Malcolm X (21 page)

Report of: SA [BUREAU DELETION] b7C

 

Date: 11/17/59

Office: New York

File Number: New York 105-8999

Bureau: 100-399321

Title: MALCOLM K. LITTLE

 

Character: INTERNAL SECURITY - NOI

 

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

Nineteen sixty may well prove to be a year of decision for the American Negro. At this very moment the
United States Senate is bogged down by a southern filibuster designed to prevent the passage of legislation protecting the Negroes' voting rights. In several southern states, Negro students are refusing to leave stores or restaurants that will not serve them because of their color. The day before yesterday, a thousand Negroes marched on the first capitol of the confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama, in a protest against segregation. One group, known as the Muslims, has rejected the gradualism advocated by the NAACP and the Urban League and is stridently proclaiming that a white man's heaven is a black man's hell. Its members have been called racists and rabble-rousers by their opponents. But even their most severe critics have to admit that the Muslims are growing rapidly. Tonight we have with us MALCOLM X, the Muslim's New York minister, who feels that the Negro must take his destiny in his own hands. Opposing him is Reverend WILLIAM M. JAMES, pastor of Harlem's Metropolitan Community Methodist Church, who rejects Mr. X's thesis in favor of love and tolerance among all peoples. Let's turn first to Mr. X. Mr. X, before we start our discussion tonight on racial extremism in Harlem, would you mind explaining for me the
meaning of your name, which is the letter X.

MALCOLM X:

Yes, sir, Mr. KUNSTLER. As you know, during slavery time, the slavemasters named most of the so-called Negroes in America. Mr. ELIJAH MUHAMMAD teaches us that the last names that they have are slave names and after coming into the knowledge of Islam, we who follow Mr. MUHAMMAD use X. We replace the name of our slavemasters with X, and some people would say that it doesn't make any difference, but there have been many cases of dark people in the South going to apply for rooms in a hotel and upon saying that their names were SMITH or JONES or JOHNSON or something like that, they were barred. Whereas, the same dark people who would use the names MUHAMMAD or HUSSAN or SHARIEFF, they would not run into the same JIM CROW practices as those who didn't have that type name. So a name does make a difference and since we've been disconnected from that Eastern culture for so long that we don't know the names we originally had, we use X today until we're made familiar or until we are qualified to be accepted back among our people in the East.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

Well, Mr. X, getting to the point at hand, ROY WILKINS, the Executive Director of the NAACP, has
described your Temple of Islam as being no better than the Ku KIux Klan. You think this is an adequate comment on his part?

MALCOLM X:

Well, sir, I believe that ROY WILKINS is actually too intelligent to have made that statement and I find it hard to believe that he really said it. Plus, on the MIKE WALLACE show, during the summary Mr. WILKINS expressed ignorance of Mr. MUHAMMAD and his followers. I wonder then how he could so suddenly become an authority on us and how he can now find himself in a position to judge us, unless he's been doing some research since then, or perhaps he's just expressing opinions about that which he knows nothing, or he's parroting what he has been told to say or paid to say by those who have control over him. At any rate, I will challenge ROY WILKINS at any time, anywhere and under any conditions to a public debate concerning his charges that we who follow the Muslim faith are no better or are no different than the Ku Klux Klan, especially when there are over six hundred million Muslims on this earth that stretch from the China seas to the shores of West Africa and here in America. Mr. ELIJAH MUHAMMAD, who is our leader and teacher, has just returned from a tour of the Muslim countries of Africa and Asia where he visited the
holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Arabia and was warmly received. I very much doubt if Mr. WILKINS was familiar with Mr. MUHAMMAD and his program, that he would make such charges and if he is familiar, I doubt that he made those charges.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

Well, Mr. X, one point that might have led to those charges was contained in the January 25th issue of the
New York Times
, and it reads as follows: Like Mr. MUHAMMAD, MALCOLM X describes the white race as made up of quote inhuman devils whose very nature is to lie, cheat, steal, deceive, hate and murder black mankind end quote. And then you go on to say, as the
Times
reporter says, that an avenging Allah will soon wipe out the white devils. You think this is a fair commentary on whites in general, not-withstanding there might have been individual grievances?

MALCOLM X:

Well, sir, I think that you'll say that where racial extremism is concerned, first you take the word
extremism
itself means exactly what it says. When a person is a racial extremist, to me he's extreme in his desire and in his love and in his devotion to his race. Taking it from that angle, it's not a crime to be a racial extremist. Catholics say that the Catholic church is the only church and the only way to get to heaven is through the Catholic
Church. Baptists say that no one can go to heaven unless they're baptized. And Jews themselves for thousands of years have taught that they alone are God's chosen people and that he would some day come and place them and them alone in the promised land. And now, despite this, the Catholics have never been accused of advocating Catholic supremacy, the Christians aren't accused of advocating Christian supremacy and the Jews are not accused of advocating Jewish supremacy, nor are they accused of teaching race hatred. And also, the same Christian Bible that they go by is loaded or laced with promises that non-Christians will be destroyed in a fiery death someday by God himself, and based upon that I find it difficult for Catholics and Christians to accuse us of teaching or advocating any kind of racial supremacy or racial hatred, because their own history and their own teachings are filled with it, if you're going to classify it as such.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

Mr. X, on the subject of religion, the
Times
also quoted one of Mr. MUHAMMAD‘S pamphlets as criticizing Christianity as quote religion organized and backed by the devil for the purpose of making slaves of black mankind end quote, and then referred to the Bible as the poison book.

MALCOLM X:

Yes, sir, anything you take that affects
you so much so that it makes you absolutely helpless, can easily be classified as poison, and we find that the so-called Negroes here in America today are in a miserable or pitiful condition, namely because of the type of conception they've gotten of religion from getting the wrong understanding of the Bible. They actually try and practice turning the other cheek toward people who have used them. They practice loving their enemies. They practice praying for those who spitefully use them, and anytime a person believes in a teaching like that and practices it, it doesn't make them an intelligent person or man, it makes him a fool and a coward and when Mr. MUHAMMAD says that the Bible is a poison book, he doesn't condemn the book as such but he condemns the condition that the reading of it has placed the Negroes here in America in.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

Mr. X, LESTER GRANGER, of the National Urban League, claims that the Temple of Islam can only become important in a time of crisis, like the present. Do you think you are a temporary movement to fill a need that is raised by a crisis?

MALCOLM X:

Well, sir, if we are only a temporary movement, then LESTER GRANGER and Mr. WILKINS and the press that's raising so much to-do about us are wasting their time. If we're temporary, all they
have to do is sit back and wait until we collapse. As it says in one part of the Bible, I think it was Gameleo [
sic
], he advised the people don't touch that group because if they're not with God, as they say, they'll come to naught, but if they are with God and God is behind them, be careful how you deal with them because you might find yourself in opposition against God.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

Mr. X, some of the leaders in Harlem, and I'm referring now particularly to Dr. JAMES H. ROBINSON of the Presbyterian Church of the Master, have called you a hate group, and Dr. ROBINSON said hate groups are dangerous because they can set off a spark end quote. Do you think that you would classify yourself as a hate group?

MALCOLM X:

Well, sir, number one, the charge isn't so surprising, because, I'm sorry to say, but it's true, many Negro preachers, religious leaders, know absolutely nothing about the origin of their own denominations, the origin and history of Christianity, and they know much less about the religions of the East and especially the religions of Africa and Asia. Muslims are not a hate group, we're not bitter toward the white man, in fact I believe that we Muslims who follow Mr. ELIJAH MUHAMMAD get along better with white people than the same Christian Negroes who go to Reverend
ROBINSON‘s church, who profess to love white people. In fact, most white people recognize us Muslims and respect us for what we are just as we respect them. We recognize the white man and respect him for what he is and this mutual understanding of each other provides the more sensible climate for whatever relationship or activity must take place between us. They don't have any trouble out of us, we don't have any trouble out of them.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

But aren't you, Mr. X, aping the plantation philosophy that has in one sense given rise to your movement, by your own feeling that a Negro should buy black, for example, and do nothing with whites at all, as, for example, when Premier TOURE was here last November, the President of the new African republic of Guinea. When he was here, there was a movement to remove from the dais a white representative of the State Department, I believe a white woman interpreter for him. Don't you think you're reversing and doing the same thing as the southerners have done with Negroes for generations?

MALCOLM X:

Sir, to my knowledge, there was not a Muslim who follows the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD at that reception at the YMCA given for President SEKOU TOURE. We knew nothing about it and we had nothing to do with it, and the way it
was reported in the paper it was twisted to make it look like we were involved. But we had nothing to do with it. We don't participate in actions like that, we don't do anything to embarrass people.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

Yet, if I can interrupt you for a moment, further, you, at your own meetings banned white reporters and white guests.

MALCOLM X:

Well, sir, then that too should be understood. As you know, last year, I think it was sometime in May, we had a trial out in Queens, Long Island, a police brutality case, at which time our homes were shot up, the police shot at our women, at children and at our babies and threatened to throw my wife, who was pregnant at that time, down the back stairs because she wasn't moving fast enough for them. This trial lasted for three weeks in the Queens County Court and it was worse than a Mississippi courtroom, in so far as justice was concerned. And at that time the nine white dailies in New York didn't send one reporter out there to cover it, they weren't interested in the truth or in justice for Negroes but, rather, that which they can twist and use against us. They want to cry about the injustices in Mississippi, but they want to divert the attention of what's going on here in New York to hide their own faults. And I say again, sir, where was Mr. WILKINS? The
Jews had their MOSES, the Christians had their Jesus and the Arabs had their MUHAMMAD, we here in America today have our MOSES and our MUHAMMAD in the person of the Honorable ELIJAH MUHAMMAD.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER:

Thank you Mr. X. Now we'll talk to Reverend WILLIAM M. JAMES, who rejects your nationalism and feels that Negroes will benefit more from cooperation with the white race than by going it alone.