The Autobiography of Malcolm X: Chapters 10–13

Under Bimbi’s tutelage, too, I had gotten myself some little cellblock swindles going.

The visiting rules, far more lenient than other prisons’, permitted visitors almost every day, and allowed them to stay two hours.

“The devil white man,” down through history, out of his devilish nature, had pillaged, murdered, raped, and exploited every race of man not white.

Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversation he was in, and I had tried to emulate him.

I read descriptions of atrocities, saw those illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged off, never to be seen by their mothers again; of dogs after slaves, and of the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men with whips and clubs and chains and guns.

Below the Sahara, in the places where most of America’s Negroes’ foreparents were kidnapped, there is being unearthed some of the finest craftsmanship, sculpture and other objects, that has ever been seen by modern man.

Soon after that, Minister Lemuel Hassan urged me to address the brothers and sisters with an extemporaneous lecture.

Time and again Mr. Muhammad’s teachings were rebuffed and even ridiculed.

“Turn around and look at each other, brothers and sisters, and think of this! You and me, polluted all these colors — and this devil has the arrogance and the gall to think we, his victims, should love him!”

I want you, when you leave this room, to start to see all this whenever you see this devil white man. Oh, yes, he’s a devil! I just want you to start watching him, in his places where he doesn’t want you around; watch him reveling in his preciousness, and his exclusiveness, and his vanity, while he continues to subjugate you and me.

I can’t start to describe for you my welter of emotions.

No lying or stealing, and no insubordination to civil authority, except on the grounds of religious obligation.

They deal with the responsibilities of a husband and father; what to expect of women; the rights of women which are not to be abrogated by the husband; the importance of the father-male image in the strong household; current events; why honesty, and chastity, are vital in a person, a home, a community, a nation, and a civilization; why one should bathe at least once each twenty-four hours; business principles; and things of that nature.

Every Muslim minister is always hearing the problems of young people whose parents have ostracized them for becoming Muslims.

But love transcends just the physical.