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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?
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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.
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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.
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As time went by, you could see she was wearing down.
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[music]
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For seven years, as Malcolm grew into adolescence,
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his mother slowly withdrew from her family.
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Two days before Christmas, 1938,
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Louise Little was diagnosed as paranoid and was sent to Kalamazoo State Hospital.
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And when I came home from school one day and she wasn't there,
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I can remember being empty 'cause my mother had never left us.
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And I felt, you know, the pain of her being gone every day,
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and it was only going to be a couple of weeks,
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you know.
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She was going to get better and come right back home.
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And it turned into years.
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Louise Little would remain at Kalamazoo for the next 26 years.
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The 13-year-old Malcolm watched as the court split up his family,
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assigning the younger children to foster homes in Lansing
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and sending him to a white community 10 miles away.
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In the past,
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the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer.
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If I take my hand and slap you,
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you don't even feel it.
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It might sting you because these digits are separated.
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But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together.
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He was a man who, in the eighth grade in Michigan
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a school where I think he was the only black in his class and one of the very few in the school
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had been an outstanding straight-A student,
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you know,
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who had been in fact the president of his class,
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and all the others were white in the eighth grade.
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Obviously, he had to be exceptional to be those things.
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And then you had the Malcolm who had left school and who had gone to Roxbury, Massachusetts
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where he had gotten his first exposure to what might loosely be called "hustling."
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[music]
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I called myself little hustler up in Roxbury in those days.
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And this particular day, you know,
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Malcolm X had come into Boston and he had on his zoot suit with the wide-brim hat
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with the long, three-quarter-length coat with the chain that went down to your ankles.
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I don't know, the last time I recall, Cab Callowy used that outfit for his stage uniform.
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Now, when Malcolm left Lansing,
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he had nothing but a old square suit on
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"white man's suit,"
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as I call it.
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When he came back from Boston, oh Lord,
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Malcolm had a zoot suit on and a wide-brim hat
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and a chain from his hat down onto his lapel
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and he was the talk of the town.
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Everybody was talking about Malcolm.
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[music]
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And then when he was dancing on the floor and he was floating around,
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those pants were like he was a floating balloon,
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with -- that coat was like a wing.
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The way he'd be dancing and flying around with the big, 10-gallon hat on and the chain flinging.
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And this used to really shake up the girls.
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[music and singing]
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In Boston, they called him "New York Red.
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In New York, they called him "Detroit Red."
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He had his hair crockonoed, "conked," you know.
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It was red and he had pictures of him and Billie Holiday
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and all these people at the time out there who were just being made known to the rest of the black world.
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Malcolm worked the kitchen crew on the New Haven Railroad between Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.
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In 1942, he moved to Harlem and at age 17 began traveling in a world of after-hour clubs and small-time hustlers.
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He reached a point where he said,
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"You'll never make it on these janitor jobs and selling sandwiches on these trains and shining shoes and stuff like that."
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He says, "You never will get anywhere."
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Well, he had the reputation as being a hustler and he was a street person,
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but he wasn't a hustler.
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He was a con man, yeah, a con artist.
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They called him an artist.
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When the white folks came out at night and they wanted black women,
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he could arrange for them to get them.
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If they wanted bootleg whiskey, he knew where to get it.
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If they wanted drugs, he knew where to get it.
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He made it possible that he knew what they wanted and he knew where to get it
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and he would be in the middle where he could make a profit off of it.
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And this is the way he started doing.
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Looking back at that time,
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Malcolm said only three things worried him
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jail, a job and the Army.
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To avoid serving in World War II,
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he told his draft board that he wanted to organize black soldiers to kill whites.
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He was judged unfit for the military.
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Malcolm's gambling and drugs and Harlem nightlife were expensive.
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He had already been arrested twice for petty crimes.
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When he moved back to Boston in 1945,
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he organized a gang to burglarize homes of prominent families.
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The other gang members included his friend Malcolm Jarvis,
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his white girlfriend, Bea, and two other white women.
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This girl knew that these people were down in Florida at that time of the year,
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there was nobody home,
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so we broke into the house and we'd get some of their valuables and Malcolm would
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take most of the stuff and pawn it and get money
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for his gambling habit.
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After two weeks of doing this,
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that's when the ??? when he made the mistake
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of going to the pawn shop to retrieve a watch worth over a thousand dollars that came out of
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one of the houses and that's when he was arrested by three policemen.
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Malcolm Little, Malcolm Jarvis and the three women were charged with breaking and entering.
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The fact that two black men were with white women became
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an issue in the court.
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Malcolm was definitely involved with two white women and this is what made the case so powerful.
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So outrageous.
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The women testified that Malcolm had forced them to participate in the burglaries.
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The two men received a maximum sentence: eight to ten years in state prison.
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When they sentenced us, I went out of my mind.
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I reached up and grabbed the bars of the cage and I shook them, almost shook them right up off the floor
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and I hollered at the judge and I said to him,
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"you might as well kill me as to give me ten years in jail."
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Well, I was what you call a mad negro, I was one.
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And I knew what I saw was real.
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???
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I knew that when they laughed all together, they were laughing, look what we did, we doing it to the negro.
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Then they had the unintimidated gall to ask the girls before they took them out of there to press charges
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against us for rape. The girls wouldn't do it.
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Malcolm Little was twenty years old, facing eight to ten years in state prison.
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He had wandered far from the Garvey pride and independence his parents had preached.
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He was now prisoner number 22843.
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To have once been a criminal is no disgrace.
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To remain a criminal is the disgrace.
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I formerly was a criminal. I formerly was in prison.
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I'm not ashamed of that. You never can use that over my head,
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and he's using the wrong stick. I don't feel that stick.
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[cheering and applause]
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They charged Jesus with sedition. Didn't they do that?
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They said he was against Caesar. They said he was discriminating because he told his disciples
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"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,
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who are lost from the knowledge of themselves and who are strangers in a land that is not theirs. Go to those people. Go
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to the slaves. Go to the second-class citizens. Go to the ones who are suffering the brunt of Caesar's brutality."
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And if Jesus were here in America today, he wouldn't be going to the white man. The white man is the oppressor.
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He would be going to the oppressed. He would be going to the humble. He would be going to the lowly.
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He would be going to the rejected and the despised.
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He would be going to the so-called American negro.
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Behind prison walls, Malcolm hustled bets, fed his drug habit and argued against the existence of God.
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The men in the cellblock called him Satan.
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But at the same time, encouraged by an older black inmate, Malcolm began reading and taking English courses.
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Malcolm described vividly prison life that he was in effect lonely and limited, but had plans for
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he was going to do a lot of reading and he certainly
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did a lot of writing.
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Because I think there were times when he probably wrote to me every week.
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During the second year in prison, his brothers and sisters wrote to him about what they called
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the natural religion for the black man,
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a religion that taught that black people were the original people, that God was black and
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was called Allah.
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They told Malcolm they were now a part of the Nation of Islam, followers of the honorable
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Elijah Mohammad, the messenger of Allah.
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I think Islam is one of the greatest religions of all time for our people in America. The so-called American
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negro have to be completely reeducated and Islam gives them that qualification, that he can feel proud and
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does not feel ashamed to be called a black man.
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I came into the Muslim movement in 1947 and, um
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then started bringing my brothers and sisters in.
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When we already had been indoctrinated with Marcus Garvey's philosophy, so they didn't
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have anything to do with convincing us that we were black
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and should be proud.
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We were already that when we came in.
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So I wrote to Malcolm and told him about...
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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
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he had very low tolerance for religion and I didn't intend to lose that tolerance.
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Malcolm's brothers and sisters wrote the young prisoner that black people in America
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were part of a lost tribe, soon to be delivered out of bondage.
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And that whites, according to Elijah Mohammad, were a race of devils whose domination on Earth was
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about to end.
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At first, he liked every bit of it, except one thing he couldn't understand and that was the part they were teaching
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about the white man being the devil.
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Malcolm wrote to Elijah Mohammad. Elijah Mohammad
-
answered and when he answered, he would cite a portion of scripture.
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And then he gave him the key. He said the key... the Bible is the book that everything that takes place in that Bible
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is on this Earth.
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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
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putting that hell on you. Well, that's a very convincing teaching, especially when you're using the white
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man's history to corroborate this.
-
Malcolm began reading history, philosophy and religion. The writings of W.E.B Du Bois,
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Shakespeare, Socrates, the fables of Aesop, the lives of Gandhi and Nat Turner.
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And he finds all this history of how white Christians lynched black Christians, white Christians were the ones who were
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involved in the slave trade -- those were Christians.
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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
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on this earth, it has to be the white man.
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Elijah Mohammad told Malcolm to submit to Allah. But for Malcolm, submission would always be difficult.
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It took a week before he could force himself to bow in prayer.
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Later, to help spread the teachings of Elijah Mohammad, Malcolm joined the prison debate team, competing
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against visiting college teams from Harvard and MIT.
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That's when Malcolm's name and fame started spreading
-
amongst the prison population. And that's when the
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population started to grow at the debating classes. Most of
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the fellows used to come over out of curiosity just to hear him speak.
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In 1950, Malcolm wrote to the governor demanding the right to practice the Muslim religion in prison.
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His letters would later end up in FBI files. The Bureau had been keeping a close watch on the nation of Islam since
-
the late 1930s. Malcolm, considered a troublemaker, was denied an early parole.
-
He was not eligible to be let out at that time because he'd be a threat to society.
-
They considered him dangerous, knowledge-wise and otherwise, religious-wise. He would've been like a
-
rotten apple in the barrel of a thousand. He was gonna spoil many.
-
On August 7, 1952, after six and a half years in prison, Malcolm was released. Within a month, he was accepted into
-
the Nation of Islam. Malcolm Little had become Malcolm X.
-
How did you happen to join the Muslim movement?
-
I was in prison. I was a very wayward criminal, backward, illiterate, uneducated, whatever other negative characteristics you can think of...
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type of person until I heard the teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad. And because of the impact that it had
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upon me in giving me a desire to reform myself and rehabilitate myself for the first time in my life. And also being
-
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
-
the religious teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad, immediately, it instilled within me such a high degree of racial
-
pride and racial dignity that I wanted to be somebody and I realized that I couldn't be anybody by begging the white man
-
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.
-
The first time I recall seeing Malcolm was at the home of my father, Elijah Mohammad. I saw a thin man, tall man, young
-
man, reddish face. If he was just meeting you, the first thing you would get from him is a smile.
-
He said "this is Wallace" and I smiled
-
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.
-
And he was just so excited about the messenger, really, it wasn't just seeing Wallace. It was seeing the
-
messenger's son.
-
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
-
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.
-
And he says, "I'm surprised that you are sitting here and so many empty seats." He said "every time you come out here,"
-
he said "this place should be full."
-
And that excited the honorable Elijah Mohammad.
-
In the early 1950s, the Nation of Islam was unknown in most black communities. Total membership was believed to be
-
no more than four hundred people.
-
Malcolm was sent on the road to spread the message.
-
Within two years, he helped organize temples in Boston, Hartford and Philadelphia.
-
Elijah Mohammad then named Malcolm minister of the most important temple on the East Coast,
-
Harlem's temple number seven.
-
Mr. Mohammad knew that Malcolm had the experience and
-
he knew New York and he also knew that he was the kind
-
of man, complexion, height, speech and carriage, all has to be taken into consideration when you select a man
-
to send before the people. Plus, this is an international city.
-
You got to have your best in New York and this is why
-
Mr. Mohammad selected him.
-
[soft applause]
-
In 1955, when Elijah Mohammad visited the New York temple, it was to inspect the work of the
-
ambitious and outspoken young minister who had transformed tiny storefronts along the East Coast into a congregation of thousands.
-
Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again,
-
some of them came out and found a new meaning to their
-
manhood and their womanhood. Had Elijah Mohammad
-
tried to introduce an orthodox form of Arab-oriented Islam, I doubt if he would have attracted five hundred people.
-
But he introduced a form of Islam that could communicate with the people he had to deal with.
-
He was the king to those who had no king and he was the messiah to those some people thought unworthy
-
of a messiah.
-
The teachings of ??? honorable Elijah Mohammad is like nothing I have ever taken, it's a medicine.
-
Right, that's right.
-
You're seeing the medicine that has cured me of all my ills.
-
That's right.
-
'Cause I was a sick man.
-
And when I embraced the teachings of the honorable Elijah Mohammad, these teachings cured me of these ills.
-
I'm a well man now. And I feel good.
-
That's right, as long as you stay with the doctor, you'll continue to feel good.
-
Yes sir.
-
What about you, brother? How do you feel about the honorable Elijah Mohammad?
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Honorable Elijah Mohammad is trying to teach all our original people they are in bad shape. Honorable Elijah
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Mohammad trying to wake 'em up.
-
[music]
-
Inside Muslim temples, no white people were allowed.
-
Members worked to build a self-sufficient community founded on strict rules and absolute obedience.
-
The Nation set up Muslim schools for its children, teaching mathematics, science, history and Arabic.
-
[all in chorus] We're the original man. The original man is the ??? black man.
-
[indistinct] on the Planet Earth.
-
Muslim women studied nutrition, child-rearing and guidelines on how to care for their husbands.
-
Muslim men studied parental responsibility, history and religion.
-
The elite corps, called the Fruit of Islam, was trained in hand-to-hand combat and was expected to protect
-
the temples and to punish any members who spoke out against the messenger.
-
I was surprised when I went into some... a couple of the Muslim families. The faith that they had
-
in Elijah Mohammad and in Malcolm... I asked one father, I said, "suppose your son came home one day and told you
-
that he was renouncing the Muslim religion?"
-
And he said "I would turn him from my door. I would never allow him in again."
-
So I asked Malcolm about that. He says, "he meant it. And he would do it."
-
I says, "not worry about what happened to his son?"
-
"No, he wouldn't worry about what happened to him. His allegiance is with Elijah Mohammad."
-
To help expand the Nation of Islam, Malcolm created a newspaper, Muhammad Speaks,
-
and persuaded other black newspapers to carry the messenger's weekly column.
-
His strength was, once he believed in a thing, he would give everything he had to it, all of his energies.
-
He'd work, he would become a workaholic.
-
He worked day and night for it.
-
He only required around four hours' sleep and many times wouldn't get that. And you just kind of wonder
-
how can anybody keep up that kind of a pace? But he did it,
-
day in and day out. Plus on top of that, he's reading. He's reading papers, keeping up what the news is,
-
he's just a person that's tuned into life in such a way that
-
he doesn't miss too much of it.
-
At age 32, after devoting five years to building the Nation, he sought the approval of Elijah Mohammad to marry
-
sister Betty X, a college-educated member of Harlem's temple number seven.
-
In the years that followed, the demands of his ministry allowed little time for his growing family.
-
He sometimes, if I could catch him, would have to read to the children. They would always want the story read again
-
so that they would really just wait until he was on the last page and say "read it again."
-
"Read it again, read it again," you know, and so that he started giving the books different endings.
-
He had a beautiful sense of humor, especially when he was kidding me about pork and whacking me on the back
-
and saying that "you're a decent human being, smart historian, I'm going to give you 99 as a human being and
-
you stop eating pork I'm going to give you 100."
-
Had a beautiful sense of humor, plus the fact that when you got to know him, he was kind of shy.
-
[jazzy music]
-
Malcolm was now in the Nation of Islam's inner circle,
-
Elijah Muhammad's most visible representative.
-
He had the Messenger's confidence, and the loyalty
-
of thousands of Muslims.
-
In a sense, Malcolm had found a father.
-
Elijah Muhammad had found another son.
-
[faint sirens]
-
On an April night in 1957,
-
a Muslim Brother was beaten by New York City police.
-
His skull fractured, Johnson Hinton lay in a back room
-
of a Harlem police station.
-
When word spread that Hinton was dying,
-
Malcolm ordered the Muslims into the streets.
-
Other Harlem residents joined them.
-
The community had endured a long history of police brutality;
-
many considered the police an occupying force.
-
28th Precinct was notorious for their prejudice.
-
Naturally, when the people saw us come out there,
-
that was the first time that anyone had marched
-
on the 28th Precinct in protest of something
-
that they felt that wasn't right.
-
I don't know what would have happened in Harlem
-
that night, because the atmosphere was not . . .
-
It was, I think the word they use is "charged"?
-
Well, this atmosphere was explosive.
-
Malcolm demanded medical treatment for Hinton.
-
After a long negotiation, police agreed
-
to send the prisoner to Harlem Hospital.
-
But even then, the Muslims refused to disperse.
-
There's a sergeant - he came out and tried to chase the Muslims
-
who were standing across the street.
-
And Malcolm came out and told him, "You can't do that."
-
He said, "They're not gonna move for you."
-
Malcolm said: "I'll get rid of...I'll send them away".
-
He went out to the front of the station on the first step and he just waived his hand
-
and the people walked away.
-
A police commissioner on the scene, remarked
-
"That's too much power for one man to have!"
-
Malcolm will later take New york City to court and win the largest police brutality settlement in the city's history.
-
They realized that anytime a person could wave his hand and have a large number of people automatically move away
-
without any conversation, that by the same token that the same man
-
could wave his hand and those people to create some kind of disturbance if he wanted to.
-
I believe from that point on the police department and
-
and the political people in New York City began to realize
-
they had a significant force in the city to deal with.
-
Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace. Last week on Newsbeat,
-
our 6:30 news program here on Channel 13, we presented a five-part series which we called
-
"The Hate That Hate Produced," a study of the rise of black racism,
-
of a call for black supremacy among a small but growing segment of the American Negro population.
-
MALCOLM X: "We have come to hear and to see the greatest and the wisest and most..."
-
This 1959 documentary was the first television portrayal of the internal activities of the Nation of Islam.
-
Malcolm saw the television program as an opportunity.
-
Elijah Muhammad was against it.
-
Mr. Muhammad told Malcolm no, it wasn't going to do any good.
-
All it would do is hurt us, in our work, in what we were trying to do.
-
Malcolm wasn't satisfied.
-
He didn't insist, but he continued to ask Mr. Muhammad
-
could he do it. Mr. Muhammad reluctantly agreed.
-
MALCOLM X: "I charge the white man with being the greatest liar on earth.
-
I charge the white man, ladies and gentleman of the jury,
-
with being the greatest murderer on the earth.
-
I have charged the white man with being the greatest adulterer on earth."
-
Here was the auditorium overflowing -
-
thousands of people -- about an organization
-
I knew nothing about?
-
I found it difficult to credit when I saw it.
-
And of course, when we put it on the air,
-
New Yorkers -- 'cause that's all who saw it -we’re stunned that this...
-
-- there was this organization, the Black Muslims, about which
-
white New Yorkers simply knew nothing!
-
Minister Malcolm X as he addressed a non-Muslim audience.
-
MALCOLM X: "How could so few white people rule so many black people?
-
This is the thing you should want to know.
-
How could so few -- the white man today will tell you that thousands of years ago
-
the black man in Africa was living in palaces,
-
the black man was wearing silk,
-
the black man in Africa was cooking and seasoning his food.
-
The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences.
-
He knew the course of the stars in the universe
-
before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.
-
Is that right or wrong?"
-
I was amazed at his capacity to communicate
-
and at the naked honesty with which
-
he expressed his feelings about black people, about white people.
-
He scared me - I'm sure he intended to -
-
but certainly after I saw him in "The Hate That Hate Produced",
-
I know that- I knew that I would never forget this man.
-
When I first saw Malcolm on a television, he scared me also.
-
Immediately the family said, "Turn off that television.
-
That man is saying stuff you ain't supposed to hear,"
-
so of course we did!
-
But always-- you know when the sun comes in the window
-
and you kind of jump up to get it, to close the blinds or pull down the shade,
-
but before you do that, the sun comes in?
-
Well, before each time we'd turn the television off, a little sun came in.
-
While the documentary helped bring in new converts,
-
the racial views of the Nation of Islam shocked white America
-
and many in the black community.
-
Preaching of racial hatred and racial advantage and the bigotry involved is a bad thing whether it's colored or white.
-
For years, the NAACP has been opposed
-
to white extremists preaching hatred of Negro people
-
and we are equally opposed to Negro extremists
-
preaching against white people simply for the sake of whiteness.
-
Most in the civil rights movement believed that
-
integration was the way to solve America's racial problems,
-
but Malcolm preached that black people
-
were able to solve their own problems without the help of whites.
-
At a time when black Americans began identifying with freedom movements in Africa and Latin America,
-
Malcolm developed alliances with revolutionary leaders from around the world.
-
He encouraged black Americans to see themselves not as a minority but as a part of a world majority.
-
The rise of African nations
-
concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement
-
gave black America a burst of pride over and above
-
anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
-
MALCOLM X: "They're passing the basket through the crowd
-
and I think everybody standing here should put one dollar in that basket.
-
Don't you think you should? Sure!
-
These are freedom dollars, Brother!
-
We're not asking you to give us some money to make us rich.
-
We put our businesses-- the Honorable Elijah Muhammad has set up more businesses than any black man in America".
-
The Nation of Islam, with its interlocking corporations
-
was now reputed to be the largest black-owned business empire in the United States.
-
The Nation of Islam, during the early '60s,
-
was perhaps enjoying its best days.
-
We were opening restaurants and grocery stores
-
and seeing Muhammad SPEAKS paper compete with other black papers.
-
We were seeing Malcolm on television kind of frequently.
-
We were proud of him. In our opinion, he was doing an excellent job of representing
-
the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.
-
We were seeing the Fruit of Islam now
-
not just going through exercises in some small facilities,
-
but we were seeing them in great numbers,
-
hundreds of them on the streets of big cities like Chicago and New York and Los Angeles.
-
My view of the Fruit of Islam was that these were the absolute baddest, cleanest brothers I had ever seen in my life.
-
There was some bad blood, you know what I'm saying?
-
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."
-
The growing presence of the Fruit of Islam attracted police attention.
-
There were increasing numbers of confrontations and arrests.
-
Malcolm warned that members of the FOI would always obey the law,
-
but would also defend themselves if attacked.
-
In cities across America, police agencies were determined to contain the Black Muslims.
-
It was only a matter of time before the two forces would again collide.
-
Los Angeles, California
-
On a spring night in 1962, another confrontation.
-
It began as a stop-and-search of Muslim men delivering dry cleaning.
-
It ended with a full police assault on the Muslim temple.
-
This time eight men were shot, one police officer and seven Muslims.
-
Temple secretary Ronald Stokes was dead at the scene.
-
I arrived at the mosque in Los Angeles after the shooting took place,
-
and there was great sadness amongst the people, you know...
-
Malcolm was walking back and forth, shaking his head saying
-
"They're going to pay for it, they're going to pay for it,
-
they're going to pay for it, they're going to pay for it!"
-
If anyone breaks into our temples, we were to defend the temple with our life.
-
The temple is sacred and those brothers, they acted on what they were taught.
-
And I'm sure that anyone seeing police break into a church would be outraged.
-
Mayor SAM YORTY, Los Angeles:
-
"This didn't come as a great surprise to us, the fact that
-
they would resist our police officers and cause trouble because we have been watching this group for a long time
-
and I think Chief Parker warned some time ago that we might have trouble with them."
-
The Los Angeles Times reported the incident as a Muslim riot and "a wild gunfight",
-
but it was never proven that any of the guns fired belonged to the Muslims.
-
Malcolm called for churches and civil rights organizations to form a united front
-
with the Muslims against police brutality.
-
MALCOLM X: Let us remember that we are not brutalized because we are Baptists.
-
We're not brutalized because we are Methodists.
-
We're not brutalized because we're Muslims.
-
We're not brutalized because we are Catholics.
-
We're brutalized because we are black people in America."
-
I'm telling you they came out of those cars
-
and we have enough witnesses to hang them
-
with their guns smoking.
-
Chief Parker knows this, Mayor Yorty knows this
-
and every police official in the city knows that!
-
They didn't fire now warning shots in the air.
-
They fired warning shots point-blank at innocent, unarmed defenseless Negroes.
-
As I say two of the brothers were shot in the back.
-
Another was shot in the shoulder.
-
Another was shot- two of them were shot -
-
excuse the expression -- through the penis.
-
Let me tell you something and I'll tell you why you say
-
we hate white people. We don't hate anybody.
-
We love our people so much they think we hate the ones who are inflicting injustice against them."
-
Patrolman Donald Weese, the officer who killed Ronald Stokes, testified
-
that he knew Stokes was unarmed, but that Stokes had raised his hands in a menacing way.
-
The all-white coroner's jury deliberated 23 minutes and found the death a justifiable homicide.
-
Fourteen Muslims were then ordered to stand trial on assault charges.
-
Eleven would be found guilty and sentenced to prison.
-
We were people that said, "Never be the aggressor,
-
but if someone attack you, we do not teach you to turn the other cheek."
-
There were Muslims who were not from the East Coast,
-
but from other parts of the country that was actually ready to go out there
-
and kill those police officers,
-
even though they may have been killed in the process of doing it.
-
But that's how strong the attitude of Muslims was against those brothers just being shot like that.
-
The conflict at the Los Angeles mosque brought to the surface
-
the growing differences between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad.
-
The Messenger insisted Allah would avenge Stokes' death,
-
but Malcolm demanded justice in the courts.
-
MALCOLM X: If it were possible for them to get a fair trial,
-
there would be no necessity for trial at all.
-
These are the victims of police bullets,
-
and you don't take the victim in court as a criminal.
-
You take the one shot the victim in court.
-
And it is the police who should be on trial here in Los Angeles."
-
Malcolm began to talk less and less about God was going to get rid of the Caucasians
-
and he began to talk about how we was going to be able to
-
bring them to justice and make them guilty and that,
-
"They are guilty according to the law of the land," which was not our argument at all.
-
Our argument was that we were a divine people and that we would be protected
-
and finally delivered, put in the seat of authority by Allah.
-
That was our teaching at that time!
-
To avoid further confrontations with city authorities,
-
Elijah Muhammad summoned Malcolm to a meeting at the Messenger's home.
-
And Elijah Muhammad told him very definitely,
-
"If you had reacted the way you should have reacted,
-
if you had more faith in Allah, Ronald Stokes would be alive."
-
And that was it.
-
He really gave him enough upbraiding.
-
And Malcolm said nothing about it, "Well, there was nothing we could do,"
-
or anything of that sort. He just listened.
-
Mr. Muhammad told him-- he said,
-
"That's one man that we lost.
-
I never did tell you that we weren't going to lose anyone,
-
but that's the way it is when you're building a nation."
-
He said, "They were wrong, but if I send my followers out there
-
to do battle with those people in L.A.,
-
either undercover or on top of the cover,
-
they will get slaughtered, and I'm not going to do that."
-
And Malcolm didn't like that.
-
Malcolm had always said, "Muslims don't back down."
-
In Harlem, he now had to explain what happened in Los Angeles.
-
MALCOLM X: Ronald Stokes was not the least
-
among the followers of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,
-
he was one of the highest. He was the secretary of our Los Angeles mosque,
-
and as we explained in that rally on May, many of you thought
-
we should go right on out then and make war on the white man.
-
You wanted to do it yourself, didn't you?"
-
AUDIENCE: Yes!
-
MALCOLM X: Didn't you?
-
AUDIENCE: Yes!
-
MALCOLM X: You wanted some action then, didn't you?
-
AUDIENCE: Yes!
-
MALCOLM X: 'Cause you don't like the idea of white people shooting black people down, do you?
-
AUDIENCE: No!
-
MALCOLM X: And you're ready to do something about it, aren't you?
-
AUDIENCE: Yes!
-
MALCOLM X: We know you are, and the white man should be thankful that
-
God has given the Honorable Elijah Muhammad the control over his followers
-
that he has so that they can play it cool,
-
calm and collected and leave it in the hands of God."
-
In the months following the Los Angeles incident,
-
Malcolm's faith in the Messenger was further tested
-
by rumors about Elijah Muhammad's private life.
-
Once a month, he would go to Chicago to take money to Elijah Muhammad,
-
and he would always go to the side door.
-
And this particular day,when he got to the side door,
-
there were three young ladies where they were knocking and bamming on the door
-
"Open the door, open the door. We need money for food. Our children don't have have this or that or the other."
-
He immediately felt that, number one, he didn't belong there.
-
Malcolm had long dismissed stories that Elijah Muhammad
-
had fathered eight children with six of his secretaries.
-
Now he approached the Messenger's son Wallace to confirm what he had seen.
-
So I told him yes. I say,
-
"I know of-- I know about that."
-
I say, "You can see things, but you don't want to see it,
-
so you just blot it out in your mind."
-
I say, "I'm aware of secretaries having that kind of relationship with my father,
-
being there with their children."
-
I say, "I've seen him take their children and somewhere in my conscience
-
I'm sure it was registering that that was his family,
-
but I never accepted it to deal with it in my mind.
-
Never did I accept to deal with it in my mind."
-
Officials in the nation accused Wallace Muhammad of starting rumors and conspiring against his father.
-
The charge that I gave Malcolm information on my father's domestic situation is true,
-
but only after Malcolm had already told me that he witnessed that situation."
-
MALCOLM X: It gives me great pleasure and an honor and a privilege at this time to introduce to you
-
and present to you the Messenger of Allah, your and my beloved leader and teacher,
-
the Most Honorable and Humble Elijah Muhammad."
-
Malcolm had submitted himself to Elijah Muhammad
-
as his spiritual leader and never tried to see anything else.
-
And the things that he tried to put into practice himself
-
he thought were being also being practiced by his leader.
-
And when he found it differently,
-
it just took all the wind out his sails."
-
In public, the two men continued to embrace.
-
In private, suspicion had replaced faith.
-
Their relationship was further complicated by Elijah Muhammad's failing health.
-
Malcolm's popularity naturally grew.
-
Number one, Mr. Muhammad was sick, he had bronchitis,
-
so Mr. Muhammad, he only went to large public meetings maybe once a year, twice a year.
-
That was it. All the rest of the time, Malcolm was going everywhere.
-
It was Malcolm who sparked the growth of the Nation all over the country.
-
He was in demand.
-
Nobody was asking for Elijah Muhammad to speak, they were asking for Malcolm to speak.
-
And naturally, Malcolm got more involved with the civil rights struggle
-
and his argument became more an argument that you would expect from someone
-
who was in the civil rights struggle than you would for someone who was following the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
-
The '60s showed us the white man in the image that the Nation of Islam had cast him in,
-
in the image of brutal person, you know, turning the dogs out on demonstrators,
-
using the fire hoses.
-
So all this helped the Nation of Islam's charge against the white race
-
and made it possible for the Nation of Islam's spokesman, for the E.Muhammed's spokesman, Malcolm X,
-
to get the press, to get the camera on him
-
and to state what he had confidence in that was an alternative, and that was seperation.
-
As Muslims, we believe that separation is the best way and the only sensible way,
-
not integration,
-
but on the other hand, when we see our people being brutalized by white bigots, white racists,
-
we think that they are foolish
-
to allow themselves to be beaten and brutalized
-
and do nothing whatsoever to protect themselves.
-
If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog,
-
whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog.
-
If a dog is fixed on a black man when that black man is doing nothing but
-
trying to take advantage of what the government says is supposed to be his,
-
then that black man should kill that dog or
-
any two-legged dog who sets the dog on him.
-
When Malcolm talks all the Muslim ministers talk,
-
they articulate for all the Negro people who hear them,
-
who listen to them, they articulate their suffering,
-
the suffering which has been in this country so long denied.
-
That's Malcolm's great authority over any of his audiences.
-
He corroborates their reality.
-
I was probably about 14 years old
-
and I was involved in demonstrations at this construction site.
-
The community was demanding integration of the workforce.
-
We realized that Malcolm had come to watch the demonstration.
-
When my shift changed, I went across the street to talk to Malcolm.
-
We had quite an argument that morning,
-
and he tried to explain to me what was wrong with my
-
laying down on the ground in front of a cement truck.
-
And Malcolm said if these are people who could lynch black people,
-
murder black children, enslave people, why couldn't they run over somebody
-
with a truck? And he said,
-
"Oh, they'd say it was an accident!"
-
He'd say, 'Oops, my foot slipped,' but you'd be just as dead."
-
And when he left and I turned around to go back across the street,
-
I went back and I got on the picket line,
-
but I never laid down in the street in front of a truck again.
-
We were sitting across the street at the Shabazz Frosti Kreem and
-
talking about race relations in America,
-
and Malcolm at one point said, "OK, what's your solution?"
-
And I don't-- he was not asking me for advice,
-
he was-- he just wanted to sort of put me on the spot for a moment, I think.
-
And I was, at the time, under the spell of Dr. King
-
and his notion of the beloved society which would be colorblind,
-
in which color would not be a disability for anybody
-
it would disappear, but it wouldn't be a disability.
-
and Malcolm just kind of looked back at me and said
-
"You're dreaming. I haven't got time for dreams."
-
KENNETH CLARKE: The goal of Dr. King is full equality
-
MALCOLM X: No!
-
KENNETH CLARK: -- and full rights of citizenship for Negroes.
-
MALCOLM X: The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance
-
to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.
-
The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to get Negroes
-
to forgive the people who have brutalized them for 400 years
-
by lulling them to sleep and making them forgetting what those whites have done to them.
-
But the masses of black people in America today don't go for what Martin Luther King is putting down.
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As you said in one of your articles, it's psychologically insecure
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or something of that sort, I forget how you put it.
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But you didn't endorse what Martin Luther King was doing yourself.
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KENNETH CLARKE: I do not reject his goals of full integration and full equality rights for American citizens.
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Do you reject these goals?
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MALCOLM X: If you don't think that he's walking on the right road,
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I'm quite sure you don't agree that he'll get to the right place!"
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We were aware or felt that it was somewhat dangerous to be too closely associated to Malcolm.
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He was saying some pretty rough things, particularly about whites,
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and those of us who wanted to keep peace with the white world - some of us,
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had our jobs out in the white community - we didn't really want to get too close to Malcolm.
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KENNETH CLARKE: It has been suggested also that this movement preaches a gospel of violence, that...
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MALCOLM X: No, the black people in this country have been the victims of violence
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at the hands of the white man for 400 years,
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and following the ignorant Negro preachers,
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we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.
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And today, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is showing black people in this country
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that just as the white man and every other person on this earth has god-given rights -
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natural rights, civil rights, any kind of rights that you can think of when it comes to defending himself -
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black people should have -- we should have the right to defend ourselves also.
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In August 1963, 250,000 Americans gathered for the march on Washington.
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Malcolm came to us. He told us the story about the march on Washington.
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And one thing I can say about Malcolm, anytime he told us something, he could back it up.
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He had a article and he brought the
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he said, "I'm going to tell you. I know what I'm talking about."
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He says, "Who pays the bills for civil rights?"
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And he said, "The angels are white."
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And what he went on to say was, "You have to fight your battles,
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and it started in the street.
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But once you let them become integrated, it gets cool."
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And then he relates it to a cup of coffee that is hot and as soon as...your water...
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put the milk in it, it cools down.
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And these analogies Malcolm used sometimes were funny,
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but they got home, they hit home.
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GLORIA RICHARDSON, Southern Civil Rights Leader
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Most of the people that we were organizing had heard also of Malcolm X and that-
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and respected him and listened to him.
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And, you know, any time that he was going to be on,
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they made a effort to hear those speeches
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and felt that he indeed understood what their problems were and that they needed to be fought against and,
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I suppose, not always nonviolently.
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Nineteen days after the march on Washington,
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a bomb blew apart the Sunday school of the 16th Street Baptist Church
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in Birmingham, Alabama.
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Twenty people were injured. Four little girls were killed.
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Here you're talking about bombing a church and killing four little girls,
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and the feeling of anger and not being able to do something or not doing something was
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I remember was tremendous.
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A lot of us sort of became dissatisfied,
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because - and Malcolm really became somewhat dissatisfied -
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-he never spoke of it
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that we weren't doing anything to help the...
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-our people who were being brutalized by the whites
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and the police during the civil rights movement.
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We felt that we should have gotten involved.
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MALCOLM X: One white man named Lincoln supposedly fought the civil war to
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solve the race problem and the problem is still here.
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And then another white man named Kennedy came along,
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running for president, and told Negroes what all he was going to do for them
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if they voted for him, and they voted for him 80 percent,
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and he's been in office now for three years and the problem is still here.
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When police dogs were biting black women and black children and black babies
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in Birmingham, Alabama,
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that Kennedy talked about what he couldn't do because no federal law had been violated,
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and as soon as the Negroes exploded and began to protect themselves
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got the best of the crackers in Birmingham,
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then Kennedy sent for troops.
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And there was no... he used...
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he didn't have any new law when he sent for the troops
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when the Negroes erupted than he had at the time when whites were erupting.
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So we are within our rights and with justice
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with justification, when we express doubt concerning the ability of the white man
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to solve our problem and also when we express doubt concerning his integrity,
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concerning his sincerity, because you will have to confess
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that the problem has been around here for a long time
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and whites have been saying the same thing about it for the past 100 years
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and it's no nearer a solution today than it was a hundred years ago.
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Well, he was changed,
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changed from religious talks to nationalistic talk to the point where I told him
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(meaning Malcolm) that I listened to him when he first started
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and I listened to him now and that I hear a change.
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He say, "What kind of change you mean?"
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I say, "Well, your talks when you first started out, you know,
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caused me to have chills when you speak because of the truth that you were saying.
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But now I don't feel that anymore."
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He told his answer to me, he said, "Well," he said,
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"maybe you have lost your religious or your spirit."
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I say, "Well, maybe I have, but I'm just letting you know what I feel."
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After a while, we began to notice that there were some rumblings from the family,
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from Elijah Muhammad's family.
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Every now and then there'd be little things they would say
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that let you know that they got a problem with Malcolm rising up before the public like he's doing,
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because everybody's beginning to recognize him now as the spokesman.
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All right, the spokesman might be all right, but at the same time
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he's getting the publicity this and the media's got him.
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Everybody is Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm X, Malcolm X,
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and you only hear-- you starting to hear Elijah Muhammed's name less and less.
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Malcolm believed he could handle the jealousies within the Nation of Islam,
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but tensions between him and the Messenger would come to a head in late November 1963.
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So we were sitting in the restaurant drinking coffee,
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having this meeting and the captain of the mosque, Joseph,
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got a telephone call from his wife.
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And Joseph got up and went to a phone booth, took the call, and he came back to the table looking visibly shocked.
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And he said that his wife has just told him that Kennedy had been shot.
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Malcolm sent somebody to get a radio out of the back and we plugged in the radio and
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listened and the announcer was saying,
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"To repeat, we're confirming that the President has been shot in Dallas, Texas
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and at this point, we don't know how serious it is."
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And Malcolm said-- immediately, he said, "That devil is dead."
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John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
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Mr. Muhammad had his son call Malcolm.
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He said, "Brother Minister Malcolm, my father told me to tell you -
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and we're calling all over the country -
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that John F. Kennedy was assassinated and that we should not say anything
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in a derogatory way whatsoever
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because the man is the President of the United States and that people love him."
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The Muslims had scheduled a rally at the Manhattan Center in New York City.
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The day of the rally, the Messenger called Malcolm to remind him to teach the spiritual side
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and avoid saying anything about the President's death.
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But he was clearly nervous about what he might say!
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He spoke from a prepared speech,
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never specifically mentioned Kennedy
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but then, as if quoting desaster
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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!
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And he went in this litany, comparing other leaders around the world
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who had somehow suffered at the hands of the United States government or its agents
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and how that compared to what had just happened to Kennedy.
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And he said, "Patrice Lumumba died and his wife became a widow.
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His people had their leader cut down,"
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and the U.S. government had been involved in doing that.
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And he went through a string of these,
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always winding up with the involvement of the United States government.
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So that the final point that when you do those kinds of things all around the world,
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you set up a situation, an atmosphere, an environment in the world
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and sooner or later those chickens come home to roost.
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When he answered, I was really- I was really took back!
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I didn't understand that!
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And he answered the question. He just said,
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"Well," he said, "I know I'm going to get in trouble for this,
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but as far as I'm concerned, it's a case of the chickens coming home to roost."
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And actually, John Ali, the National Secretary, was there
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and that's how Mr. Muhammad got the news so fast.
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JOHN ALI, National Secretary, Nation of Islam
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This statement is from Messenger Elijah Muhammad the leader of the Muslims in America.
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Minister Malcolm Shabazz, addressing a public meeting at Manhattan Center in New York on Sunday, December 1st,
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did not speak for the Muslims when he made comments on the death of the President
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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,
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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.
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Well, we were doing a lot of Kennedy stories and there was going to be a little one
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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,
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and he sounded upset, he sounded worried,
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and it was the first time I had ever sensed vulnerability in this guy
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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.
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It was later learned the FBI fed stories to local reporters
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in an attempt to deepen the rift between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad.
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Malcolm, isolated and exhausted, accepted an invitation to Miami
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where young heavyweight contender Cassius Clay was training for his championship bout against Sonny Liston.
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Though not a member of the nation,
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Clay had been visiting Muslim temples for two years
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and had asked Malcolm to help him mentally prepare for the fight against Liston.
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ATTALLA SHABAZZ, Daughter
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Well, going to Florida for my family was a honeymoon,
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my parents referred to it as a honeymoon.
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Of course, its significance of us going as a family was much stronger and meaningful for them.
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For us, it was just an opportunity to be with each other,
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but as my mother talked about it, as my father talked about it,
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it was the first time in their real life as a marital union that they had time for themselves.
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Malcolm offered to bring Cassius Clay into the Nation of Islam in exchange for his own reinstatement,
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but the Nation's hierarchy ignored Malcolm's offer.
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Like most of America, they saw the young boxer as a loudmouth with little chance of beating Liston.
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As Malcolm watched from the ringside, the young Clay wore down the older champion.
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At the beginning of the seventh round, a battered Liston could not come out of his corner.
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Clay had become the new heavyweight champion of the world.
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OK, give us the poetry on number seven.
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He wanted to go to heaven/ So I took him in seven.
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You took him in seven.
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CASSIUS CLAY: I am the king of the world!
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Hold it, hold it, hold it.
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CASSIUS CLAY: I'm prettier.
REPORTER: Hold it, you're not that pretty.
CASSIUS CLAY: I'm a bad man.
REPORTER: Wait, wait-
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I shook up the world! I shook up the world!
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What do you think of Cassius's victory in Miami?
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I think it was a great victory. He proved he was the best man!
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And where were you during the fight?
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I was in the auditorium, watching the fight.
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Right at ringside?
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Right at ringside. I was in seat seven.
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The Nation's leadership bypassed Malcolm and called Clay directly.
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They accepted the young champion into the Nation of Islam
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and announced his new name, Muhammad Ali, at their annual convention on Savior's Day.
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Malcolm was not invited.
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In his place, introducing Elijah Muhammad,
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was Malcolm's former protege, the minister from Boston, Louis X.
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"And I would meet the man that I had lived for and fought for and longed for all the days of my life!"
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Minister Malcolm was honest.
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He was sincere. He was dedicated to the uplifting of African-American people.
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Then you had another group of people who were officials there in Chicago who were-
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who were dedicated to the uplifting of themselves.
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He accused them of taking money, of buying expensive jewelry, of buying furs.
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He accused them of converting the Nation of Islam into a criminal organization.
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A lot of the well-placed people in Islam had been trained by Malcolm.
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Some of them had been reformed by Malcolm.
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They liked their little petty power positions,
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and there were other people in the Nation with aspiration toward that number one slot.
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And if Elijah Muhammad died and if Malcolm X took over the Nation,
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the first thing he might do was some serious housecleaning.
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He would move the money-changers out of the temple.
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So the idea was to get rid of him BEFORE the event of the passing of the old man.
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On March 8, 1964, Malcolm announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam.
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He formed the new religious organization called the Muslim Mosque Incorporated,
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for those who followed him out of the Nation,
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but Malcolm knew that a rival mosque would be seen as a direct challenge to Elijah Muhammad.
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And he comes into this very room and he sits there and we talk to him.
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He says, first of all, that he had arrived early, but because he was ahead of time,
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he'd driven around the block a couple of times.
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He wanted to be exactly on time and he was.
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We sat and listened. We didn't have any questions.
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We knew what the anguish was.
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We knew what was happening.
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And he just seemed to need a friendly ear, so we let him talk.
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And he talked about his time in prison.
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He talked about the times when he first heard of Elijah Muhammad and the change it made in his life.
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He expressed that deep hurt within him that his father had rejected him.
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And as he sat there, it was evident that if Elijah Muhammad had just done that at that moment,
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whatever the differences were between them, Malcolm would have been off and running.
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Malcolm was certainly a beloved son of the Harlem community and people were interested in his side of the story.
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Elijah Muhammad was somebody in a picture on the wall, someone whose name was mentioned,
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but Harlem didn't know him.
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They knew Malcolm and loved Malcolm and remained loyal to Malcolm long after that split.
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MALCOLM X: So what you and I have got to do is get involved!
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