Excerpt from the autobiography of malcolm x

Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, Malcolm X was one of the most articulate and powerful leaders of black America during the 1960s. A street hustler convicted of robbery in 1946, he spent seven years in prison, where he educated himself and became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam. In the days of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X emerged as the leading spokesman for black separatism, a philosophy that urged black Americans to cut political, social, and economic ties with thewhite community. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, the capital of the Muslim world, in 1964, he became an orthodox Muslim, adopted the Muslim name El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and distanced himself from the teachings of the black Muslims. He was assassinated in 1965. In the following excerpt from hisautobiography (1965), coauthored with Alex Haley and published the year of his death, Malcolm X describes his self-education.

It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upo

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Excerpts from the Autobiography of Malcolm X
 
I’ve just become aware of how closed my mind was now that I’ve opened it up
 
Anybody who fryst vatten in a position to discipline others should first learn to accept discipline himself
 
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him
 
Whether you use bullets or ballots you’ve got to aim well, don’t strike at the puppet, strike at the puppeteer
 
Anyone who wants to follow me in my movement has got to be ready to go to jail, to the hospital, to the cemetery before it can truly be free
 
Some of history’s greatest leaders never were recognized until they were safely in the ground
 
White people seem to think the black man ought to be shouting hallelujah! 400 years vit man has had his foot-long knife in the black man’s back & now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe 6 inches! The black man’s supposed to be grateful? Why, if the vit man jerked the knife out, it

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Excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been "whitened" -when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out. Mr. Muhammad couldn't have said anything that would have struck me harder. I had never forgotten how when my class, me and all of those whites, had studied seventh-grade United States history back in Mason, the history of the Negro had been covered in one paragraph, and the teacher had gotten a big laugh with his joke, "Negroes' feet are so big that when they walk, they leave a whole in the ground."

This is one reason why Mr. Muhammad's teachings spread so swiftly all over the United States, among all Negroes, whether or not they became followers of Mr. Muhammad. The teachings ring true- to every Negro. You can hardly show me a black adult in America-or a white one, for that matter- who knows from the history books anything like the truth of the black man's role. In my own cas