The autobiography of Malcolm X (30 page)

These three-I believe there were three, as I remember-older devils sat behind desks. They all wore that “troublesome nigger” expression. And I looked “white devil” right back into their eyes. They asked me on what basis did I claim to be a Muslim in my religion. I told them that the Messenger of Allah was Mr. Elijah Muhammad, and that all who followed Mr. Muhammad here in America were Muslims. I knew they had heard this before from some Temple One young brothers who had been there before me.

They asked if I knew what “conscientious objector” meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.

They told me that my case would be “pending.” But I was put through the physical anyway, and they sent me a card with some kind of a classification. That was 1953, then I heard no more for seven years, when I received another classification card in the mail. In fact, I carry it in my wallet right now. Here: it's card number 20 219 25 1377, it's dated November 21, 1960. It says, “Class 5- A,” whatever that means, and stamped on the card's back is “Michigan Local Board No. 19, Wayne County, 3604 South Wayne Road, Wayne, Michigan.”

***

Every time I spoke at our Temple One, my voice would still be hoarse from the last time. My throat took a long time to get into condition. "Do you know _why_ the white man really hates you? It's because every time he sees your face,

he sees a mirror of his crime-and his guilty conscience can't bear to face it!

“Every white man in America, when he looks into a black man's eyes, should fall to his knees and say 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry-my kind has committed history's greatest crime against your kind; will you give me the chance to atone?' But do you brothers and sisters expect any white man to do that? _No_, you _know_ better! And why won't he do it? Because he _can't_ do it. The white man has _created_ a devil, to bring chaos upon this earth. . . .”

Somewhere about this time, I left the Gar Wood factory and I went to work for the Ford Motor Company, one of the Lincoln-Mercury Division assembly lines.

As a young minister, I would go to Chicago and see Mr. Elijah Muhammad every time I could get off. He encouraged me to come when I could. I was treated as if I had been one of the sons of Mr. Muhammad and his dark, good wife Sister Clara Muhammad. I saw their children only occasionally. Most of them in those years worked around Chicago in various jobs, laborers, driving taxis, and things such as that. Also living in the home was Mr. Muhammad's dear Mother Marie.

I would spend almost as much time with Mother Marie as I did with Mr. Muhammad. I loved to hear her reminiscences about her son Elijah's early life when they lived in Sandersville, Georgia, where he was born in 1897.

Mr. Muhammad would talk with me for hours. After eating good, healthful Muslim food, we would stay at the dinner table and talk. Or I would ride with him as he drove on his daily rounds between the few grocery stores that the Muslims then owned in Chicago. The stores were examples to help black people see what they could do for themselves by hiring their own kind and trading with their own kind and thus quit being exploited by the white man.

In the Muslim-owned combination grocery-drug store on Wentworth and 31st Street, Mr. Muhammad would sweep the floor or something like that. He would do such work himself as an example to his followers whom he taught that idleness and laziness were among the black man's greatest sins against himself. I would want to snatch the broom from Mr. Muhammad's hand, because I thought he was too valuable to be sweeping a floor. But he wouldn't let me do anything but stay with him and listen while he advised me on the best ways to spread his message.

The way we were with each other, it would make me think of Socrates on the steps of the Athens market place, spreading his wisdom to his students. Or how one of those students, Aristotle, had his students following behind him, walking through the Lyceum.

One day, I remember, a dirty glass of water was on a counter and Mr. Muhammad put a clean glass of water beside it. “You want to know how to spread my teachings?” he said, and he pointed to the glasses of water. “Don't condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,” he said, “just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won't have to say that yours is better.”

Of all the things that Mr. Muhammad ever was to teach me, I don't know why, that still stands out in my mind. Although I haven't always practiced it. I love too much to battle. I'm inclined to tell somebody if his glass of water is dirty.

Mother Marie, when Mr. Muhammad was busy, would tell me about her son's boyhood and of his growing up in Georgia to young manhood.Mother Marie's account of her son began when she was herself but seven years old. She told me that then she had a vision that one day she would be the mother of a very great man. She married a Baptist minister, Reverend Poole, who worked around Sandersville on the farms, and in the sawmills. Among their thirteen children, said Mother Marie, little Elijah was very different, almost from when he could walk and talk.

The small, frail boy usually settled his older brothers' and sisters' disputes, Mother Marie said. And young as he was, he became regarded by them as their leader. And Elijah, about the time he entered school, began displaying a strong race consciousness. After the fourth grade, because the family was so poor, Elijah had to quit school and begin full-time working. An older sister taught Elijah as much as she was able at night.

Mother Marie said that Elijah spent hours poring through the Bible, with tears shining in his eyes. (Mr. Muhammad told me himself later that as a boy he felt that the Bible's words were a locked door, that could be unlocked, if only he knew how, and he cried because of his frustrated anxiety to receive understanding. ) Elijah grew up into a still-frail teenager who displayed a most uncommonly strong love for his race, and, Mother Marie said, instead of condemning Negroes' faults, young Elijah always would speak of reasons for those faults.

Mother Marie has since died. I believe that she had as large a funeral as Chicago has seen. Not only Muslims, but others knew of the deep bond that Messenger Elijah had with his mother.

“I am not ashamed to say how little learning I have had,” Mr. Muhammad told me. “My going to school no further than the fourth grade proves that I can know nothing except the truth I have been taught by Allah. Allah taught memathematics. He found me with a sluggish tongue, and taught me how to pronounce words.”

Mr. Muhammad said that somehow, he never could stand how the Sandersville white farmers, the sawmill foremen, or other white employers would habitually and often curse Negro workers. He said he would politely ask any for whom he worked never to curse him. “I would ask them to just fire me if they didn't like my work, but just don't curse me.” (Mr. Muhammad's ordinary conversation was the manner he used when making speeches. He was not “eloquent,” as eloquence is usually meant, but whatever he uttered had an impact on me that trained orators did not begin to have. ) He said that on the jobs he got, he worked so honestly that generally he was put in charge of the other Negroes.

After Mr. Muhammad and Sister Clara met and married and their first two children had been born, a white employer early in 1923 did curse Mr. Muhammad, then Elijah Poole. Elijah Poole, determined to avoid trouble, took his family to Detroit, arriving when he was twenty-five. Five more children would be born there in Detroit, and, finally, the last one in Chicago.

In Detroit in 1931, Mr. Muhammad met Master W. D. Fard.

The effects of the depression were bad everywhere, but in the black ghetto they were horrible, Mr. Muhammad told me. A small, light brown-skinned man knocked from door to door at the apartments of the poverty-stricken Negroes. The man offered for sale silks and other yard goods, and he identified himself as “a brother from the East.”

This man began to tell Negroes how they came from a distant land, in the seeds of their forefathers. He warned them against eating the “filthy pig” and other “wrong foods” that it was habitual for Negroes to eat.

Among the Negroes whom he found most receptive, he began holding little meetings in their poor homes. The man taught both the Quran and the Bible, and his students included Elijah Poole.

This man said his name was W. D. Fard. He said that he was born in the _Koreish_ tribe of Muhammad ibn Abdullah, the Arabian prophet Himself. This peddler of silks and yard goods, Mr. W. D. Fard, knew the Bible better than any of the Christian-bred Negroes.

In the essence, Mr. W. D. Fard taught that God's true name was Allah, that His true religion was

Islam, that the true name for that religion's people was Muslims.

Mr. W. D. Fard taught that the Negroes in America were directly descended from Muslims. He taught that Negroes in America were Lost Sheep, lost for four hundred years from the Nation of Islam, and that he, Mr. Fard, had come to redeem and return the Negro to his true religion.

No heaven was in the sky, Mr. Fard taught, and no hell was in the ground. Instead, both heaven and hell were conditions in which people lived right here on this planet Earth. Mr. Fard taught that the Negro in America had been for four hundred years in hell, and he, Mr. Fard, had come to return them to where heaven for them was-back home, among their own kind.

Master Fard taught that as hell was on earth, also on earth was the devil-the white race which was bred from black Original Man six thousand years before, purposely to create a hell on earth for the next six thousand years. The black people, God's children, were Gods themselves, Master Fard taught. And he taught that among them was one, also a human being like the others, who was the God of Gods: The Most, Most High, The Supreme Being, supreme in wisdom and power-and His proper name was Allah.

Among his handful of first converts in 1931 in Detroit, Master W. D. Fard taught that every religion says that near the Last Day, or near the End of Time, God would come, to resurrect the Lost Sheep, to separate them from their enemies, and restore them to their own people. Master Fard taught that Prophecy referred to this Finder and Savior of the Lost Sheep as The Son of Man, or God in Person, or The Lifegiver, The Redeemer, or The Messiah, who would come as lightning from the East and appear in the West.

He was the One to whom the Jews referred as The Messiah, the Christians as The Christ, and the Muslims as The Mahdi.

***

I would sit, galvanized, hearing what I then accepted from Mr. Muhammad's own mouth as being the true history of our religion, the true religion for the black man. Mr. Muhammad told me that one evening he had a revelation that Master W. D. Fard represented the fulfillment of the prophecy.

“I asked Him,” said Mr. Muhammad, "'Who are you, and what is your real name?' And He said, 'I am The One the world has been looking for to come for the past two thousand years.'

“I said to Him again,” said Mr. Muhammad, “'What is your _true_ name?' And then He said, 'My name is Mahdi. I came to guide you into the right path.'”

Mr. Elijah Muhammad says that he sat listening with an open heart and an open mind-the way I was sitting listening to Mr. Muhammad. And Mr. Muhammad said he never doubted any word that the “Savior” taught him.

Starting to organize, Master W. D. Fard set up a class for training ministers to carry the teachings to America's black people. In giving names to these first ministers, Master Fard named Elijah Poole “Elijah Karriem.”

Next, Master W. D. Fard established in 1931 in Detroit a University of Islam. It had adult classes which taught, among other things, mathematics, to help the poor Negroes quit being duped and deceived by the “tricknology” of “the blue-eyed devil white man.”

Starting a school in the rough meant that it lacked qualified teachers, but a start had to be made somewhere. Mr. Elijah Karriem removed his own children from Detroit public schools, to start a nucleus of children in the University of Islam.

Mr. Muhammad told me that his older children's lack of formal education reflected their sacrifice to form the backbone for today's Universities of Islam in Detroit and Chicago which have better- qualified faculties.

Master W. D. Fard selected Elijah Karriem to be the Supreme Minister, over all other ministers, and among all of those others sprang up a bitter jealousy. All of them had better education than Elijah Karriem, and also they were more articulate than he was. They raged, even in his presence, “Why should we bow down to someone who appears less qualified?”

But Mr. Elijah Karriem was then in some way re-named “Elijah Muhammad,” who as the Supreme Minister began to receive from Master W. D. Fard for the next three and a half years private teachings, during which time he says he “heard things never revealed to others.” During this period, Mr. Elijah Muhammad and Master W. D. Fard went to Chicago and established Temple Number Two. They also established in Milwaukee the beginnings of a Temple Number Three.

In 1934, Master W. D. Fard disappeared, without a trace.

Elijah Muhammad says that attempts were made upon his life, because the other ministers' jealousy had reached such a pitch. He says that these “hypocrites” forced him to flee to Chicago. Temple Number Two became his headquarters until the “hypocrites” pursued him there, forcing him to flee again. In Washington, D. C., he began Temple Number Four. Also while there, in the Congressional Library, he studied books which he says Master W. D. Fard had told him contained different pieces of the truth that devil white man had recorded, but which were not in books generally available to the public.