as he called us,

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really thought we were free,

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without being aware that in our subconscious, all those chains we thought had been struck off were still there

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And there were many ways, where what really motivated us

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was our desire to be loved by the white man.

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Malcolm meant to lance that sense of inferiority.

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He knew it would be painful.

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He knew that people could kill you because of it,

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but he dared to take that risk.

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He was saying something, over and above that of any other leader of that day.

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While the other leaders were begging for entry into the house of their oppressor,

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he was telling you to build your own house.

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He expelled fear for African Americans.

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He said "I will speak out loud what you've been thinking"

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and he said "You'll see, people will hear, and it will not do anything to us, necessarily, ok?

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But I will not speak it for the masses of people."

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When he said it in a very strong fashion, in this very manly fashion, in this fashion that says,

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"I am not afraid to say what you've been thinking all these years,"

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that's why we loved him.

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He said it out loud, not behind closed doors,

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He took on America for us.

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And I, for one, as a Muslim believe that the white man is intelligent enough.

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If he were made to realize how Black people really feel

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and how fed up we are without that old compromising sweet talk

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Why, you're the one who make it hard for yourself.

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The white man believes you when you go through with that old sweet talk

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'cause you've been sweet talking him ever since he brought you here

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Stop sweet talking him!

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Tell him how you feel!

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Tell him how, what kind of hell you've been catching, and let him know that if he's not ready to clean his house up, if he's not ready to clean his house up,

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he shouldn't have a house. [crowd: That's right!] It should catch on fire, and burn down...

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[applause]

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[drums and music]

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On these Harlem street corners, for most of this century, Black people have celebrated their culture,

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and argued the question of race in America.

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It was here that Malcolm first joined the street orators who gave voice to Harlem's hope, and its anger.

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I've taught nationalism, and that means that I want to go out of this white man's country, because integration will never happen

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You will never, as long as you live,

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integrate into the white men's system

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A hundred and twenty-fifth street and Seventh Avenue was

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the center of activity among the black street orators.

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When Malcolm arrived, technically he had no corner.

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So he established his base, you might say, in front of Elder Michaux's bookstore.

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When Malcolm would ascent the little platform, he didn't, he couldn't talk for the first four, five minutes.

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The people would be making such a praise-shout to him

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and he would stand there, taking his due.

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and then he would open his mouth.

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They call Mr. Muhammad a hate-teacher

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because he makes you hate dope and alcohol.

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They call Mr. Muhammad a black supremacist

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because he teaches you and me not only that we are as good as the white man,

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but better than the white man.

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Yes, better than the white man.

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You are better than the white man

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and that's not saying anything.

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That's not saying, you know we're just as equal with him.

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Who is he to be equal with?

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You look at his skin

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You can't compare your skin with his skin,

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Why your skin look like gold beside his skin.

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There was a time when we used to drool in the mouth over white people.

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We thought they were pretty 'cause we were blind, we were dumb.

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We couldn't see them as they are.

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But since the honorable Elijah Muhammad has come and taught us the religion of Islam,

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which have cleaned us up, and made us so we can see for ourselves

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now we can see that old pale thing to look exactly as he look

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nothing but an old, pale thing.

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I came away from that rally feeling that with him

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once you heard him speak,

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you never went back to where you were before.

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You had to, even if you kept your position you had to rethink it.

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We weren't accustomed to being told that we were devils

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and that we were oppressors up here in our wonderful northern cities.

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He was speaking for a silent mass of black people

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and sang it out front on the devil's own airwaves, and that was an act of war.

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When he came off the stage, I jumped off the island,

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walked up to him, and of course when I got to him the bodyguards,

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you know, moved in front, and he just pushed them away.

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And I went in front of him and extended my hand,

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and said "I liked some of what you said. I didn't agree with what, all that you said, but I liked some of what you said"

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And he looked at me, held my hand in a very gentle fashion and says

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"One day you will, Sister. One day you will, Sister", and he smiled.

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To make his message clear, Malcolm used his own life as a lesson for all black Americans.

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He preached it in fables and parables

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and later, in writing his autobiography with Alex Haley,

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he sought some control over how his life would be interpreted in the future.

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I would be rather taken by a statement he would make of himself

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He would say "I am a part of all I have met"

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and by that he meant that all the things he had done in his earlier life had exposed him to things

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and taught him skills of one or another sort,

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all of which had synthesized into the Malcolm who became the spokesman for the Nation of Islam.

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You were born in Omaha, is that right?

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Yes sir

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And you left, your familiy left Omaha when you were about one year old?

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I imagine about a year old.

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Why did they leave Omaha?

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Well, to my understanding, the Ku Klux Klan burned down one of their homes in Omaha

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There's a lot of Ku Klux Klan

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They made your family feel very unhappy, I'm sure.

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Well, insecure, if not unhappy.

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So you must have a somewhat prejudiced point of view,

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a personally prejudiced point of view

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In other words, you cannot look at this in a broad, academic sort of way, really, can you?

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I think that's incorrect, because despite the fact that that happened in Omaha

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and then when we moved to Lansing, Michigan,our home was burned down again

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in fact my father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan,

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and despite all of that, no one was more thoroughly integrated with whites than I

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No one has lived more so in the society of whites than I.

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We were the only black children in the neighborhood

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but on the back of our property we had a wooded area,

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so the white kids would all come over to our house and they'd go back and play in the woods.

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So Malcolm would say "Well let's go play Robin Hood"

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Well, so we'd go back there to play Robin Wood

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Robin Hood was Malcolm.

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and these white kids would go along with it.

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Malcolm said he was the lightest skinned of the seven children born to Earl and Louise Little,

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a reminder, he said, of the white man who had raped his mother's mother.

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In 1929, when Malcolm was four years old, his father, a carpenter and preacher,

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moved the family to Lansing, Michigan.

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Lansing was a small town and the west side was the side of town that blacks lived on.

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Malcolm and his family lived outside of the city

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and they had a four-acre parcel with a small house on it,

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so they were sort of considered as farmers.

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Three months after the Littles moved in, white neighbors took legal action to evict them.

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A county judge ruled that the farm property was restricted to whites only.

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But Earl Little refused to move.

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Here in Michigan, Ku Klux Klan membership was at least 70,000, five times more than in Mississippi.

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For Malcolm's family, white hostility was a fact of life.

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Everybody was asleep in our house and all of a sudden, we heard a big boom.

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And when we woke up, fire was everywhere and everybody was running into the walls and into each other, you know.

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Well, what I recall about that was my mother telling us to,

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"Get up, get up, get up, the house is on fire," and to get out. That's what I actually recall.

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I could hear my mother yelling, I hear my father yelling.

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And so they made sure they got us all rounded up and got us out.

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The house burned down to the ground. No firewagon came, nothing, and we were burned out.

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Malcolm's father, Earl Little, accused local whites of setting the fire.

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The police accused Earl and arrested him on suspicion of arson. The charges were later dropped.

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In the city where we grew up, whites could refer to us as "those uppity niggers," or,

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"those smart niggers that live out south of town."

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In those days, whenever a white person referred to you as a "smart nigger," that was their way of saying, "This is a nigger you have to watch because he's not dumb."

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My father was independent. He didn't want anybody to feed him.

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He wanted to raise his own food. He didn't want anybody to exercise authority over his children.

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He wanted to exercise the authority, and he did.

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He was always speaking in terms of Marcus Garvey's way of thinking and trying to get black people to organize themselves,

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not to cause any trouble, but just to do, to work in unity with each other

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toward improving their conditions.

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But in those days if you did that, you were still considered a troublemaker.

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In the 1920's Marcus Garvey,

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a black nationalist, preached that black Americans should build a nation independent of white society.

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With membership in the hundreds of thousands, Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association sought closer ties with African countries.

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The UNIA had its own flag, its own national anthem and an African legion pledged to defend black people at home and abroad.

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The U.S. Bureau of Investigation labeled Garvey, "one of the prominent Negro agitators."

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The federal government deported him in 1927, but Malcolm's parents remained Garveyites.

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Earl recruited new members.

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Louise wrote for the Garvey newspaper.

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My mother is the one who would read to us the Garvey paper, which was called The Negro World.

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and she also would talk to us about ourselves as being independent.

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We shouldn't be calling ourself "Negroes," or "niggers" and that we were black people

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and that we should be proud to call ourself black people.

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What is your real name?

0:14:34.807,0:14:36.734
Malcolm. Malcolm X.

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Is that your legal name?

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As far as I'm concerned, it's my legal name.

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Would you mind telling me what your father's last name was?

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My father didn't know his last name.

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My father got his last name from his grandfather and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slavemaster.

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The real names of our people were destroyed

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Well, was there any

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during slavery.

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Was there any line, any point in the genealogy of your family when you did have to use a last name and if so, what was it?

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The last name of my forefathers

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Yes?

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was taken from them when they were brought to America and made slaves,

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and then the name of the slavemaster was given, which we refuse, we reject that name today and refuse to

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You mean, you won't even tell me what your father's supposed last name was or gifted last name was?

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I never acknowledge it whatsoever.

0:15:29.054,0:15:32.442
September 1931

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Malcolm was six years old when his mother had a premonition.

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We were all at the house and we had dinner, supper together.

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And my mother was holding Wesley, who was my youngest brother.

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And she may have been nursing him, 'cause she was at the table, and she fell asleep,

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nursing, holding the baby.

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And my father had gotten up and went in the bedroom to clean up and to go down and collect money.

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And she woke up and she said, "Earl, Earl, don't go downtown."

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She says, "If you go, you won't come back."

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That night around 11 o'clock, Earl Little was found in an isolated area outside Lansing,

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his body almost cut in two by the wheels of a streetcar.

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The police reported Earl Little's death an accident.

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There was a cloud over that whole issue because, at the time,

0:16:29.531,0:16:42.463
it was perceived that rather than an accident with a streetcar that Earl Little had really been pushed under the wheels of the streetcar.

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As a matter of fact,

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I remember hearing just that language,

0:16:47.298,0:16:53.254
that he was probably pushed under the wheels of that streetcar.

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And my father's death caused a great

0:16:55.485,0:16:57.574
great shock in the family,

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because he was the power.

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He was the strength.

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We were organized,

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we were a structured family.

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When I'd get out of school,

0:17:04.333,0:17:07.124
when we got out of school, me and my brothers and sisters,

0:17:07.124,0:17:08.883
we'd come right home and go to work

0:17:08.883,0:17:11.640
in the garden, clean up the chicken shed and get ready for the night,

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and get up in the morning and all this.

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We'd pump the water and bring it in the house and all this.

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This was while Dad was alive,

0:17:17.381,0:17:21.888
because to not do this brought the consequences of a whipping.

0:17:21.888,0:17:24.687
So we were disciplined.

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And then after my father got killed

0:17:28.203,0:17:33.187
and my mother's inability to run as fast as I could run or Malcolm

0:17:33.187,0:17:35.678
enabled us to get away with a lot of things

0:17:35.678,0:17:38.078
we wouldn't have tried to get away with.

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So we got looser and looser.

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Louise Little struggled to raise her seven children through the years of the Great Depression.

0:17:48.975,0:17:53.180
She's reduced to where she has no income.

0:17:53.180,0:17:55.018
She'd try to get -- she got jobs.

0:17:55.018,0:17:57.045
She was a proud lady.

0:17:57.045,0:17:58.353
She had a lot of pride.

0:17:58.353,0:18:02.835
She sold. She crocheted gloves for people.

0:18:02.835,0:18:07.501
She did a lot of things not to be dependent solely on welfare.

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She didn't like them telling her what she could do and what she couldn't do.

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And this is one of the main things that devastated her more than anything else.

0:18:16.379,0:18:22.438
As time went by, you could see she was wearing down.

0:18:22.438,0:18:26.799
[music]

0:18:26.799,0:18:30.381
For seven years, as Malcolm grew into adolescence,

0:18:30.381,0:18:35.109
his mother slowly withdrew from her family.

0:18:35.109,0:18:38.619
Two days before Christmas, 1938,

0:18:38.619,0:18:48.529
Louise Little was diagnosed as paranoid and was sent to Kalamazoo State Hospital.

0:18:48.529,0:18:52.229
And when I came home from school one day and she wasn't there,

0:18:52.229,0:18:58.304
I can remember being empty 'cause my mother had never left us.

0:18:58.304,0:19:01.472
And I felt, you know, the pain of her being gone every day,

0:19:01.472,0:19:04.208
and it was only going to be a couple of weeks,

0:19:04.208,0:19:05.187
you know.

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She was going to get better and come right back home.

0:19:08.393,0:19:12.848
And it turned into years.

0:19:12.848,0:19:20.830
Louise Little would remain at Kalamazoo for the next 26 years.

0:19:20.830,0:19:25.620
The 13-year-old Malcolm watched as the court split up his family,

0:19:25.620,0:19:29.888
assigning the younger children to foster homes in Lansing

0:19:29.888,0:19:38.257
and sending him to a white community 10 miles away.

0:19:38.257,0:19:39.838
In the past,

0:19:39.838,0:19:45.140
the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer.

0:19:45.140,0:19:49.617
If I take my hand and slap you,

0:19:49.617,0:19:51.068
you don't even feel it.

0:19:51.068,0:19:55.991
It might sting you because these digits are separated.

0:19:55.991,0:20:03.662
But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together.

0:20:03.662,0:20:08.128
He was a man who, in the eighth grade in Michigan

0:20:08.128,0:20:12.892
a school where I think he was the only black in his class and one of the very few in the school

0:20:12.892,0:20:16.625
had been an outstanding straight-A student,

0:20:16.625,0:20:17.181
you know,

0:20:17.181,0:20:19.599
who had been in fact the president of his class,

0:20:19.599,0:20:22.405
and all the others were white in the eighth grade.

0:20:22.405,0:20:26.194
Obviously, he had to be exceptional to be those things.

0:20:26.194,0:20:33.159
And then you had the Malcolm who had left school and who had gone to Roxbury, Massachusetts

0:20:33.159,0:20:39.480
where he had gotten his first exposure to what might loosely be called "hustling."

0:20:39.480,0:21:04.562
[music]

0:21:04.562,0:21:09.466
I called myself little hustler up in Roxbury in those days.

0:21:09.466,0:21:11.685
And this particular day, you know,

0:21:11.685,0:21:17.202
Malcolm X had come into Boston and he had on his zoot suit with the wide-brim hat

0:21:17.202,0:21:21.983
with the long, three-quarter-length coat with the chain that went down to your ankles.

0:21:21.983,0:21:31.864
I don't know, the last time I recall, Cab Callowy used that outfit for his stage uniform.

0:21:31.864,0:21:33.676
Now, when Malcolm left Lansing,

0:21:33.676,0:21:36.186
he had nothing but a old square suit on

0:21:36.186,0:21:37.069
"white man's suit,"

0:21:37.069,0:21:38.865
as I call it.

0:21:38.865,0:21:41.168
When he came back from Boston, oh Lord,

0:21:41.168,0:21:44.567
Malcolm had a zoot suit on and a wide-brim hat

0:21:44.567,0:21:47.065
and a chain from his hat down onto his lapel

0:21:47.065,0:21:49.666
and he was the talk of the town.

0:21:49.666,0:21:53.402
Everybody was talking about Malcolm.

0:21:53.402,0:21:57.647
[music]

0:21:57.647,0:22:01.226
And then when he was dancing on the floor and he was floating around,

0:22:01.226,0:22:04.094
those pants were like he was a floating balloon,

0:22:04.094,0:22:07.006
with -- that coat was like a wing.

0:22:07.006,0:22:11.762
The way he'd be dancing and flying around with the big, 10-gallon hat on and the chain flinging.

0:22:11.762,0:22:11.763
And this used to really shake up the girls.

0:22:11.763,0:22:11.763
[music and singing]

0:22:28.634,0:22:29.815
In Boston, they called him "New York Red.

0:22:29.815,0:22:31.856
In New York, they called him "Detroit Red."

0:22:31.856,0:22:34.512
He had his hair crockonoed, "conked," you know.

0:22:34.512,0:22:38.334
It was red and he had pictures of him and Billie Holiday

0:22:38.334,0:22:46.367
and all these people at the time out there who were just being made known to the rest of the black world.

0:22:46.367,0:22:54.704
Malcolm worked the kitchen crew on the New Haven Railroad between Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.

0:22:54.704,0:23:06.228
In 1942, he moved to Harlem and at age 17 began traveling in a world of after-hour clubs and small-time hustlers.

0:23:06.228,0:23:08.522
He reached a point where he said,

0:23:08.522,0:23:15.815
"You'll never make it on these janitor jobs and selling sandwiches on these trains and shining shoes and stuff like that."

0:23:15.815,0:23:18.176
He says, "You never will get anywhere."

0:23:18.176,0:23:22.878
Well, he had the reputation as being a hustler and he was a street person,

0:23:22.878,0:23:25.012
but he wasn't a hustler.

0:23:25.012,0:23:28.070
He was a con man, yeah, a con artist.

0:23:28.070,0:23:30.741
They called him an artist.

0:23:30.741,0:23:34.109
When the white folks came out at night and they wanted black women,

0:23:34.109,0:23:35.463
he could arrange for them to get them.

0:23:35.463,0:23:38.087
If they wanted bootleg whiskey, he knew where to get it.

0:23:38.087,0:23:41.089
If they wanted drugs, he knew where to get it.

0:23:41.089,0:23:45.954
He made it possible that he knew what they wanted and he knew where to get it

0:23:45.954,0:23:49.423
and he would be in the middle where he could make a profit off of it.

0:23:49.423,0:23:53.124
And this is the way he started doing.

0:23:53.124,0:23:54.621
Looking back at that time,

0:23:54.621,0:23:57.794
Malcolm said only three things worried him

0:23:57.794,0:24:02.863
jail, a job and the Army.

0:24:02.863,0:24:04.724
To avoid serving in World War II,

0:24:04.724,0:24:10.840
he told his draft board that he wanted to organize black soldiers to kill whites.

0:24:10.840,0:24:17.939
He was judged unfit for the military.

0:24:17.939,0:24:22.117
Malcolm's gambling and drugs and Harlem nightlife were expensive.

0:24:22.117,0:24:26.560
He had already been arrested twice for petty crimes.

0:24:26.560,0:24:29.589
When he moved back to Boston in 1945,

0:24:29.589,0:24:34.368
he organized a gang to burglarize homes of prominent families.

0:24:34.368,0:24:37.969
The other gang members included his friend Malcolm Jarvis,

0:24:37.969,0:24:42.848
his white girlfriend, Bea, and two other white women.

0:24:42.848,0:24:47.204
This girl knew that these people were down in Florida at that time of the year,

0:24:47.204,0:24:48.086
there was nobody home,

0:24:48.086,0:24:52.649
so we broke into the house and we'd get some of their valuables and Malcolm would

0:24:52.649,0:24:54.929
take most of the stuff and pawn it and get money

0:24:54.929,0:24:56.589
for his gambling habit.

0:24:56.589,0:25:00.000
After two weeks of doing this,

0:25:00.000,0:25:02.443
that's when the ??? when he made the mistake

0:25:02.443,0:25:07.112
of going to the pawn shop to retrieve a watch worth over a thousand dollars that came out of

0:25:07.112,0:25:13.170
one of the houses and that's when he was arrested by three policemen.

0:25:13.170,0:25:19.034
Malcolm Little, Malcolm Jarvis and the three women were charged with breaking and entering.

0:25:19.034,0:25:22.189
The fact that two black men were with white women became

0:25:22.189,0:25:25.107
an issue in the court.

0:25:25.107,0:25:32.351
Malcolm was definitely involved with two white women and this is what made the case so powerful.

0:25:32.351,0:25:36.007
So outrageous.

0:25:36.007,0:25:42.396
The women testified that Malcolm had forced them to participate in the burglaries.

0:25:42.396,0:25:49.519
The two men received a maximum sentence: eight to ten years in state prison.

0:25:49.519,0:25:53.694
When they sentenced us, I went out of my mind.

0:25:53.694,0:25:58.140
I reached up and grabbed the bars of the cage and I shook them, almost shook them right up off the floor

0:25:58.140,0:26:00.161
and I hollered at the judge and I said to him,

0:26:00.161,0:26:03.675
"you might as well kill me as to give me ten years in jail."

0:26:03.675,0:26:09.100
Well, I was what you call a mad negro, I was one.

0:26:09.100,0:26:11.307
And I knew what I saw was real.

0:26:11.307,0:26:12.895
???

0:26:12.895,0:26:22.947
I knew that when they laughed all together, they were laughing, look what we did, we doing it to the negro.

0:26:22.947,0:26:30.138
Then they had the unintimidated gall to ask the girls before they took them out of there to press charges

0:26:30.138,0:26:36.421
against us for rape. The girls wouldn't do it.

0:26:36.421,0:26:41.654
Malcolm Little was twenty years old, facing eight to ten years in state prison.

0:26:41.654,0:26:47.324
He had wandered far from the Garvey pride and independence his parents had preached.

0:26:47.324,0:26:56.346
He was now prisoner number 22843.

0:26:56.346,0:27:01.696
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace.

0:27:01.696,0:27:05.816
To remain a criminal is the disgrace.

0:27:05.816,0:27:10.333
I formerly was a criminal. I formerly was in prison.

0:27:10.333,0:27:15.243
I'm not ashamed of that. You never can use that over my head,

0:27:15.243,0:27:19.423
and he's using the wrong stick. I don't feel that stick.

0:27:19.423,0:27:26.560
[cheering and applause]

0:27:26.560,0:27:32.129
They charged Jesus with sedition. Didn't they do that?

0:27:32.129,0:27:40.864
They said he was against Caesar. They said he was discriminating because he told his disciples

0:27:40.864,0:27:49.453
"go not the way of the gentiles, but rather go to the lost sheep. Go to the people who don't know who they are,

0:27:49.453,0:27:55.220
who are lost from the knowledge of themselves and who are strangers in a land that is not theirs. Go to those people. Go

0:27:55.220,0:28:04.843
to the slaves. Go to the second-class citizens. Go to the ones who are suffering the brunt of Caesar's brutality."

0:28:04.843,0:28:11.725
And if Jesus were here in America today, he wouldn't be going to the white man. The white man is the oppressor.

0:28:11.725,0:28:17.449
He would be going to the oppressed. He would be going to the humble. He would be going to the lowly.

0:28:17.449,0:28:20.473
He would be going to the rejected and the despised.

0:28:20.473,0:28:35.042
He would be going to the so-called American negro.

0:28:35.042,0:28:43.170
Behind prison walls, Malcolm hustled bets, fed his drug habit and argued against the existence of God.

0:28:43.170,0:28:47.138
The men in the cellblock called him Satan.

0:28:47.138,0:28:56.405
But at the same time, encouraged by an older black inmate, Malcolm began reading and taking English courses.

0:28:56.405,0:29:06.945
Malcolm described vividly prison life that he was in effect lonely and limited, but had plans for

0:29:06.945,0:29:12.654
he was going to do a lot of reading and he certainly

0:29:12.654,0:29:14.426
did a lot of writing.

0:29:14.426,0:29:20.799
Because I think there were times when he probably wrote to me every week.

0:29:20.799,0:29:26.051
During the second year in prison, his brothers and sisters wrote to him about what they called

0:29:26.051,0:29:29.330
the natural religion for the black man,

0:29:29.330,0:29:35.808
a religion that taught that black people were the original people, that God was black and

0:29:35.808,0:29:38.596
was called Allah.

0:29:38.596,0:29:43.432
They told Malcolm they were now a part of the Nation of Islam, followers of the honorable

0:29:43.432,0:29:49.172
Elijah Mohammad, the messenger of Allah.

0:29:49.172,0:29:58.522
I think Islam is one of the greatest religions of all time for our people in America. The so-called American

0:29:58.522,0:30:12.679
negro have to be completely reeducated and Islam gives them that qualification, that he can feel proud and

0:30:12.679,0:30:18.749
does not feel ashamed to be called a black man.

0:30:18.749,0:30:25.953
I came into the Muslim movement in 1947 and, um

0:30:25.953,0:30:29.787
then started bringing my brothers and sisters in.

0:30:29.787,0:30:34.974
When we already had been indoctrinated with Marcus Garvey's philosophy, so they didn't

0:30:34.974,0:30:39.043
have anything to do with convincing us that we were black

0:30:39.043,0:30:40.621
and should be proud.

0:30:40.621,0:30:43.987
We were already that when we came in.

0:30:43.987,0:30:47.373
So I wrote to Malcolm and told him about...

0:30:47.373,0:30:54.109
I said to him if he would believe in Allah that he would get out of prison. And that's all I wrote because I know

0:30:54.109,0:31:01.061
he had very low tolerance for religion and I didn't intend to lose that tolerance.

0:31:01.061,0:31:05.752
Malcolm's brothers and sisters wrote the young prisoner that black people in America

0:31:05.752,0:31:11.545
were part of a lost tribe, soon to be delivered out of bondage.

0:31:11.545,0:31:17.888
And that whites, according to Elijah Mohammad, were a race of devils whose domination on Earth was

0:31:17.888,0:31:21.371
about to end.

0:31:21.371,0:31:27.778
At first, he liked every bit of it, except one thing he couldn't understand and that was the part they were teaching

0:31:27.778,0:31:31.258
about the white man being the devil.

0:31:31.258,0:31:33.874
Malcolm wrote to Elijah Mohammad. Elijah Mohammad

0:31:33.874,0:31:38.692
answered and when he answered, he would cite a portion of scripture.

0:31:38.692,0:31:46.984
And then he gave him the key. He said the key... the Bible is the book that everything that takes place in that Bible

0:31:46.984,0:31:48.392
is on this Earth.

0:31:48.392,0:31:53.875
So you don't have to die to go to hell, you can catch hell while you're living. And the white man is the one that's

0:31:53.875,0:32:01.359
putting that hell on you. Well, that's a very convincing teaching, especially when you're using the white

0:32:01.359,0:32:05.383
man's history to corroborate this.

0:32:05.383,0:32:13.663
Malcolm began reading history, philosophy and religion. The writings of W.E.B Du Bois,

0:32:13.663,0:32:21.889
Shakespeare, Socrates, the fables of Aesop, the lives of Gandhi and Nat Turner.

0:32:21.889,0:32:29.609
And he finds all this history of how white Christians lynched black Christians, white Christians were the ones who were

0:32:29.609,0:32:33.499
involved in the slave trade -- those were Christians.

0:32:33.499,0:32:40.123
So Malcolm began to see this and then he began to study it himself and prove that if there is such a thing as a real devil

0:32:40.123,0:32:50.200
on this earth, it has to be the white man.

0:32:50.200,0:33:00.324
Elijah Mohammad told Malcolm to submit to Allah. But for Malcolm, submission would always be difficult.

0:33:00.324,0:33:11.387
It took a week before he could force himself to bow in prayer.

0:33:11.387,0:33:17.629
Later, to help spread the teachings of Elijah Mohammad, Malcolm joined the prison debate team, competing

0:33:17.629,0:33:22.846
against visiting college teams from Harvard and MIT.

0:33:22.846,0:33:25.910
That's when Malcolm's name and fame started spreading

0:33:25.910,0:33:28.664
amongst the prison population. And that's when the

0:33:28.664,0:33:31.905
population started to grow at the debating classes. Most of

0:33:31.905,0:33:36.330
the fellows used to come over out of curiosity just to hear him speak.

0:33:36.330,0:33:43.810
In 1950, Malcolm wrote to the governor demanding the right to practice the Muslim religion in prison.

0:33:43.810,0:33:53.458
His letters would later end up in FBI files. The Bureau had been keeping a close watch on the nation of Islam since

0:33:53.458,0:34:02.554
the late 1930s. Malcolm, considered a troublemaker, was denied an early parole.

0:34:02.554,0:34:09.667
He was not eligible to be let out at that time because he'd be a threat to society.

0:34:09.667,0:34:16.810
They considered him dangerous, knowledge-wise and otherwise, religious-wise. He would've been like a

0:34:16.810,0:34:22.600
rotten apple in the barrel of a thousand. He was gonna spoil many.

0:34:22.600,0:34:33.250
On August 7, 1952, after six and a half years in prison, Malcolm was released. Within a month, he was accepted into

0:34:33.250,0:34:41.781
the Nation of Islam. Malcolm Little had become Malcolm X.

0:34:41.781,0:34:45.265
How did you happen to join the Muslim movement?

0:34:45.265,0:34:54.536
I was in prison. I was a very wayward criminal, backward, illiterate, uneducated, whatever other negative characteristics you can think of...

0:34:54.536,0:35:01.121
type of person until I heard the teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad. And because of the impact that it had

0:35:01.121,0:35:08.334
upon me in giving me a desire to reform myself and rehabilitate myself for the first time in my life. And also being

0:35:08.334,0:35:15.440
able to see the effect that it had upon others, this is what made me accept it. And I noticed that after being exposed to

0:35:15.440,0:35:21.363
the religious teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad, immediately, it instilled within me such a high degree of racial

0:35:21.363,0:35:28.250
pride and racial dignity that I wanted to be somebody and I realized that I couldn't be anybody by begging the white man

0:35:28.250,0:35:35.328
for what he had, but that I had to get out here and try and do something for myself or make something out of myself.

0:35:35.328,0:35:47.570
The first time I recall seeing Malcolm was at the home of my father, Elijah Mohammad. I saw a thin man, tall man, young

0:35:47.570,0:35:54.574
man, reddish face. If he was just meeting you, the first thing you would get from him is a smile.

0:35:54.574,0:35:58.000
He said "this is Wallace" and I smiled

0:35:58.000,0:36:05.262
at him, I was happy to see him because I had heard about him too and he said the messenger's son, the messenger's son.

0:36:05.262,0:36:12.009
And he was just so excited about the messenger, really, it wasn't just seeing Wallace. It was seeing the

0:36:12.009,0:36:14.584
messenger's son.

0:36:14.584,0:36:20.067
When Malcolm came out, he was full of fire. He had gotten so full of fire that he got out at the right time and the right

0:36:20.067,0:36:28.442
place so he could expound. He came to Detroit, he was surprised to find there were such few people in this powerful teaching in his mind.

0:36:28.442,0:36:34.742
And he says, "I'm surprised that you are sitting here and so many empty seats." He said "every time you come out here,"

0:36:34.742,0:36:37.152
he said "this place should be full."

0:36:37.152,0:36:40.706
And that excited the honorable Elijah Mohammad.

0:36:40.706,0:36:48.490
In the early 1950s, the Nation of Islam was unknown in most black communities. Total membership was believed to be

0:36:48.490,0:36:51.373
no more than four hundred people.

0:36:51.373,0:36:56.144
Malcolm was sent on the road to spread the message.

0:36:56.144,0:37:04.685
Within two years, he helped organize temples in Boston, Hartford and Philadelphia.

0:37:04.685,0:37:11.223
Elijah Mohammad then named Malcolm minister of the most important temple on the East Coast,

0:37:11.223,0:37:15.430
Harlem's temple number seven.

0:37:15.430,0:37:18.805
Mr. Mohammad knew that Malcolm had the experience and

0:37:18.805,0:37:23.742
he knew New York and he also knew that he was the kind

0:37:23.742,0:37:33.103
of man, complexion, height, speech and carriage, all has to be taken into consideration when you select a man

0:37:33.103,0:37:37.862
to send before the people. Plus, this is an international city.

0:37:37.862,0:37:42.037
You got to have your best in New York and this is why

0:37:42.037,0:37:46.872
Mr. Mohammad selected him.

0:37:46.872,0:37:50.062
[soft applause]

0:37:50.062,0:37:56.507
In 1955, when Elijah Mohammad visited the New York temple, it was to inspect the work of the

0:37:56.507,0:38:09.033
ambitious and outspoken young minister who had transformed tiny storefronts along the East Coast into a congregation of thousands.

0:38:09.033,0:38:19.131
Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again,

0:38:19.131,0:38:24.005
some of them came out and found a new meaning to their

0:38:24.005,0:38:28.174
manhood and their womanhood. Had Elijah Mohammad

0:38:28.174,0:38:40.536
tried to introduce an orthodox form of Arab-oriented Islam, I doubt if he would have attracted five hundred people.

0:38:40.536,0:38:52.090
But he introduced a form of Islam that could communicate with the people he had to deal with.

0:38:52.090,0:39:01.330
He was the king to those who had no king and he was the messiah to those some people thought unworthy

0:39:01.330,0:39:07.639
of a messiah.

0:39:07.639,0:39:14.318
The teachings of ??? honorable Elijah Mohammad is like nothing I have ever taken, it's a medicine.

0:39:14.318,0:39:15.301
Right, that's right.

0:39:15.301,0:39:18.261
You're seeing the medicine that has cured me of all my ills.

0:39:18.261,0:39:19.046
That's right.

0:39:19.046,0:39:21.253
'Cause I was a sick man.

0:39:21.253,0:39:25.649
And when I embraced the teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad, these teachings cured me of these ills.

0:39:25.649,0:39:28.102
I'm a well man now. And I feel good.

0:39:28.102,0:39:32.213
That's right, as long as you stay with the doctor, you'll continue to feel good.

0:39:32.213,0:39:34.328
Yes sir.

0:39:34.328,0:39:36.295
What about you, brother? How do you feel about the honorable Elijah Mohammad?

0:39:36.295,0:39:44.496
Honorable Elijah Mohammad is trying to teach all our original people they are in bad shape. Honorable Elijah

0:39:44.496,0:39:46.801
Mohammad trying to wake 'em up.

0:39:46.801,0:39:50.123
[music]

0:39:50.123,0:39:54.021
Inside Muslim temples, no white people were allowed.

0:39:54.021,0:40:06.668
Members worked to build a self-sufficient community founded on strict rules and absolute obedience.

0:40:06.668,0:40:14.412
The Nation set up Muslim schools for its children, teaching mathematics, science, history and Arabic.

0:40:14.412,0:40:20.773
[all in chorus] We're the original man. The original man is the ??? black man.

0:40:20.773,0:40:27.796
[indistinct] on the Planet Earth.

0:40:27.796,0:40:34.872
Muslim women studied nutrition, child-rearing and guidelines on how to care for their husbands.

0:40:34.872,0:40:46.309
Muslim men studied parental responsibility, history and religion.

0:40:46.309,0:40:54.028
The elite corps, called the Fruit of Islam, was trained in hand-to-hand combat and was expected to protect

0:40:54.028,0:41:01.893
the temples and to punish any members who spoke out against the messenger.

0:41:01.893,0:41:08.072
I was surprised when I went into some... a couple of the Muslim families. The faith that they had

0:41:08.072,0:41:17.591
in Elijah Mohammad and in Malcolm... I asked one father, I said, "suppose your son came home one day and told you

0:41:17.591,0:41:20.612
that he was renouncing the Muslim religion?"

0:41:20.612,0:41:25.823
And he said "I would turn him from my door. I would never allow him in again."

0:41:25.823,0:41:30.982
So I asked Malcolm about that. He says, "he meant it. And he would do it."

0:41:30.982,0:41:35.401
I says, "not worry about what happened to his son?"

0:41:35.401,0:41:43.835
"No, he wouldn't worry about what happened to him. His allegiance is with Elijah Mohammad."

0:41:43.835,0:41:51.191
To help expand the Nation of Islam, Malcolm created a newspaper, Muhammad Speaks,

0:41:51.191,0:41:56.453
and persuaded other black newspapers to carry the messenger's weekly column.

0:41:56.453,0:42:04.233
His strength was, once he believed in a thing, he would give everything he had to it, all of his energies.

0:42:04.233,0:42:06.976
He'd work, he would become a workaholic.

0:42:06.976,0:42:09.127
He worked day and night for it.

0:42:09.127,0:42:16.147
He only required around four hours' sleep and many times wouldn't get that. And you just kind of wonder

0:42:16.147,0:42:19.631
how can anybody keep up that kind of a pace? But he did it,

0:42:19.631,0:42:27.343
day in and day out. Plus on top of that, he's reading. He's reading papers, keeping up what the news is,

0:42:27.343,0:42:34.289
he's just a person that's tuned into life in such a way that

0:42:34.289,0:42:38.988
he doesn't miss too much of it.

0:42:38.988,0:42:46.478
At age 32, after devoting five years to building the Nation, he sought the approval of Elijah Mohammad to marry

0:42:46.478,0:42:53.282
sister Betty X, a college-educated member of Harlem's temple number seven.

0:42:53.282,0:43:02.889
In the years that followed, the demands of his ministry allowed little time for his growing family.

0:43:02.889,0:43:14.438
He sometimes, if I could catch him, would have to read to the children. They would always want the story read again

0:43:14.438,0:43:21.289
so that they would really just wait until he was on the last page and say "read it again."

0:43:21.289,0:43:29.169
"Read it again, read it again," you know, and so that he started giving the books different endings.

0:43:29.169,0:43:38.276
He had a beautiful sense of humor, especially when he was kidding me about pork and whacking me on the back

0:43:38.276,0:43:48.586
and saying that "you're a decent human being, smart historian, I'm going to give you 99 as a human being and

0:43:48.586,0:43:54.191
you stop eating pork I'm going to give you 100."

0:43:54.191,0:44:02.371
Had a beautiful sense of humor, plus the fact that when you got to know him, he was kind of shy.

0:44:02.371,0:44:07.135
[jazzy music]

0:44:07.135,0:44:11.318
Malcolm was now in the Nation of Islam's inner circle,

0:44:11.318,0:44:15.432
Elijah Muhammad's most visible representative.

0:44:15.432,0:44:18.406
He had the Messenger's confidence, and the loyalty

0:44:18.406,0:44:21.174
of thousands of Muslims.

0:44:21.174,0:44:24.603
In a sense, Malcolm had found a father.

0:44:24.603,0:44:30.485
Elijah Muhammad had found another son.

0:44:30.485,0:44:33.752
[faint sirens]

0:44:33.752,0:44:36.801
On an April night in 1957,

0:44:36.801,0:44:40.761
a Muslim Brother was beaten by New York City police.

0:44:40.761,0:44:45.099
His skull fractured, Johnson Hinton lay in a back room

0:44:45.099,0:44:47.701
of a Harlem police station.

0:44:47.701,0:44:50.436
When word spread that Hinton was dying,

0:44:50.436,0:44:54.367
Malcolm ordered the Muslims into the streets.

0:44:54.367,0:44:58.331
Other Harlem residents joined them.

0:44:58.331,0:45:05.905
The community had endured a long history of police brutality;

0:45:05.905,0:45:10.410
many considered the police an occupying force.

0:45:10.410,0:45:16.480
28th Precinct was notorious for their prejudice.

0:45:16.480,0:45:19.253
Naturally, when the people saw us come out there,

0:45:19.253,0:45:23.689
that was the first time that anyone had marched

0:45:23.689,0:45:26.255
on the 28th Precinct in protest of something

0:45:26.255,0:45:28.724
that they felt that wasn't right.

0:45:28.724,0:45:32.367
I don't know what would have happened in Harlem

0:45:32.367,0:45:36.118
that night, because the atmosphere was not . . .

0:45:36.118,0:45:39.788
It was, I think the word they use is "charged"?

0:45:39.788,0:45:43.206
Well, this atmosphere was explosive.

0:45:43.206,0:45:46.089
Malcolm demanded medical treatment for Hinton.

0:45:46.089,0:45:49.167
After a long negotiation, police agreed

0:45:49.167,0:45:52.786
to send the prisoner to Harlem Hospital.

0:45:52.786,0:45:56.867
But even then, the Muslims refused to disperse.

0:45:56.867,0:46:02.845
There's a sergeant - he came out and tried to chase the Muslims

0:46:02.845,0:46:05.053
who were standing across the street.

0:46:05.053,0:46:07.389
And Malcolm came out and told him, "You can't do that."

0:46:07.389,0:46:09.874
He said, "They're not gonna move for you."

0:46:09.874,0:46:12.768
Malcolm said: "I'll get rid of...I'll send them away".

0:46:12.768,0:46:17.153
He went out to the front of the station on the first step and he just waived his hand

0:46:17.153,0:46:21.492
and the people walked away.

0:46:21.492,0:46:25.418
A police commissioner on the scene, remarked

0:46:25.418,0:46:29.657
"That's too much power for one man to have!"

0:46:29.657,0:46:38.514
Malcolm will later take New york City to court and win the largest police brutality settlement in the city's history.

0:46:38.514,0:46:48.622
They realized that anytime a person could wave his hand and have a large number of people automatically move away

0:46:48.622,0:46:53.662
without any conversation, that by the same token that the same man

0:46:53.662,0:46:59.687
could wave his hand and those people to create some kind of disturbance if he wanted to.

0:46:59.687,0:47:02.446
I believe from that point on the police department and

0:47:02.446,0:47:06.828
and the political people in New York City began to realize

0:47:06.828,0:47:11.735
they had a significant force in the city to deal with.

0:47:11.735,0:47:19.774
Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace. Last week on Newsbeat,

0:47:19.774,0:47:25.153
our 6:30 news program here on Channel 13, we presented a five-part series which we called

0:47:25.153,0:47:30.298
"The Hate That Hate Produced," a study of the rise of black racism,

0:47:30.298,0:47:36.166
of a call for black supremacy among a small but growing segment of the American Negro population.

0:47:36.166,0:47:43.507
MALCOLM X: "We have come to hear and to see the greatest and the wisest and most..."

0:47:43.507,0:47:50.580
This 1959 documentary was the first television portrayal of the internal activities of the Nation of Islam.

0:47:50.580,0:47:53.986
Malcolm saw the television program as an opportunity.

0:47:53.986,0:47:57.513
Elijah Muhammad was against it.

0:47:57.513,0:48:01.563
Mr. Muhammad told Malcolm no, it wasn't going to do any good.

0:48:01.563,0:48:04.215
All it would do is hurt us, in our work, in what we were trying to do.

0:48:04.215,0:48:08.426
Malcolm wasn't satisfied.

0:48:08.426,0:48:15.053
He didn't insist, but he continued to ask Mr. Muhammad

0:48:15.053,0:48:20.963
could he do it. Mr. Muhammad reluctantly agreed.

0:48:20.963,0:48:26.458
MALCOLM X: "I charge the white man with being the greatest liar on earth.

0:48:26.458,0:48:30.271
I charge the white man, ladies and gentleman of the jury,

0:48:30.271,0:48:32.931
with being the greatest murderer on the earth.

0:48:32.931,0:48:37.116
I have charged the white man with being the greatest adulterer on earth."

0:48:37.116,0:48:39.817
Here was the auditorium overflowing -

0:48:39.817,0:48:42.999
thousands of people -- about an organization

0:48:42.999,0:48:46.503
I knew nothing about?

0:48:46.503,0:48:50.032
I found it difficult to credit when I saw it.

0:48:50.032,0:48:52.225
And of course, when we put it on the air,

0:48:52.225,0:48:58.297
New Yorkers -- 'cause that's all who saw it -we’re stunned that this...

0:48:58.297,0:49:01.211
-- there was this organization, the Black Muslims, about which

0:49:01.211,0:49:05.002
white New Yorkers simply knew nothing!

0:49:05.002,0:49:08.966
Minister Malcolm X as he addressed a non-Muslim audience.

0:49:08.966,0:49:18.923
MALCOLM X: "How could so few white people rule so many black people?

0:49:18.923,0:49:21.436
This is the thing you should want to know.

0:49:21.436,0:49:27.821
How could so few -- the white man today will tell you that thousands of years ago

0:49:27.821,0:49:31.309
the black man in Africa was living in palaces,

0:49:31.309,0:49:34.441
the black man was wearing silk,

0:49:34.441,0:49:38.598
the black man in Africa was cooking and seasoning his food.

0:49:38.598,0:49:42.500
The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences.

0:49:42.500,0:49:45.497
He knew the course of the stars in the universe

0:49:45.497,0:49:49.515
before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.

0:49:49.515,0:49:51.462
Is that right or wrong?"

0:49:51.462,0:49:56.654
I was amazed at his capacity to communicate

0:49:56.654,0:49:59.566
and at the naked honesty with which

0:49:59.566,0:50:02.301
he expressed his feelings about black people, about white people.

0:50:02.301,0:50:05.993
He scared me - I'm sure he intended to -

0:50:05.993,0:50:10.203
but certainly after I saw him in "The Hate That Hate Produced",

0:50:10.203,0:50:14.080
I know that- I knew that I would never forget this man.

0:50:14.080,0:50:20.558
When I first saw Malcolm on a television, he scared me also.

0:50:20.558,0:50:23.323
Immediately the family said, "Turn off that television.

0:50:23.323,0:50:26.848
That man is saying stuff you ain't supposed to hear,"

0:50:26.848,0:50:29.426
so of course we did!

0:50:29.426,0:50:33.264
But always-- you know when the sun comes in the window

0:50:33.264,0:50:37.924
and you kind of jump up to get it, to close the blinds or pull down the shade,

0:50:37.924,0:50:41.003
but before you do that, the sun comes in?

0:50:41.003,0:50:45.895
Well, before each time we'd turn the television off, a little sun came in.

0:50:45.895,0:50:51.031
While the documentary helped bring in new converts,

0:50:51.031,0:50:55.429
the racial views of the Nation of Islam shocked white America

0:50:55.429,0:50:58.659
and many in the black community.

0:50:58.659,0:51:09.725
Preaching of racial hatred and racial advantage and the bigotry involved is a bad thing whether it's colored or white.

0:51:09.725,0:51:13.219
For years, the NAACP has been opposed

0:51:13.219,0:51:17.707
to white extremists preaching hatred of Negro people

0:51:17.707,0:51:21.584
and we are equally opposed to Negro extremists

0:51:21.584,0:51:26.721
preaching against white people simply for the sake of whiteness.

0:51:26.721,0:51:29.553
Most in the civil rights movement believed that

0:51:29.553,0:51:34.972
integration was the way to solve America's racial problems,

0:51:34.972,0:51:37.181
but Malcolm preached that black people

0:51:37.181,0:51:42.626
were able to solve their own problems without the help of whites.

0:51:42.626,0:51:49.448
At a time when black Americans began identifying with freedom movements in Africa and Latin America,

0:51:49.448,0:51:55.675
Malcolm developed alliances with revolutionary leaders from around the world.

0:51:55.675,0:52:03.821
He encouraged black Americans to see themselves not as a minority but as a part of a world majority.

0:52:03.821,0:52:08.785
The rise of African nations

0:52:08.785,0:52:18.316
concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement

0:52:18.316,0:52:24.772
gave black America a burst of pride over and above

0:52:24.772,0:52:32.293
anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.

0:53:03.628,0:53:06.063
MALCOLM X: "They're passing the basket through the crowd

0:53:06.063,0:53:09.878
and I think everybody standing here should put one dollar in that basket.

0:53:09.878,0:53:12.041
Don't you think you should? Sure!

0:53:12.041,0:53:14.374
These are freedom dollars, Brother!

0:53:14.374,0:53:16.575
We're not asking you to give us some money to make us rich.

0:53:16.575,0:53:24.032
We put our businesses-- the Honorable Elijah Muhammad has set up more businesses than any black man in America".

0:53:24.032,0:53:27.290
The Nation of Islam, with its interlocking corporations

0:53:27.290,0:53:32.444
was now reputed to be the largest black-owned business empire in the United States.

0:53:32.444,0:53:38.537
The Nation of Islam, during the early '60s,

0:53:38.537,0:53:42.731
was perhaps enjoying its best days.

0:53:42.731,0:53:46.160
We were opening restaurants and grocery stores

0:53:46.160,0:53:49.999
and seeing Muhammad SPEAKS paper compete with other black papers.

0:53:49.999,0:53:54.314
We were seeing Malcolm on television kind of frequently.

0:53:54.314,0:54:00.246
We were proud of him. In our opinion, he was doing an excellent job of representing

0:54:00.246,0:54:04.066
the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.

0:54:04.066,0:54:06.802
We were seeing the Fruit of Islam now

0:54:06.802,0:54:11.563
not just going through exercises in some small facilities,

0:54:11.563,0:54:14.162
but we were seeing them in great numbers,

0:54:14.162,0:54:21.815
hundreds of them on the streets of big cities like Chicago and New York and Los Angeles.

0:54:21.815,0:54:29.774
My view of the Fruit of Islam was that these were the absolute baddest, cleanest brothers I had ever seen in my life.

0:54:29.774,0:54:32.376
There was some bad blood, you know what I'm saying?

0:54:32.376,0:54:38.383
I mean, you did not mess with the FOI! When they came out on the street, people would say, "Uh, er, yes, sir, uh-huh."

0:54:38.383,0:54:43.365
The growing presence of the Fruit of Islam attracted police attention.

0:54:43.365,0:54:48.348
There were increasing numbers of confrontations and arrests.

0:54:48.348,0:54:53.831
Malcolm warned that members of the FOI would always obey the law,

0:54:53.831,0:54:58.044
but would also defend themselves if attacked.

0:54:58.044,0:55:05.695
In cities across America, police agencies were determined to contain the Black Muslims.

0:55:05.695,0:55:13.564
It was only a matter of time before the two forces would again collide.

0:55:13.564,0:55:19.766
Los Angeles, California

0:55:19.766,0:55:31.077
On a spring night in 1962, another confrontation.

0:55:31.077,0:55:37.292
It began as a stop-and-search of Muslim men delivering dry cleaning.

0:55:37.292,0:55:42.937
It ended with a full police assault on the Muslim temple.

0:55:42.937,0:55:49.839
This time eight men were shot, one police officer and seven Muslims.

0:55:49.839,0:55:54.802
Temple secretary Ronald Stokes was dead at the scene.

0:55:54.802,0:56:03.014
I arrived at the mosque in Los Angeles after the shooting took place,

0:56:03.014,0:56:07.303
and there was great sadness amongst the people, you know...

0:56:07.303,0:56:11.095
Malcolm was walking back and forth, shaking his head saying

0:56:11.095,0:56:12.976
"They're going to pay for it, they're going to pay for it,

0:56:12.976,0:56:16.584
they're going to pay for it, they're going to pay for it!"

0:56:16.584,0:56:21.959
If anyone breaks into our temples, we were to defend the temple with our life.

0:56:21.959,0:56:26.629
The temple is sacred and those brothers, they acted on what they were taught.

0:56:26.629,0:56:33.606
And I'm sure that anyone seeing police break into a church would be outraged.

0:56:33.606,0:56:35.102
Mayor SAM YORTY, Los Angeles:

0:56:35.102,0:56:37.891
"This didn't come as a great surprise to us, the fact that

0:56:37.891,0:56:45.027
they would resist our police officers and cause trouble because we have been watching this group for a long time

0:56:45.027,0:56:50.940
and I think Chief Parker warned some time ago that we might have trouble with them."

0:56:50.940,0:56:56.800
The Los Angeles Times reported the incident as a Muslim riot and "a wild gunfight",

0:56:56.800,0:57:05.144
but it was never proven that any of the guns fired belonged to the Muslims.

0:57:05.144,0:57:11.188
Malcolm called for churches and civil rights organizations to form a united front

0:57:11.188,0:57:17.430
with the Muslims against police brutality.

0:57:17.430,0:57:22.718
MALCOLM X: Let us remember that we are not brutalized because we are Baptists.

0:57:22.718,0:57:25.733
We're not brutalized because we are Methodists.

0:57:25.733,0:57:28.524
We're not brutalized because we're Muslims.

0:57:28.524,0:57:31.963
We're not brutalized because we are Catholics.

0:57:31.963,0:57:40.522
We're brutalized because we are black people in America."

0:57:40.522,0:57:43.823
I'm telling you they came out of those cars

0:57:43.823,0:57:47.383
and we have enough witnesses to hang them

0:57:47.383,0:57:49.669
with their guns smoking.

0:57:49.669,0:57:52.466
Chief Parker knows this, Mayor Yorty knows this

0:57:52.466,0:57:56.336
and every police official in the city knows that!

0:57:56.336,0:57:59.329
They didn't fire now warning shots in the air.

0:57:59.329,0:58:10.522
They fired warning shots point-blank at innocent, unarmed defenseless Negroes.

0:58:10.522,0:58:16.257
As I say two of the brothers were shot in the back.

0:58:16.257,0:58:22.361
Another was shot in the shoulder.

0:58:22.361,0:58:25.850
Another was shot- two of them were shot -

0:58:25.850,0:58:32.334
excuse the expression -- through the penis.

0:58:32.334,0:58:37.138
Let me tell you something and I'll tell you why you say

0:58:37.138,0:58:40.153
we hate white people. We don't hate anybody.

0:58:40.153,0:58:48.237
We love our people so much they think we hate the ones who are inflicting injustice against them."

0:58:48.237,0:59:03.191
Patrolman Donald Weese, the officer who killed Ronald Stokes, testified

0:59:03.191,0:59:10.602
that he knew Stokes was unarmed, but that Stokes had raised his hands in a menacing way.

0:59:10.602,0:59:19.687
The all-white coroner's jury deliberated 23 minutes and found the death a justifiable homicide.

0:59:19.687,0:59:24.918
Fourteen Muslims were then ordered to stand trial on assault charges.

0:59:24.918,0:59:30.889
Eleven would be found guilty and sentenced to prison.

0:59:30.889,0:59:33.782
We were people that said, "Never be the aggressor,

0:59:33.782,0:59:38.691
but if someone attack you, we do not teach you to turn the other cheek."

0:59:38.691,0:59:42.293
There were Muslims who were not from the East Coast,

0:59:42.293,0:59:47.942
but from other parts of the country that was actually ready to go out there

0:59:47.942,0:59:53.127
and kill those police officers,

0:59:53.127,0:59:58.344
even though they may have been killed in the process of doing it.

0:59:58.344,1:00:13.467
But that's how strong the attitude of Muslims was against those brothers just being shot like that.

1:00:13.467,1:00:19.303
The conflict at the Los Angeles mosque brought to the surface

1:00:19.303,1:00:24.405
the growing differences between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad.

1:00:24.405,1:00:29.009
The Messenger insisted Allah would avenge Stokes' death,

1:00:29.009,1:00:33.490
but Malcolm demanded justice in the courts.

1:00:33.490,1:00:35.722
MALCOLM X: If it were possible for them to get a fair trial,

1:00:35.722,1:00:38.250
there would be no necessity for trial at all.

1:00:38.250,1:00:40.304
These are the victims of police bullets,

1:00:40.304,1:00:43.196
and you don't take the victim in court as a criminal.

1:00:43.196,1:00:45.624
You take the one shot the victim in court.

1:00:45.624,1:00:49.986
And it is the police who should be on trial here in Los Angeles."

1:00:49.986,1:00:54.859
Malcolm began to talk less and less about God was going to get rid of the Caucasians

1:00:54.859,1:00:57.412
and he began to talk about how we was going to be able to

1:00:57.412,1:01:01.039
bring them to justice and make them guilty and that,

1:01:01.039,1:01:05.458
"They are guilty according to the law of the land," which was not our argument at all.

1:01:05.458,1:01:08.963
Our argument was that we were a divine people and that we would be protected

1:01:08.963,1:01:12.443
and finally delivered, put in the seat of authority by Allah.

1:01:12.443,1:01:15.505
That was our teaching at that time!

1:01:15.505,1:01:19.021
To avoid further confrontations with city authorities,

1:01:19.021,1:01:24.129
Elijah Muhammad summoned Malcolm to a meeting at the Messenger's home.

1:01:24.129,1:01:27.381
And Elijah Muhammad told him very definitely,

1:01:27.381,1:01:33.287
"If you had reacted the way you should have reacted,

1:01:33.287,1:01:39.937
if you had more faith in Allah, Ronald Stokes would be alive."

1:01:39.937,1:01:41.378
And that was it.

1:01:41.378,1:01:44.504
He really gave him enough upbraiding.

1:01:44.504,1:01:48.082
And Malcolm said nothing about it, "Well, there was nothing we could do,"

1:01:48.082,1:01:52.633
or anything of that sort. He just listened.

1:01:52.633,1:01:55.417
Mr. Muhammad told him-- he said,

1:01:55.417,1:01:57.557
"That's one man that we lost.

1:01:57.557,1:02:00.808
I never did tell you that we weren't going to lose anyone,

1:02:00.808,1:02:04.124
but that's the way it is when you're building a nation."

1:02:04.124,1:02:10.785
He said, "They were wrong, but if I send my followers out there

1:02:10.785,1:02:14.365
to do battle with those people in L.A.,

1:02:14.365,1:02:17.393
either undercover or on top of the cover,

1:02:17.393,1:02:21.656
they will get slaughtered, and I'm not going to do that."

1:02:21.656,1:02:25.211
And Malcolm didn't like that.

1:02:25.211,1:02:30.120
Malcolm had always said, "Muslims don't back down."

1:02:30.120,1:02:35.677
In Harlem, he now had to explain what happened in Los Angeles.

1:02:35.677,1:02:38.354
MALCOLM X: Ronald Stokes was not the least

1:02:38.354,1:02:41.363
among the followers of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,

1:02:41.363,1:02:45.147
he was one of the highest. He was the secretary of our Los Angeles mosque,

1:02:45.147,1:02:49.284
and as we explained in that rally on May, many of you thought

1:02:49.284,1:02:54.501
we should go right on out then and make war on the white man.

1:02:54.501,1:02:57.649
You wanted to do it yourself, didn't you?"

1:02:57.649,1:02:58.801
AUDIENCE: Yes!

1:02:58.801,1:02:59.998
MALCOLM X: Didn't you?

1:02:59.998,1:03:00.923
AUDIENCE: Yes!

1:03:00.923,1:03:02.122
MALCOLM X: You wanted some action then, didn't you?

1:03:02.122,1:03:03.750
AUDIENCE: Yes!

1:03:03.750,1:03:05.952
MALCOLM X: 'Cause you don't like the idea of white people shooting black people down, do you?

1:03:05.952,1:03:07.121
AUDIENCE: No!

1:03:07.121,1:03:08.898
MALCOLM X: And you're ready to do something about it, aren't you?

1:03:08.898,1:03:09.871
AUDIENCE: Yes!

1:03:09.871,1:03:14.331
MALCOLM X: We know you are, and the white man should be thankful that

1:03:14.331,1:03:17.866
God has given the Honorable Elijah Muhammad the control over his followers

1:03:17.866,1:03:20.867
that he has so that they can play it cool,

1:03:20.867,1:03:26.638
calm and collected and leave it in the hands of God."

1:03:26.638,1:03:30.970
In the months following the Los Angeles incident,

1:03:30.970,1:03:34.071
Malcolm's faith in the Messenger was further tested

1:03:34.071,1:03:40.199
by rumors about Elijah Muhammad's private life.

1:03:40.199,1:03:44.763
Once a month, he would go to Chicago to take money to Elijah Muhammad,

1:03:44.763,1:03:51.205
and he would always go to the side door.

1:03:51.205,1:03:55.835
And this particular day,when he got to the side door,

1:03:55.835,1:04:00.550
there were three young ladies where they were knocking and bamming on the door

1:04:00.550,1:04:07.789
"Open the door, open the door. We need money for food. Our children don't have have this or that or the other."

1:04:07.789,1:04:14.446
He immediately felt that, number one, he didn't belong there.

1:04:14.446,1:04:17.604
Malcolm had long dismissed stories that Elijah Muhammad

1:04:17.604,1:04:21.843
had fathered eight children with six of his secretaries.

1:04:21.843,1:04:27.927
Now he approached the Messenger's son Wallace to confirm what he had seen.

1:04:27.927,1:04:29.711
So I told him yes. I say,

1:04:29.711,1:04:31.562
"I know of-- I know about that."

1:04:31.562,1:04:35.032
I say, "You can see things, but you don't want to see it,

1:04:35.032,1:04:37.436
so you just blot it out in your mind."

1:04:37.436,1:04:42.833
I say, "I'm aware of secretaries having that kind of relationship with my father,

1:04:42.833,1:04:44.369
being there with their children."

1:04:44.369,1:04:47.915
I say, "I've seen him take their children and somewhere in my conscience

1:04:47.915,1:04:51.342
I'm sure it was registering that that was his family,

1:04:51.342,1:04:54.403
but I never accepted it to deal with it in my mind.

1:04:54.403,1:04:58.647
Never did I accept to deal with it in my mind."

1:04:58.647,1:05:06.840
Officials in the nation accused Wallace Muhammad of starting rumors and conspiring against his father.

1:05:06.840,1:05:13.702
The charge that I gave Malcolm information on my father's domestic situation is true,

1:05:13.702,1:05:19.568
but only after Malcolm had already told me that he witnessed that situation."

1:05:19.568,1:05:25.589
MALCOLM X: It gives me great pleasure and an honor and a privilege at this time to introduce to you

1:05:25.589,1:05:30.283
and present to you the Messenger of Allah, your and my beloved leader and teacher,

1:05:30.283,1:05:33.104
the Most Honorable and Humble Elijah Muhammad."

1:05:33.104,1:05:35.204
Malcolm had submitted himself to Elijah Muhammad

1:05:35.204,1:05:43.294
as his spiritual leader and never tried to see anything else.

1:05:43.294,1:05:46.905
And the things that he tried to put into practice himself

1:05:46.905,1:05:52.309
he thought were being also being practiced by his leader.

1:05:52.309,1:05:54.966
And when he found it differently,

1:05:54.966,1:05:58.373
it just took all the wind out his sails."

1:05:58.373,1:06:03.678
In public, the two men continued to embrace.

1:06:03.678,1:06:07.543
In private, suspicion had replaced faith.

1:06:07.543,1:06:13.772
Their relationship was further complicated by Elijah Muhammad's failing health.

1:06:13.772,1:06:17.556
Malcolm's popularity naturally grew.

1:06:17.556,1:06:21.129
Number one, Mr. Muhammad was sick, he had bronchitis,

1:06:21.129,1:06:30.487
so Mr. Muhammad, he only went to large public meetings maybe once a year, twice a year.

1:06:30.487,1:06:36.722
That was it. All the rest of the time, Malcolm was going everywhere.

1:06:36.722,1:06:40.641
It was Malcolm who sparked the growth of the Nation all over the country.

1:06:40.641,1:06:41.717
He was in demand.

1:06:41.717,1:06:46.592
Nobody was asking for Elijah Muhammad to speak, they were asking for Malcolm to speak.

1:06:46.592,1:06:51.574
And naturally, Malcolm got more involved with the civil rights struggle

1:06:51.574,1:06:56.517
and his argument became more an argument that you would expect from someone

1:06:56.517,1:07:05.195
who was in the civil rights struggle than you would for someone who was following the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

1:07:05.195,1:07:24.519
The '60s showed us the white man in the image that the Nation of Islam had cast him in,

1:07:24.519,1:07:29.485
in the image of brutal person, you know, turning the dogs out on demonstrators,

1:07:29.485,1:07:31.970
using the fire hoses.

1:07:31.970,1:07:41.298
So all this helped the Nation of Islam's charge against the white race

1:07:41.298,1:07:48.330
and made it possible for the Nation of Islam's spokesman, for the E.Muhammed's spokesman, Malcolm X,

1:07:48.330,1:07:54.490
to get the press, to get the camera on him

1:07:54.490,1:08:03.623
and to state what he had confidence in that was an alternative, and that was seperation.

1:08:03.623,1:08:10.850
As Muslims, we believe that separation is the best way and the only sensible way,

1:08:10.850,1:08:12.787
not integration,

1:08:12.787,1:08:19.572
but on the other hand, when we see our people being brutalized by white bigots, white racists,

1:08:19.572,1:08:24.137
we think that they are foolish

1:08:24.137,1:08:27.657
to allow themselves to be beaten and brutalized

1:08:27.657,1:08:31.758
and do nothing whatsoever to protect themselves.

1:08:31.758,1:08:36.090
If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog,

1:08:36.090,1:08:40.796
whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog.

1:08:40.796,1:08:45.481
If a dog is fixed on a black man when that black man is doing nothing but

1:08:45.481,1:08:50.755
trying to take advantage of what the government says is supposed to be his,

1:08:50.755,1:08:52.749
then that black man should kill that dog or

1:08:52.749,1:08:57.715
any two-legged dog who sets the dog on him.

1:08:57.715,1:09:02.030
When Malcolm talks all the Muslim ministers talk,

1:09:02.030,1:09:06.567
they articulate for all the Negro people who hear them,

1:09:06.567,1:09:11.063
who listen to them, they articulate their suffering,

1:09:11.063,1:09:15.215
the suffering which has been in this country so long denied.

1:09:15.215,1:09:18.300
That's Malcolm's great authority over any of his audiences.

1:09:18.300,1:09:21.402
He corroborates their reality.

1:09:21.402,1:09:25.491
I was probably about 14 years old

1:09:25.491,1:09:33.058
and I was involved in demonstrations at this construction site.

1:09:33.058,1:09:39.593
The community was demanding integration of the workforce.

1:09:39.593,1:09:45.401
We realized that Malcolm had come to watch the demonstration.

1:09:45.401,1:09:50.005
When my shift changed, I went across the street to talk to Malcolm.

1:09:50.005,1:09:53.744
We had quite an argument that morning,

1:09:53.744,1:09:59.054
and he tried to explain to me what was wrong with my

1:09:59.054,1:10:03.372
laying down on the ground in front of a cement truck.

1:10:03.372,1:10:09.547
And Malcolm said if these are people who could lynch black people,

1:10:09.547,1:10:15.457
murder black children, enslave people, why couldn't they run over somebody

1:10:15.457,1:10:18.027
with a truck? And he said,

1:10:18.027,1:10:20.847
"Oh, they'd say it was an accident!"

1:10:20.847,1:10:26.659
He'd say, 'Oops, my foot slipped,' but you'd be just as dead."

1:10:26.659,1:10:32.027
And when he left and I turned around to go back across the street,

1:10:32.027,1:10:34.448
I went back and I got on the picket line,

1:10:34.448,1:10:39.755
but I never laid down in the street in front of a truck again.

1:10:39.755,1:10:44.612
We were sitting across the street at the Shabazz Frosti Kreem and

1:10:44.612,1:10:47.959
talking about race relations in America,

1:10:47.959,1:10:51.991
and Malcolm at one point said, "OK, what's your solution?"

1:10:51.991,1:10:54.284
And I don't-- he was not asking me for advice,

1:10:54.284,1:10:59.346
he was-- he just wanted to sort of put me on the spot for a moment, I think.

1:10:59.346,1:11:03.880
And I was, at the time, under the spell of Dr. King

1:11:03.880,1:11:07.701
and his notion of the beloved society which would be colorblind,

1:11:07.701,1:11:11.779
in which color would not be a disability for anybody

1:11:11.779,1:11:16.142
it would disappear, but it wouldn't be a disability.

1:11:16.142,1:11:19.593
and Malcolm just kind of looked back at me and said

1:11:19.593,1:11:23.189
"You're dreaming. I haven't got time for dreams."

1:11:23.189,1:11:28.288
KENNETH CLARKE: The goal of Dr. King is full equality

1:11:28.288,1:11:29.265
MALCOLM X: No!

1:11:29.265,1:11:31.476
KENNETH CLARK: -- and full rights of citizenship for Negroes.

1:11:31.476,1:11:34.507
MALCOLM X: The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance

1:11:34.507,1:11:39.738
to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

1:11:39.738,1:11:42.664
The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to get Negroes

1:11:42.664,1:11:46.516
to forgive the people who have brutalized them for 400 years

1:11:46.516,1:11:50.997
by lulling them to sleep and making them forgetting what those whites have done to them.

1:11:50.997,1:11:56.009
But the masses of black people in America today don't go for what Martin Luther King is putting down.

1:11:56.009,1:11:58.799
As you said in one of your articles, it's psychologically insecure

1:11:58.799,1:12:01.125
or something of that sort, I forget how you put it.

1:12:01.125,1:12:03.615
But you didn't endorse what Martin Luther King was doing yourself.

1:12:03.615,1:12:09.029
KENNETH CLARKE: I do not reject his goals of full integration and full equality rights for American citizens.

1:12:09.029,1:12:11.449
Do you reject these goals?

1:12:11.449,1:12:13.735
MALCOLM X: If you don't think that he's walking on the right road,

1:12:13.735,1:12:16.414
I'm quite sure you don't agree that he'll get to the right place!"

1:12:16.414,1:12:22.059
We were aware or felt that it was somewhat dangerous to be too closely associated to Malcolm.

1:12:22.059,1:12:25.890
He was saying some pretty rough things, particularly about whites,

1:12:25.890,1:12:30.939
and those of us who wanted to keep peace with the white world - some of us,

1:12:30.939,1:12:37.168
had our jobs out in the white community - we didn't really want to get too close to Malcolm.

1:12:37.168,1:12:42.549
KENNETH CLARKE: It has been suggested also that this movement preaches a gospel of violence, that...

1:12:42.549,1:12:46.582
MALCOLM X: No, the black people in this country have been the victims of violence

1:12:46.582,1:12:49.804
at the hands of the white man for 400 years,

1:12:49.804,1:12:52.623
and following the ignorant Negro preachers,

1:12:52.623,1:12:57.947
we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.

1:12:57.947,1:13:01.254
And today, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is showing black people in this country

1:13:01.254,1:13:05.453
that just as the white man and every other person on this earth has god-given rights -

1:13:05.453,1:13:10.851
natural rights, civil rights, any kind of rights that you can think of when it comes to defending himself -

1:13:10.851,1:13:17.819
black people should have -- we should have the right to defend ourselves also.

1:13:17.819,1:13:31.656
In August 1963, 250,000 Americans gathered for the march on Washington.

1:13:31.671,1:13:38.350
Malcolm came to us. He told us the story about the march on Washington.

1:13:38.350,1:13:43.637
And one thing I can say about Malcolm, anytime he told us something, he could back it up.

1:13:43.637,1:13:46.357
He had a article and he brought the

1:13:46.357,1:13:49.098
he said, "I'm going to tell you. I know what I'm talking about."

1:13:49.098,1:13:52.378
He says, "Who pays the bills for civil rights?"

1:13:52.378,1:13:55.748
And he said, "The angels are white."

1:13:55.748,1:13:59.816
And what he went on to say was, "You have to fight your battles,

1:13:59.816,1:14:02.469
and it started in the street.

1:14:02.469,1:14:08.038
But once you let them become integrated, it gets cool."

1:14:08.038,1:14:11.853
And then he relates it to a cup of coffee that is hot and as soon as...your water...

1:14:11.853,1:14:14.898
put the milk in it, it cools down.

1:14:14.898,1:14:18.475
And these analogies Malcolm used sometimes were funny,

1:14:18.475,1:14:23.684
but they got home, they hit home.

1:14:37.680,1:14:38.562
GLORIA RICHARDSON, Southern Civil Rights Leader

1:14:38.562,1:14:44.460
Most of the people that we were organizing had heard also of Malcolm X and that-

1:14:44.460,1:14:48.055
and respected him and listened to him.

1:14:48.208,1:14:51.773
And, you know, any time that he was going to be on,

1:14:51.881,1:14:55.565
they made a effort to hear those speeches

1:14:55.657,1:15:04.328
and felt that he indeed understood what their problems were and that they needed to be fought against and,

1:15:06.991,1:15:08.340
I suppose, not always nonviolently.

1:15:08.418,1:15:10.518
Nineteen days after the march on Washington,

1:15:10.594,1:15:13.047
a bomb blew apart the Sunday school of the 16th Street Baptist Church

1:15:13.109,1:15:15.063
in Birmingham, Alabama.

1:15:18.294,1:15:22.759
Twenty people were injured. Four little girls were killed.

1:15:29.080,1:15:33.215
Here you're talking about bombing a church and killing four little girls,

1:15:33.215,1:15:40.782
and the feeling of anger and not being able to do something or not doing something was

1:15:40.782,1:15:43.601
I remember was tremendous.

1:15:43.601,1:15:46.478
A lot of us sort of became dissatisfied,

1:15:46.478,1:15:49.672
because - and Malcolm really became somewhat dissatisfied -

1:15:49.672,1:15:50.942
-he never spoke of it

1:15:50.942,1:15:56.572
that we weren't doing anything to help the...

1:15:56.572,1:16:03.192
-our people who were being brutalized by the whites

1:16:03.192,1:16:07.704
and the police during the civil rights movement.

1:16:07.704,1:16:16.085
We felt that we should have gotten involved.

1:16:29.452,1:16:33.192
MALCOLM X: One white man named Lincoln supposedly fought the civil war to

1:16:33.192,1:16:36.012
solve the race problem and the problem is still here.

1:16:36.012,1:16:38.055
And then another white man named Kennedy came along,

1:16:38.055,1:16:40.989
running for president, and told Negroes what all he was going to do for them

1:16:40.989,1:16:43.462
if they voted for him, and they voted for him 80 percent,

1:16:43.462,1:16:46.667
and he's been in office now for three years and the problem is still here.

1:16:46.667,1:16:49.688
When police dogs were biting black women and black children and black babies

1:16:49.688,1:16:51.277
in Birmingham, Alabama,

1:16:51.277,1:16:56.950
that Kennedy talked about what he couldn't do because no federal law had been violated,

1:16:56.950,1:17:00.264
and as soon as the Negroes exploded and began to protect themselves

1:17:00.264,1:17:02.566
got the best of the crackers in Birmingham,

1:17:02.566,1:17:04.134
then Kennedy sent for troops.

1:17:04.134,1:17:05.707
And there was no... he used...

1:17:05.707,1:17:08.793
he didn't have any new law when he sent for the troops

1:17:08.793,1:17:12.365
when the Negroes erupted than he had at the time when whites were erupting.

1:17:12.365,1:17:16.196
So we are within our rights and with justice

1:17:16.196,1:17:22.312
with justification, when we express doubt concerning the ability of the white man

1:17:22.312,1:17:27.565
to solve our problem and also when we express doubt concerning his integrity,

1:17:27.565,1:17:30.662
concerning his sincerity, because you will have to confess

1:17:30.662,1:17:33.074
that the problem has been around here for a long time

1:17:33.074,1:17:35.880
and whites have been saying the same thing about it for the past 100 years

1:17:35.880,1:17:40.047
and it's no nearer a solution today than it was a hundred years ago.

1:17:40.047,1:17:42.325
Well, he was changed,

1:17:42.325,1:17:50.724
changed from religious talks to nationalistic talk to the point where I told him

1:17:50.724,1:17:55.603
(meaning Malcolm) that I listened to him when he first started

1:17:55.603,1:18:01.869
and I listened to him now and that I hear a change.

1:18:01.869,1:18:04.447
He say, "What kind of change you mean?"

1:18:04.447,1:18:09.342
I say, "Well, your talks when you first started out, you know,

1:18:09.342,1:18:14.773
caused me to have chills when you speak because of the truth that you were saying.

1:18:14.773,1:18:17.755
But now I don't feel that anymore."

1:18:17.755,1:18:20.326
He told his answer to me, he said, "Well," he said,

1:18:20.326,1:18:23.875
"maybe you have lost your religious or your spirit."

1:18:23.875,1:18:30.038
I say, "Well, maybe I have, but I'm just letting you know what I feel."

1:18:30.038,1:18:36.617
After a while, we began to notice that there were some rumblings from the family,

1:18:36.617,1:18:38.756
from Elijah Muhammad's family.

1:18:38.756,1:18:41.960
Every now and then there'd be little things they would say

1:18:41.960,1:18:48.405
that let you know that they got a problem with Malcolm rising up before the public like he's doing,

1:18:48.405,1:18:53.491
because everybody's beginning to recognize him now as the spokesman.

1:18:53.491,1:18:57.674
All right, the spokesman might be all right, but at the same time

1:18:57.674,1:19:02.353
he's getting the publicity this and the media's got him.

1:19:02.353,1:19:06.524
Everybody is Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm X, Malcolm X,

1:19:06.524,1:19:12.289
and you only hear-- you starting to hear Elijah Muhammed's name less and less.

1:19:12.289,1:19:18.476
Malcolm believed he could handle the jealousies within the Nation of Islam,

1:19:18.476,1:19:28.710
but tensions between him and the Messenger would come to a head in late November 1963.

1:19:28.710,1:19:31.621
So we were sitting in the restaurant drinking coffee,

1:19:31.621,1:19:35.891
having this meeting and the captain of the mosque, Joseph,

1:19:35.891,1:19:39.094
got a telephone call from his wife.

1:19:39.094,1:19:47.709
And Joseph got up and went to a phone booth, took the call, and he came back to the table looking visibly shocked.

1:19:47.709,1:19:56.340
And he said that his wife has just told him that Kennedy had been shot.

1:19:56.340,1:20:01.236
Malcolm sent somebody to get a radio out of the back and we plugged in the radio and

1:20:01.236,1:20:07.574
listened and the announcer was saying,

1:20:07.574,1:20:13.849
"To repeat, we're confirming that the President has been shot in Dallas, Texas

1:20:13.849,1:20:18.119
and at this point, we don't know how serious it is."

1:20:18.119,1:20:24.902
And Malcolm said-- immediately, he said, "That devil is dead."

1:20:24.902,1:20:31.039
John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

1:20:31.039,1:20:34.803
Mr. Muhammad had his son call Malcolm.

1:20:34.803,1:20:40.718
He said, "Brother Minister Malcolm, my father told me to tell you -

1:20:40.718,1:20:43.849
and we're calling all over the country -

1:20:43.849,1:20:50.413
that John F. Kennedy was assassinated and that we should not say anything

1:20:50.413,1:20:52.968
in a derogatory way whatsoever

1:20:52.968,1:21:00.167
because the man is the President of the United States and that people love him."

1:21:00.167,1:21:05.380
The Muslims had scheduled a rally at the Manhattan Center in New York City.

1:21:05.380,1:21:11.444
The day of the rally, the Messenger called Malcolm to remind him to teach the spiritual side

1:21:11.444,1:21:15.996
and avoid saying anything about the President's death.[br]

1:21:15.996,1:21:18.934
But he was clearly nervous about what he might say!

1:21:18.934,1:21:22.806
He spoke from a prepared speech,

1:21:22.806,1:21:26.202
never specifically mentioned Kennedy

1:21:26.202,1:21:33.020
but then, as if quoting desaster

1:21:33.020,1:21:37.129
he opened the floor up to questions.

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Normally he would speak but won't ask for questions and answers. But this day, he asked for questions and answers!

1:21:42.911,1:21:52.998
And he went in this litany, comparing other leaders around the world

1:21:52.998,1:22:01.015
who had somehow suffered at the hands of the United States government or its agents

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and how that compared to what had just happened to Kennedy.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And he said, "Patrice Lumumba died and his wife became a widow.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
His people had their leader cut down,"

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and the U.S. government had been involved in doing that.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And he went through a string of these,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
always winding up with the involvement of the United States government.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So that the final point that when you do those kinds of things all around the world,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
you set up a situation, an atmosphere, an environment in the world

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and sooner or later those chickens come home to roost.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
When he answered, I was really- I was really took back!

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I didn't understand that!

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And he answered the question. He just said,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
"Well," he said, "I know I'm going to get in trouble for this,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but as far as I'm concerned, it's a case of the chickens coming home to roost."

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And actually, John Ali, the National Secretary, was there

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and that's how Mr. Muhammad got the news so fast.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
JOHN ALI, National Secretary, Nation of Islam

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This statement is from Messenger Elijah Muhammad the leader of the Muslims in America.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Minister Malcolm Shabazz, addressing a public meeting at Manhattan Center in New York on Sunday, December 1st,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
did not speak for the Muslims when he made comments on the death of the President

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
John F. Kennedy.

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He was speaking for himself and not Muslims in general.

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And Minister Malcolm has been suspended from public speaking for the time being.

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While the Nation of Islam publicly grieved for the slain president,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the leadership announced the silencing of Malcolm X for 90 days.

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He was to give no speeches and to have no contact with the press.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Well, we were doing a lot of Kennedy stories and there was going to be a little one

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
talking about Malcolm having been suspended.

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And I was expecting to pick up the phone,

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I'd get a quote and that would be it.

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In this case, he held me on the phone for longer than I had expected,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and he sounded upset, he sounded worried,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and it was the first time I had ever sensed vulnerability in this guy

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
who I had always been accustomed to thinking of as an extremely strong man.

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Newspapers predicted a power struggle within the Nation of Islam.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It was later learned the FBI fed stories to local reporters

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in an attempt to deepen the rift between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Malcolm, isolated and exhausted, accepted an invitation to Miami

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
where young heavyweight contender Cassius Clay was training for his championship bout against Sonny Liston.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Though not a member of the nation,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Clay had been visiting Muslim temples for two years

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and had asked Malcolm to help him mentally prepare for the fight against Liston.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
ATTALLA SHABAZZ, Daughter

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Well, going to Florida for my family was a honeymoon,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
my parents referred to it as a honeymoon.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Of course, its significance of us going as a family was much stronger and meaningful for them.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
For us, it was just an opportunity to be with each other,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but as my mother talked about it, as my father talked about it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it was the first time in their real life as a marital union that they had time for themselves.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Malcolm offered to bring Cassius Clay into the Nation of Islam in exchange for his own reinstatement,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but the Nation's hierarchy ignored Malcolm's offer.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Like most of America, they saw the young boxer as a loudmouth with little chance of beating Liston.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
As Malcolm watched from the ringside, the young Clay wore down the older champion.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
At the beginning of the seventh round, a battered Liston could not come out of his corner.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Clay had become the new heavyweight champion of the world.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
OK, give us the poetry on number seven.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He wanted to go to heaven/ So I took him in seven.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
You took him in seven.

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CASSIUS CLAY: I am the king of the world!

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Hold it, hold it, hold it.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
CASSIUS CLAY: I'm prettier.[br]REPORTER: Hold it, you're not that pretty.[br]CASSIUS CLAY: I'm a bad man.[br]REPORTER: Wait, wait-[br]

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I shook up the world! I shook up the world!

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
What do you think of Cassius's victory in Miami?

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I think it was a great victory. He proved he was the best man!

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And where were you during the fight?

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I was in the auditorium, watching the fight.

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Right at ringside?

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Right at ringside. I was in seat seven.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The Nation's leadership bypassed Malcolm and called Clay directly.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
They accepted the young champion into the Nation of Islam

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and announced his new name, Muhammad Ali, at their annual convention on Savior's Day.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Malcolm was not invited.

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In his place, introducing Elijah Muhammad,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
was Malcolm's former protege, the minister from Boston, Louis X.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
"And I would meet the man that I had lived for and fought for and longed for all the days of my life!"

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Minister Malcolm was honest.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He was sincere. He was dedicated to the uplifting of African-American people.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Then you had another group of people who were officials there in Chicago who were-

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
who were dedicated to the uplifting of themselves.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He accused them of taking money, of buying expensive jewelry, of buying furs.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He accused them of converting the Nation of Islam into a criminal organization.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
A lot of the well-placed people in Islam had been trained by Malcolm.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Some of them had been reformed by Malcolm.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
They liked their little petty power positions,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and there were other people in the Nation with aspiration toward that number one slot.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And if Elijah Muhammad died and if Malcolm X took over the Nation,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the first thing he might do was some serious housecleaning.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He would move the money-changers out of the temple.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So the idea was to get rid of him BEFORE the event of the passing of the old man.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
On March 8, 1964, Malcolm announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He formed the new religious organization called the Muslim Mosque Incorporated,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
for those who followed him out of the Nation,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but Malcolm knew that a rival mosque would be seen as a direct challenge to Elijah Muhammad.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And he comes into this very room and he sits there and we talk to him.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He says, first of all, that he had arrived early, but because he was ahead of time,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
he'd driven around the block a couple of times.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He wanted to be exactly on time and he was.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We sat and listened. We didn't have any questions.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We knew what the anguish was.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We knew what was happening.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And he just seemed to need a friendly ear, so we let him talk.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And he talked about his time in prison.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He talked about the times when he first heard of Elijah Muhammad and the change it made in his life.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
He expressed that deep hurt within him that his father had rejected him.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And as he sat there, it was evident that if Elijah Muhammad had just done that at that moment,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
whatever the differences were between them, Malcolm would have been off and running.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Malcolm was certainly a beloved son of the Harlem community and people were interested in his side of the story.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Elijah Muhammad was somebody in a picture on the wall, someone whose name was mentioned,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but Harlem didn't know him.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
They knew Malcolm and loved Malcolm and remained loyal to Malcolm long after that split.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
MALCOLM X: So what you and I have got to do is get involved!