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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 to 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. 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?

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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.

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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,

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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,

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that he was probably pushed under the wheels of that streetcar.

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And my father's death caused a great

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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,

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when we got out of school, me and my brothers and sisters,

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we'd come right home and go to work

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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,

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because to not do this brought the consequences of a whipping.

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So we were disciplined.

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And then after my father got killed

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and my mother's inability to run as fast as I could run or Malcolm

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enabled us to get away with a lot of things

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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.

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She's reduced to where she has no income.

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She'd try to get -- she got jobs.

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She was a proud lady.

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She had a lot of pride.

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She sold. She crocheted gloves for people.

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She did a lot of things not to be dependent solely on welfare.

231
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She didn't like them telling her what she could do and what she couldn't do.

232
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And this is one of the main things that devastated her more than anything else.

233
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As time went by, you could see she was wearing down.

234
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[music]

235
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For seven years, as Malcolm grew into adolescence,

236
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his mother slowly withdrew from her family.

237
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Two days before Christmas, 1938,

238
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Louise Little was diagnosed as paranoid and was sent to Kalamazoo State Hospital.

239
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And when I came home from school one day and she wasn't there,

240
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I can remember being empty 'cause my mother had never left us.

241
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And I felt, you know, the pain of her being gone every day,

242
00:19:01,472 --> 00:19:04,208
and it was only going to be a couple of weeks,

243
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you know.

244
00:19:05,187 --> 00:19:08,393
She was going to get better and come right back home.

245
00:19:08,393 --> 00:19:12,848
And it turned into years.

246
00:19:12,848 --> 00:19:20,830
Louise Little would remain at Kalamazoo for the next 26 years.

247
00:19:20,830 --> 00:19:25,620
The 13-year-old Malcolm watched as the court split up his family,

248
00:19:25,620 --> 00:19:29,888
assigning the younger children to foster homes in Lansing

249
00:19:29,888 --> 00:19:38,257
and sending him to a white community 10 miles away.

250
00:19:38,257 --> 00:19:39,838
In the past,

251
00:19:39,838 --> 00:19:45,140
the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer.

252
00:19:45,140 --> 00:19:49,617
If I take my hand and slap you,

253
00:19:49,617 --> 00:19:51,068
you don't even feel it.

254
00:19:51,068 --> 00:19:55,991
It might sting you because these digits are separated.

255
00:19:55,991 --> 00:20:03,662
But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together.

256
00:20:03,662 --> 00:20:08,128
He was a man who, in the eighth grade in Michigan

257
00:20:08,128 --> 00:20:12,892
a school where I think he was the only black in his class and one of the very few in the school

258
00:20:12,892 --> 00:20:16,625
had been an outstanding straight-A student,

259
00:20:16,625 --> 00:20:17,181
you know,

260
00:20:17,181 --> 00:20:19,599
who had been in fact the president of his class,

261
00:20:19,599 --> 00:20:22,405
and all the others were white in the eighth grade.

262
00:20:22,405 --> 00:20:26,194
Obviously, he had to be exceptional to be those things.

263
00:20:26,194 --> 00:20:33,159
And then you had the Malcolm who had left school and who had gone to Roxbury, Massachusetts

264
00:20:33,159 --> 00:20:39,480
where he had gotten his first exposure to what might loosely be called "hustling."

265
00:20:39,480 --> 00:21:04,562
[music]

266
00:21:04,562 --> 00:21:09,466
I called myself little hustler up in Roxbury in those days.

267
00:21:09,466 --> 00:21:11,685
And this particular day, you know,

268
00:21:11,685 --> 00:21:17,202
Malcolm X had come into Boston and he had on his zoot suit with the wide-brim hat

269
00:21:17,202 --> 00:21:21,983
with the long, three-quarter-length coat with the chain that went down to your ankles.

270
00:21:21,983 --> 00:21:31,864
I don't know, the last time I recall, Cab Callowy used that outfit for his stage uniform.

271
00:21:31,864 --> 00:21:33,676
Now, when Malcolm left Lansing,

272
00:21:33,676 --> 00:21:36,186
he had nothing but a old square suit on

273
00:21:36,186 --> 00:21:37,069
"white man's suit,"

274
00:21:37,069 --> 00:21:38,865
as I call it.

275
00:21:38,865 --> 00:21:41,168
When he came back from Boston, oh Lord,

276
00:21:41,168 --> 00:21:44,567
Malcolm had a zoot suit on and a wide-brim hat

277
00:21:44,567 --> 00:21:47,065
and a chain from his hat down onto his lapel

278
00:21:47,065 --> 00:21:49,666
and he was the talk of the town.

279
00:21:49,666 --> 00:21:53,402
Everybody was talking about Malcolm.

280
00:21:53,402 --> 00:21:57,647
[music]

281
00:21:57,647 --> 00:22:01,226
And then when he was dancing on the floor and he was floating around,

282
00:22:01,226 --> 00:22:04,094
those pants were like he was a floating balloon,

283
00:22:04,094 --> 00:22:07,006
with -- that coat was like a wing.

284
00:22:07,006 --> 00:22:11,762
The way he'd be dancing and flying around with the big, 10-gallon hat on and the chain flinging.

285
00:22:11,762 --> 00:22:11,763
And this used to really shake up the girls.

286
00:22:11,763 --> 00:22:11,763
[music and singing]

287
00:22:28,634 --> 00:22:29,815
In Boston, they called him "New York Red.

288
00:22:29,815 --> 00:22:31,856
In New York, they called him "Detroit Red."

289
00:22:31,856 --> 00:22:34,512
He had his hair crockonoed, "conked," you know.

290
00:22:34,512 --> 00:22:38,334
It was red and he had pictures of him and Billie Holiday

291
00:22:38,334 --> 00:22:46,367
and all these people at the time out there who were just being made known to the rest of the black world.

292
00:22:46,367 --> 00:22:54,704
Malcolm worked the kitchen crew on the New Haven Railroad between Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.

293
00:22:54,704 --> 00:23:06,228
In 1942, he moved to Harlem and at age 17 began traveling in a world of after-hour clubs and small-time hustlers.

294
00:23:06,228 --> 00:23:08,522
He reached a point where he said,

295
00:23:08,522 --> 00:23:15,815
"You'll never make it on these janitor jobs and selling sandwiches on these trains and shining shoes and stuff like that."

296
00:23:15,815 --> 00:23:18,176
He says, "You never will get anywhere."

297
00:23:18,176 --> 00:23:22,878
Well, he had the reputation as being a hustler and he was a street person,

298
00:23:22,878 --> 00:23:25,012
but he wasn't a hustler.

299
00:23:25,012 --> 00:23:28,070
He was a con man, yeah, a con artist.

300
00:23:28,070 --> 00:23:30,741
They called him an artist.

301
00:23:30,741 --> 00:23:34,109
When the white folks came out at night and they wanted black women,

302
00:23:34,109 --> 00:23:35,463
he could arrange for them to get them.

303
00:23:35,463 --> 00:23:38,087
If they wanted bootleg whiskey, he knew where to get it.

304
00:23:38,087 --> 00:23:41,089
If they wanted drugs, he knew where to get it.

305
00:23:41,089 --> 00:23:45,954
He made it possible that he knew what they wanted and he knew where to get it

306
00:23:45,954 --> 00:23:49,423
and he would be in the middle where he could make a profit off of it.

307
00:23:49,423 --> 00:23:53,124
And this is the way he started doing.

308
00:23:53,124 --> 00:23:54,621
Looking back at that time,

309
00:23:54,621 --> 00:23:57,794
Malcolm said only three things worried him

310
00:23:57,794 --> 00:24:02,863
jail, a job and the Army.

311
00:24:02,863 --> 00:24:04,724
To avoid serving in World War II,

312
00:24:04,724 --> 00:24:10,840
he told his draft board that he wanted to organize black soldiers to kill whites.

313
00:24:10,840 --> 00:24:17,939
He was judged unfit for the military.

314
00:24:17,939 --> 00:24:22,117
Malcolm's gambling and drugs and Harlem nightlife were expensive.

315
00:24:22,117 --> 00:24:26,560
He had already been arrested twice for petty crimes.

316
00:24:26,560 --> 00:24:29,589
When he moved back to Boston in 1945,

317
00:24:29,589 --> 00:24:34,368
he organized a gang to burglarize homes of prominent families.

318
00:24:34,368 --> 00:24:37,969
The other gang members included his friend Malcolm Jarvis,

319
00:24:37,969 --> 00:24:42,848
his white girlfriend, Bea, and two other white women.

320
00:24:42,848 --> 00:24:47,204
This girl knew that these people were down in Florida at that time of the year,

321
00:24:47,204 --> 00:24:48,086
there was nobody home,

322
00:24:48,086 --> 00:24:52,649
so we broke into the house and we'd get some of their valuables and Malcolm would

323
00:24:52,649 --> 00:24:54,929
take most of the stuff and pawn it and get money

324
00:24:54,929 --> 00:24:56,589
for his gambling habit.

325
00:24:56,589 --> 00:25:00,000
After two weeks of doing this,

326
00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:02,443
that's when the ??? when he made the mistake

327
00:25:02,443 --> 00:25:07,112
of going to the pawn shop to retrieve a watch worth over a thousand dollars that came out of

328
00:25:07,112 --> 00:25:13,170
one of the houses and that's when he was arrested by three policemen.

329
00:25:13,170 --> 00:25:19,034
Malcolm Little, Malcolm Jarvis and the three women were charged with breaking and entering.

330
00:25:19,034 --> 00:25:22,189
The fact that two black men were with white women became

331
00:25:22,189 --> 00:25:25,107
an issue in the court.

332
00:25:25,107 --> 00:25:32,351
Malcolm was definitely involved with two white women and this is what made the case so powerful.

333
00:25:32,351 --> 00:25:36,007
So outrageous.

334
00:25:36,007 --> 00:25:42,396
The women testified that Malcolm had forced them to participate in the burglaries.

335
00:25:42,396 --> 00:25:49,519
The two men received a maximum sentence: eight to ten years in state prison.

336
00:25:49,519 --> 00:25:53,694
When they sentenced us, I went out of my mind.

337
00:25:53,694 --> 00:25:58,140
I reached up and grabbed the bars of the cage and I shook them, almost shook them right up off the floor

338
00:25:58,140 --> 00:26:00,161
and I hollered at the judge and I said to him,

339
00:26:00,161 --> 00:26:03,675
"you might as well kill me as to give me ten years in jail."

340
00:26:03,675 --> 00:26:09,100
Well, I was what you call a mad negro, I was one.

341
00:26:09,100 --> 00:26:11,307
And I knew what I saw was real.

342
00:26:11,307 --> 00:26:12,895
???

343
00:26:12,895 --> 00:26:22,947
I knew that when they laughed all together, they were laughing, look what we did, we doing it to the negro.

344
00:26:22,947 --> 00:26:30,138
Then they had the unintimidated gall to ask the girls before they took them out of there to press charges

345
00:26:30,138 --> 00:26:36,421
against us for rape. The girls wouldn't do it.

346
00:26:36,421 --> 00:26:41,654
Malcolm Little was twenty years old, facing eight to ten years in state prison.

347
00:26:41,654 --> 00:26:47,324
He had wandered far from the Garvey pride and independence his parents had preached.

348
00:26:47,324 --> 00:26:56,346
He was now prisoner number 22843.

349
00:26:56,346 --> 00:27:01,696
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace.

350
00:27:01,696 --> 00:27:05,816
To remain a criminal is the disgrace.

351
00:27:05,816 --> 00:27:10,333
I formerly was a criminal. I formerly was in prison.

352
00:27:10,333 --> 00:27:15,243
I'm not ashamed of that. You never can use that over my head,

353
00:27:15,243 --> 00:27:19,423
and he's using the wrong stick. I don't feel that stick.

354
00:27:19,423 --> 00:27:26,560
[cheering and applause]

355
00:27:26,560 --> 00:27:32,129
They charged Jesus with sedition. Didn't they do that?

356
00:27:32,129 --> 00:27:40,864
They said he was against Caesar. They said he was discriminating because he told his disciples

357
00:27:40,864 --> 00:27:49,453
"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,

358
00:27:49,453 --> 00:27:55,220
who are lost from the knowledge of themselves and who are strangers in a land that is not theirs. Go to those people. Go

359
00:27:55,220 --> 00:28:04,843
to the slaves. Go to the second-class citizens. Go to the ones who are suffering the brunt of Caesar's brutality."

360
00:28:04,843 --> 00:28:11,725
And if Jesus were here in America today, he wouldn't be going to the white man. The white man is the oppressor.

361
00:28:11,725 --> 00:28:17,449
He would be going to the oppressed. He would be going to the humble. He would be going to the lowly.

362
00:28:17,449 --> 00:28:20,473
He would be going to the rejected and the despised.

363
00:28:20,473 --> 00:28:35,042
He would be going to the so-called American negro.

364
00:28:35,042 --> 00:28:43,170
Behind prison walls, Malcolm hustled bets, fed his drug habit and argued against the existence of God.

365
00:28:43,170 --> 00:28:47,138
The men in the cellblock called him Satan.

366
00:28:47,138 --> 00:28:56,405
But at the same time, encouraged by an older black inmate, Malcolm began reading and taking English courses.

367
00:28:56,405 --> 00:29:06,945
Malcolm described vividly prison life that he was in effect lonely and limited, but had plans for

368
00:29:06,945 --> 00:29:12,654
he was going to do a lot of reading and he certainly

369
00:29:12,654 --> 00:29:14,426
did a lot of writing.

370
00:29:14,426 --> 00:29:20,799
Because I think there were times when he probably wrote to me every week.

371
00:29:20,799 --> 00:29:26,051
During the second year in prison, his brothers and sisters wrote to him about what they called

372
00:29:26,051 --> 00:29:29,330
the natural religion for the black man,

373
00:29:29,330 --> 00:29:35,808
a religion that taught that black people were the original people, that God was black and

374
00:29:35,808 --> 00:29:38,596
was called Allah.

375
00:29:38,596 --> 00:29:43,432
They told Malcolm they were now a part of the Nation of Islam, followers of the honorable

376
00:29:43,432 --> 00:29:49,172
Elijah Mohammad, the messenger of Allah.

377
00:29:49,172 --> 00:29:58,522
I think Islam is one of the greatest religions of all time for our people in America. The so-called American

378
00:29:58,522 --> 00:30:12,679
negro have to be completely reeducated and Islam gives them that qualification, that he can feel proud and

379
00:30:12,679 --> 00:30:18,749
does not feel ashamed to be called a black man.

380
00:30:18,749 --> 00:30:25,953
I came into the Muslim movement in 1947 and, um

381
00:30:25,953 --> 00:30:29,787
then started bringing my brothers and sisters in.

382
00:30:29,787 --> 00:30:34,974
When we already had been indoctrinated with Marcus Garvey's philosophy, so they didn't

383
00:30:34,974 --> 00:30:39,043
have anything to do with convincing us that we were black

384
00:30:39,043 --> 00:30:40,621
and should be proud.

385
00:30:40,621 --> 00:30:43,987
We were already that when we came in.

386
00:30:43,987 --> 00:30:47,373
So I wrote to Malcolm and told him about...

387
00:30:47,373 --> 00:30:54,109
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

388
00:30:54,109 --> 00:31:01,061
he had very low tolerance for religion and I didn't intend to lose that tolerance.

389
00:31:01,061 --> 00:31:05,752
Malcolm's brothers and sisters wrote the young prisoner that black people in America

390
00:31:05,752 --> 00:31:11,545
were part of a lost tribe, soon to be delivered out of bondage.

391
00:31:11,545 --> 00:31:17,888
And that whites, according to Elijah Mohammad, were a race of devils whose domination on Earth was

392
00:31:17,888 --> 00:31:21,371
about to end.

393
00:31:21,371 --> 00:31:27,778
At first, he liked every bit of it, except one thing he couldn't understand and that was the part they were teaching

394
00:31:27,778 --> 00:31:31,258
about the white man being the devil.

395
00:31:31,258 --> 00:31:33,874
Malcolm wrote to Elijah Mohammad. Elijah Mohammad

396
00:31:33,874 --> 00:31:38,692
answered and when he answered, he would cite a portion of scripture.

397
00:31:38,692 --> 00:31:46,984
And then he gave him the key. He said the key... the Bible is the book that everything that takes place in that Bible

398
00:31:46,984 --> 00:31:48,392
is on this Earth.

399
00:31:48,392 --> 00:31:53,875
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

400
00:31:53,875 --> 00:32:01,359
putting that hell on you. Well, that's a very convincing teaching, especially when you're using the white

401
00:32:01,359 --> 00:32:05,383
man's history to corroborate this.

402
00:32:05,383 --> 00:32:13,663
Malcolm began reading history, philosophy and religion. The writings of W.E.B Du Bois,

403
00:32:13,663 --> 00:32:21,889
Shakespeare, Socrates, the fables of Aesop, the lives of Gandhi and Nat Turner.

404
00:32:21,889 --> 00:32:29,609
And he finds all this history of how white Christians lynched black Christians, white Christians were the ones who were

405
00:32:29,609 --> 00:32:33,499
involved in the slave trade -- those were Christians.

406
00:32:33,499 --> 00:32:40,123
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

407
00:32:40,123 --> 00:32:50,200
on this earth, it has to be the white man.

408
00:32:50,200 --> 00:33:00,324
Elijah Mohammad told Malcolm to submit to Allah. But for Malcolm, submission would always be difficult.

409
00:33:00,324 --> 00:33:11,387
It took a week before he could force himself to bow in prayer.

410
00:33:11,387 --> 00:33:17,629
Later, to help spread the teachings of Elijah Mohammad, Malcolm joined the prison debate team, competing

411
00:33:17,629 --> 00:33:22,846
against visiting college teams from Harvard and MIT.

412
00:33:22,846 --> 00:33:25,910
That's when Malcolm's name and fame started spreading

413
00:33:25,910 --> 00:33:28,664
amongst the prison population. And that's when the

414
00:33:28,664 --> 00:33:31,905
population started to grow at the debating classes. Most of

415
00:33:31,905 --> 00:33:36,330
the fellows used to come over out of curiosity just to hear him speak.

416
00:33:36,330 --> 00:33:43,810
In 1950, Malcolm wrote to the governor demanding the right to practice the Muslim religion in prison.

417
00:33:43,810 --> 00:33:53,458
His letters would later end up in FBI files. The Bureau had been keeping a close watch on the nation of Islam since

418
00:33:53,458 --> 00:34:02,554
the late 1930s. Malcolm, considered a troublemaker, was denied an early parole.

419
00:34:02,554 --> 00:34:09,667
He was not eligible to be let out at that time because he'd be a threat to society.

420
00:34:09,667 --> 00:34:16,810
They considered him dangerous, knowledge-wise and otherwise, religious-wise. He would've been like a

421
00:34:16,810 --> 00:34:22,600
rotten apple in the barrel of a thousand. He was gonna spoil many.

422
00:34:22,600 --> 00:34:33,250
On August 7, 1952, after six and a half years in prison, Malcolm was released. Within a month, he was accepted into

423
00:34:33,250 --> 00:34:41,781
the Nation of Islam. Malcolm Little had become Malcolm X.

424
00:34:41,781 --> 00:34:45,265
How did you happen to join the Muslim movement?

425
00:34:45,265 --> 00:34:54,536
I was in prison. I was a very wayward criminal, backward, illiterate, uneducated, whatever other negative characteristics you can think of...

426
00:34:54,536 --> 00:35:01,121
type of person until I heard the teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad. And because of the impact that it had

427
00:35:01,121 --> 00:35:08,334
upon me in giving me a desire to reform myself and rehabilitate myself for the first time in my life. And also being

428
00:35:08,334 --> 00:35:15,440
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

429
00:35:15,440 --> 00:35:21,363
the religious teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad, immediately, it instilled within me such a high degree of racial

430
00:35:21,363 --> 00:35:28,250
pride and racial dignity that I wanted to be somebody and I realized that I couldn't be anybody by begging the white man

431
00:35:28,250 --> 00:35:35,328
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.

432
00:35:35,328 --> 00:35:47,570
The first time I recall seeing Malcolm was at the home of my father, Elijah Mohammad. I saw a thin man, tall man, young

433
00:35:47,570 --> 00:35:54,574
man, reddish face. If he was just meeting you, the first thing you would get from him is a smile.

434
00:35:54,574 --> 00:35:58,000
He said "this is Wallace" and I smiled

435
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:05,262
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.

436
00:36:05,262 --> 00:36:12,009
And he was just so excited about the messenger, really, it wasn't just seeing Wallace. It was seeing the

437
00:36:12,009 --> 00:36:14,584
messenger's son.

438
00:36:14,584 --> 00:36:20,067
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

439
00:36:20,067 --> 00:36:28,442
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.

440
00:36:28,442 --> 00:36:34,742
And he says, "I'm surprised that you are sitting here and so many empty seats." He said "every time you come out here,"

441
00:36:34,742 --> 00:36:37,152
he said "this place should be full."

442
00:36:37,152 --> 00:36:40,706
And that excited the honorable Elijah Mohammad.

443
00:36:40,706 --> 00:36:48,490
In the early 1950s, the Nation of Islam was unknown in most black communities. Total membership was believed to be

444
00:36:48,490 --> 00:36:51,373
no more than four hundred people.

445
00:36:51,373 --> 00:36:56,144
Malcolm was sent on the road to spread the message.

446
00:36:56,144 --> 00:37:04,685
Within two years, he helped organize temples in Boston, Hartford and Philadelphia.

447
00:37:04,685 --> 00:37:11,223
Elijah Mohammad then named Malcolm minister of the most important temple on the east coast,

448
00:37:11,223 --> 00:37:15,430
Harlem's temple number seven.

449
00:37:15,430 --> 00:37:18,805
Mr. Mohammad knew that Malcolm had the experience and

450
00:37:18,805 --> 00:37:23,742
he knew New York and he also knew that he was the kind

451
00:37:23,742 --> 00:37:33,103
of man, complexion, height, speech and carriage, all has to be taken into consideration when you select a man

452
00:37:33,103 --> 00:37:37,862
to send before the people. Plus, this is an international city.

453
00:37:37,862 --> 00:37:42,037
You got to have your best in New York and this is why

454
00:37:42,037 --> 00:37:46,872
Mr. Mohammad selected him.

455
00:37:46,872 --> 00:37:50,062
[soft applause]

456
00:37:50,062 --> 00:37:56,507
In 1955, when Elijah Mohammad visited the New York temple, it was to inspect the work of the

457
00:37:56,507 --> 00:38:09,033
ambitious and outspoken young minister who had transformed tiny storefronts along the east coast into a congregation of thousands.

458
00:38:09,033 --> 00:38:19,131
Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again,

459
00:38:19,131 --> 00:38:24,005
some of them came out and found a new meaning to their

460
00:38:24,005 --> 00:38:28,174
manhood and their womanhood. Had Elijah Mohammad

461
00:38:28,174 --> 00:38:40,536
tried to introduce an orthodox form of Arab-oriented Islam, I doubt if he would have attracted five hundred people.

462
00:38:40,536 --> 00:38:52,090
But he introduced a form of Islam that could communicate with the people he had to deal with.

463
00:38:52,090 --> 00:39:01,330
He was the king to those who had no king and he was the messiah to those some people thought unworthy

464
00:39:01,330 --> 00:39:07,639
of a messiah.

465
00:39:07,639 --> 00:39:14,318
The ??? honorable Elijah Mohammad is like nothing I have ever taken, it's a medicine.

466
00:39:14,318 --> 00:39:15,301
Right, that's right.

467
00:39:15,301 --> 00:39:18,261
You're seeing the medicine that has cured me of all my ills.

468
00:39:18,261 --> 00:39:19,046
That's right.

469
00:39:19,046 --> 00:39:21,253
'Cause I was a sick man.

470
00:39:21,253 --> 00:39:25,649
And when I embraced the teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad, these teachings cured me of these ills.

471
00:39:25,649 --> 00:39:28,102
I'm a well man now. And I feel good.

472
00:39:28,102 --> 00:39:32,213
That's right, as long as you stay with the doctor, you'll continue to feel good.

473
00:39:32,213 --> 00:39:34,328
Yes sir.

474
00:39:34,328 --> 00:39:36,295
What about you, brother? How do you feel about the honorable Elijah Mohammad?

475
00:39:36,295 --> 00:39:44,496
Honorable Elijah Mohammad is trying to teach all our original people they are in bad shape. Honorable Elijah

476
00:39:44,496 --> 00:39:46,801
Mohammad trying to wake 'em up.

477
00:39:46,801 --> 00:39:50,123
[music]

478
00:39:50,123 --> 00:39:54,021
Inside Muslim temples, no white people were allowed.

479
00:39:54,021 --> 00:40:06,668
Members worked to build a self-sufficient community founded on strict rules and absolute obedience.

480
00:40:06,668 --> 00:40:14,412
The Nation set up Muslim schools for its children, teaching mathematics, science, history and Arabic.

481
00:40:14,412 --> 00:40:20,773
[all in chorus] We're the original man. The original man is the ???

482
00:40:20,773 --> 00:40:27,796
[indistinct] on the Planet Earth.

483
00:40:27,796 --> 00:40:34,872
Muslim women studied nutrition, child-rearing and guidelines on how to care for their husbands.

484
00:40:34,872 --> 00:40:46,309
Muslim men studied parental responsibility, history and religion.

485
00:40:46,309 --> 00:40:54,028
The elite corps, called the Fruit of Islam, was trained in hand-to-hand combat and was expected to protect

486
00:40:54,028 --> 00:41:01,893
the temples and to punish any members who spoke out against the messenger.

487
00:41:01,893 --> 00:41:08,072
I was surprised when I went into some... a couple of the Muslim families. The faith that they had

488
00:41:08,072 --> 00:41:17,591
in Elijah Mohammad and in Malcolm... I asked one father, I said, "suppose your son came home one day and told you

489
00:41:17,591 --> 00:41:20,612
that he was renouncing the Muslim religion?"

490
00:41:20,612 --> 00:41:25,823
And he said "I would turn him from my door. I would never allow him in again."

491
00:41:25,823 --> 00:41:30,982
So I asked Malcolm about that. He says, "he meant it. And he would do it."

492
00:41:30,982 --> 00:41:35,401
I says, "not worry about what happened to his son?"

493
00:41:35,401 --> 00:41:43,835
"No, he wouldn't worry about what happened to him. His allegiance is with Elijah Mohammad."

494
00:41:43,835 --> 00:41:51,191
To help expand the Nation of Islam, Malcolm created a newspaper, Muhammad Speaks,

495
00:41:51,191 --> 00:41:56,453
and persuaded other black newspapers to carry the messenger's weekly column.

496
00:41:56,453 --> 00:42:04,233
His strength was, once he believed in a thing, he would give everything he had to it, all of his energies.

497
00:42:04,233 --> 00:42:06,976
He'd work, he would become a workaholic.

498
00:42:06,976 --> 00:42:09,127
He worked day and night for it.

499
00:42:09,127 --> 00:42:16,147
He only required around four hours' sleep and many times wouldn't get that. And you just kind of wonder

500
00:42:16,147 --> 00:42:19,631
how can anybody keep up that kind of a pace? But he did it,

501
00:42:19,631 --> 00:42:27,343
day in and day out. Plus on top of that, he's reading. He's reading papers, keeping up what the news is,

502
00:42:27,343 --> 00:42:34,289
he's just a person that's tuned into life in such a way that

503
00:42:34,289 --> 00:42:38,988
he doesn't miss too much of it.

504
00:42:38,988 --> 00:42:46,478
At age 32, after devoting five years to building the Nation, he sought the approval of Elijah Mohammad to marry

505
00:42:46,478 --> 00:42:53,282
sister Betty X, a college-educated member of Harlem's temple number seven.

506
00:42:53,282 --> 99:59:59,999
In the years that followed, the demands of his ministry allowed little time for his growing family.

507
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
He sometimes, if I could catch him, would have to read to the children. They would always want the story read again

508
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
so that they would really just wait until he was on the last page and say "read it again."

509
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
"Read it again, read it again," you know, and so that he started giving the books different endings.

510
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
He had a beautiful sense of humor, especially when he was kidding me about pork and whacking me on the back

511
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and saying that "you're a decent human being, smart historian, I'm going to give you 99 as a human being and

512
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
you stop eating pork I'm going to give you 100."

513
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Had a beautiful sense of humor, plus the fact that when you got to know him, he was kind of shy.