The Life and Death of Malcolm X Quotes

The Life and Death of Malcolm X Quotes-

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Pretext- Malcolm wanted to die
One could not easily imagine a man so alive embracing death. Yet the desperation of those days finally did seem to push him past caring, and if he did not want to die, he was too spent to run from death any longer.

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" I'm not going to sit at your table, and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner."

Malcolm, said Killens, " was all of of us." Having experienced the degradation of the blacks, he was appalled by it and even more by their acquiescence in it. He understood what Charles Silberman, a white writer he respected, has called " The black man's Negro problem"- the demoralization and the anomie of the ghetto. The original sin in his eyes was the white man's- he had severed the blacks from their past and reduced them to property- but the responsibility for the salvation of the blacks, Malcolm always insisted, was their own. This meant getting up out of the mud, out from under the white man's charity as well as his tyranny. It meant forgetting about integration, which was only further denial of the worth of black people and about non-violence, which was only a new, subtler form of humiliation before the slave master. It meant embracing the African past, till then a source of shame; it meant identifying not with the white majority in America and the west but the dark majority of the world. It meant the discovery of what Eric Lincoln terms " a negotiable identity" as black men and women, deserving of the worlds respect and their own.

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Malcolm didn't teach hate, or need to; he exploited the vein of hate that was there already and to which few black Americans were totally immune.

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He was as he saw himself, waging war- a war of words, maybe, but a war nevertheless- and in war anything goes.

" There was a private Malcolm, a man of ineffable charm and courtesy; a born aristocrat. And there was the public Malcolm. Malcolm in combat, whose job it was to frighten teh white man out of his shoes."

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... accused him of engaging in emotionalism. It stung. " When a man is hanging on a tree and he cries out," Malcolm retorted, his voice rising," should he cry out unemotionally? When a man is sitting on a hot stove and he tells you how it feels to be there, is he supposed to speak without emotion? This is what you tell black people in this country when they begin to cry out against the injustices that they're suffering. As long as they describe these injustices in a way that makes you believe you have another hundred years to rectify the situation, then you don't call that emotion. But when a man is on a hot stove, he says, " I'm coming up. I'm getting up. Violently or non-violently doesn't enter into the picture- I'm coming up, do you understand?"

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The white man doesn't know how to laugh, he just shows his teeth. But we know how to laugh- we laugh deep down, from the bottom up.

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King's celebrity particularly rankled him, built as it was on a philosophy and a style of action Malcolm found degrading...
He got the peace prize, we got the problem... I don't want the white man giving me medals. If I'm following a general and he's leading me into battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards, or awards, I get suspicious of him. Especially if he gets a peace award before the war is over.

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So it was with Malcolm; the cruelest irony of the doom-haunted last months of his life was that he no longer felt he could walk the streets of Harlem safely after dark. People who knew him find it painful remembering the Malcolm of those days, his certainties shattered and fragmented, his days a paranoid nightmare come to life. Even his rippling sense of humor took on a corrosive bitterness. He talked about it one day with Claude Lewis, a black journalist over coffee at 22 west. ..
" Anything that's paradoxical has to have some humor in it," he said, " or it'll crack you up. You know that? You put hot water in a cold glass, it'll crack. Because it's a contrast, a paradox. And America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crackup. If you can't turn it into a joke, why you will crack up."

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Black people, he said, sing in the churches about a wall so high you can't get over it, so low you can't get under it, so wide you can't get around it- you've got to go in at the door. Black leaders come up against a wall like that, Benjamin said, and when they get to the door, they see death. He thought it had been that way with Malcolm; he had come to the wall, had been to the door and had seen death. His own.

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The servant sees the master, but the master doesn't see the servant.