Malcolm X: Make It Plain (Full PBS Documentary)

The 1994 PBS documentary on the life of Malcolm X

[music]

Who taught you to hate the color of your skin?

Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair?

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

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

Who taught you to hate your own kind?

Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to

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

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

who taught you to hate being what God made you.

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

really thought we were free,

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

And there were many ways, where what really motivated us

was our desire to be loved by the white man.

Malcolm meant to lance that sense of inferiority.

He knew it would be painful.

He knew that people could kill you because of it,

but he dared to take that risk.

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

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

he was telling you to build your own house.

He expelled fear for African Americans.

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

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

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

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

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

That's why we loved him

He said it out loud, not behind closed doors,

He took on America for us.

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

If he were made to realize how Black people really feel

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

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

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

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

Stop sweet talking him!

Tell him how you feel!

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,

He shouldn't have a house. It should catch on fire, and burn down...

[applause]

[drums and music]

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

and argued the question of race in America.

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

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

You will never, as long as you live,

integrate into the white men's system

A hundred and twenty-fifth street and Seventh Avenue was

the center of activity among the black street orators.

When Malcolm arrived, technically he had no corner.

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

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

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

and he would stand there, taking his due.

and then he would open his mouth.

They call Mr. Muhammad a hate-teacher

because he makes you hate dope and alcohol.

They call Mr. Muhammad a black supremacist

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

but better than the white man.

Yes, better than the white man.

You are better than the white man

and that's not saying anything.

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

Who is he to be equal with?

You look at his skin

You can't compare your skin with his skin,

Why your skin look like gold beside his skin.

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

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

We couldn't see them as they are.

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

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

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

nothing but an old, pale thing.

I came away from that rally feeling that with him

once you heard him speak,

you never went back to where you were before.

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

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

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

He was speaking for a silent mass of black people

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

He preached it in fables and parables

and later, in writing his autobiography with Alex Haley,

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

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

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

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

and taught him skills of one or another sort,

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

You were born in Omaha, is that right?

Yes sir

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

I imagine about a year old.

Why did they leave Omaha?

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

There's a lot of Ku Klux Klan

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

Well, insecure, if not unhappy.

So you must have a somewhat prejudiced point of view,

a personally prejudiced point of view

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were the only black children in the neighborhood

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

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

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

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

Robin Hood was Malcolm.

and these white kids would go along with it.

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

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

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

moved the family to Lansing, Michigan.

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

Malcolm and his family lived outside of the city

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

so they were sort of considered as farmers.

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

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

But Earl Little refused to move.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

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

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

He wanted to exercise the authority, and he did.

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

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

toward improving their conditions.

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

In the 1920's Marcus Garvey,

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

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

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

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

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

Earl recruited new members.

Louise wrote for the Garvey newspaper.

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

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

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

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

What is your real name?

Malcolm. Malcolm X.

Is that your legal name?

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

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

My father didn't know his last name.

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

The real names of our people were destroyed

Well, was there any

during slavery.

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?

The last name of my forefathers

Yes?

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

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

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

I never acknowledge it whatsoever.

September 1931

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

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

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

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

nursing, holding the baby.

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

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

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

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

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

The police reported Earl Little's death an accident.

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

it was perceived that rather than an accident with a streetcar that Earl Little had really been pushed under the wheels of the streetcar.

As a matter of fact,

I remember hearing just that language,

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

And my father's death caused a great

great shock in the family,

because he was the power.

He was the strength.

We were organized,

we were a structured family.

When I'd get out of school,

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

we'd come right home and go to work

in the garden, clean up the chicken shed and get ready for the night,

and get up in the morning and all this.

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

This was while Dad was alive,

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

So we were disciplined.

And then after my father got killed

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

enabled us to get away with a lot of things

we wouldn't have tried to get away with.

So we got looser and looser.

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

She's reduced to where she has no income.

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

She was a proud lady.

She had a lot of pride.

She sold. She crocheted gloves for people.

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

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

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

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

[music]

For seven years, as Malcolm grew into adolescence,

his mother slowly withdrew from her family.

Two days before Christmas, 1938,

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

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

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

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

and it was only going to be a couple of weeks,

you know.

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

And it turned into years.

Louise Little would remain at Kalamazoo for the next 26 years.

The 13-year-old Malcolm watched as the court split up his family,

assigning the younger children to foster homes in Lansing

and sending him to a white community 10 miles away.

In the past,

the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer.

If I take my hand and slap you,

you don't even feel it.

It might sting you because these digits are separated.

But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together.

He was a man who, in the eighth grade in Michigan

a school where I think he was the only black in his class and one of the very few in the school

had been an outstanding straight-A student,

you know,

who had been in fact the president of his class,

and all the others were white in the eighth grade.

Obviously, he had to be exceptional to be those things.

And then you had the Malcolm who had left school and who had gone to Roxbury, Massachusetts

where he had gotten his first exposure to what might loosely be called "hustling."

[music]

I called myself little hustler up in Roxbury in those days.

And this particular day, you know,

Malcolm X had come into Boston and he had on his zoot suit with the wide-brim hat

with the long, three-quarter-length coat with the chain that went down to your ankles.

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

Now, when Malcolm left Lansing,

he had nothing but a old square suit on

"white man's suit,"

as I call it.

When he came back from Boston, oh Lord,

Malcolm had a zoot suit on and a wide-brim hat

and a chain from his hat down onto his lapel

and he was the talk of the town.

Everybody was talking about Malcolm.

[music]

And then when he was dancing on the floor and he was floating around,

those pants were like he was a floating balloon,

with -- that coat was like a wing.

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

And this used to really shake up the girls.

[music and singing]

In Boston, they called him "New York Red.

In New York, they called him "Detroit Red."

He had his hair crockonoed, "conked," you know.

It was red and he had pictures of him and Billie Holiday

and all these people at the time out there who were just being made known to the rest of the black world.

Malcolm worked the kitchen crew on the New Haven Railroad between Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.

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

He reached a point where he said,

"You'll never make it on these janitor jobs and selling sandwiches on these trains and shining shoes and stuff like that."

He says, "You never will get anywhere."

Well, he had the reputation as being a hustler and he was a street person,

but he wasn't a hustler.

He was a con man, yeah, a con artist.

They called him an artist.

When the white folks came out at night and they wanted black women,

he could arrange for them to get them.

If they wanted bootleg whiskey, he knew where to get it.

If they wanted drugs, he knew where to get it.

He made it possible that he knew what they wanted and he knew where to get it

and he would be in the middle where he could make a profit off of it.

And this is the way he started doing.

Looking back at that time,

Malcolm said only three things worried him

jail, a job and the Army.

To avoid serving in World War II,

he told his draft board that he wanted to organize black soldiers to kill whites.

He was judged unfit for the military.

Malcolm's gambling and drugs and Harlem nightlife were expensive.

He had already been arrested twice for petty crimes.

When he moved back to Boston in 1945,

he organized a gang to burglarize homes of prominent families.

The other gang members included his friend Malcolm Jarvis,

his white girlfriend, Bea, and two other white women.

This girl knew that these people were down in Florida at that time of the year,

there was nobody home,

so we broke into the house and we'd get some of their valuables and Malcolm would

take most of the stuff and pawn it and get money

for his gambling habit.

After two weeks of doing this,