Malcolm X On Afro-American History

[Medicate]

American slavery

So it was in that atmosphere that you and I arrived here. It was in the hands of that kind of people that you and I fell, in around the sixteenth century. When we came here as slaves, we were civilized, we had culture, we had a knowledge of science. They don't take a slave who's dumb—a dumb slave is not good, you have to know how to do something to be a profitable slave. This was a country that needed an agricultural system. They had no agriculture in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What was the agricultural product, what farm product was Europe famous for? Tell me. You can't. They had none, they were growing weeds up there in Europe. The farm products, the agricultural system, existed in Africa and Asia. You had mastered the growing of cotton, you had mastered the growing of all of the farm products that are necessary to give a person a balanced diet, on the African continent. You were a master of woodcraft, metalwork, and all of these other skills; and it was this that they needed. They didn't need just someone with muscle to do work—they needed someone with skill. So they brought our people here, who were the fathers of skill, who had all of these skills. And they brought us here to set up an agricultural system for them, to weave their clothes and show them how to weave, and do the other things that make a civilization and society a balanced civilization and society.

So when our people got here—and they came here from a civilization where they had high morals; there was no stealing, no drunkenness, no adultery, fornication; there was nothing but high morals—when they got here, they found a country that had the lowest morals that existed on earth at that time, because it was peopled and run by prostitutes, by cutthroats, by criminals; and they created a society to fit their nature. And when our people came into that, they were shocked—they rebelled against it, they didn't want to stay here. In the first place, they had been tricked over here, put in chains and brought here, as history points out. Initially—there's a book called The Slave Trade by Spears, 1 in which it points out that one of the first slave ships to come here was piloted by an Englishman named John Hawkins, and John Hawkins's ship was called Jesus, the good ship Jesus. This was the boat that was used—it's in history—they used Jesus to bring them here. And they've been using him to keep you here, too.[Laughter]

When our people got here and found out what they had gotten into, they didn't want to stay. Many of them started looking for that ship that brought them here. The slaves had an old spiritual which they sang: "Steal away to Jesus, steal away home." You think that they were talking about some man that got hung on the cross two thousand years ago, whereas they were talking about a ship. They wanted to steal away and get on board that ship that was named Jesus, so that they could go back home on the mother continent, the African continent, where they had been tricked and brought from. But you've got poor Negroes today, who have been brainwashed, still sitting in church talking about stealing away to Jesus; they talk about going up yonder, dying, if they're going somewhere. Showing you how your mind is all messed up. They were talking about a boat.

 

[Medicate]

Or, they used to sing a song, "You can have all this world, but give me Jesus." They weren't talking about that man that died supposedly on the cross, they were talking about a boat. "You can have this world"—this Western world, this evil, corrupt, run-down, low-down Western world—but give me Jesus the boat,[Applause] but give me the ship Jesus, so I can go back home where I'll be among my own kind. This is what the spiritual came from. But they've got it in the church today, and that old dumb preacher has your and my—yes, dumb preacher—has your and my mind so messed up we think that Jesus is somebody that died on a cross, and we sit there foaming at the mouth talking about "you can have all this world, but give me Jesus." And the man took all this world and gave you Jesus, and that's all you've got is Jesus.[Laughter and applause]

There were three people involved in the crime that was committed against us—the slave trader, the slave master, and a third one that they don't tell you and me about, the slave maker. You've read about the slave trader and you've read about the slave master; in fact, you know the slave master—you're still in his hands. But you never read in history the part played by the slave maker.

You can't make a wise man a slave, you can't make a warrior a slave. When you and I came here, or rather when we were brought here, we were brought here from a society that was highly civilized, our culture was at the highest level, and we were warriors—we knew no fear. How could they make us slaves? They had to do the same thing to us that we do to a horse. When you take a horse out of the wilds, you don't just jump on him and ride him, or put a bit in his mouth and use him to plow with. No, you've got to break him in first. Once you break him in, then you can ride him. Now the man who rides him is not the man who breaks him in. It takes a different type of man to break him in than it takes to ride him. The average man that's been riding him can't break him in. It takes a cruel man to break him in, a mean man, a heartless man, a man with no feelings.

And this is why they took the role of the slave maker out of history. It was so criminal that they don't even dare to write about it, to tell what was done to you and me to break us in and break us down to the level that we're on today. Because if you find the role that that slave maker played, I'm telling you, you'll find it hard to forget and forgive, you'll find it hard. I can't forgive the slave trader or the slave master; you know I can't forgive the slave maker.

 

[Medicate]

Slave making

Our people weren't brought right here to this country. They were first dropped off in the West Indian islands, in the Caribbean. Most of the slaves that were brought from Africa were dropped off first in the Caribbean, West Indian islands. Why? This was the breaking-in grounds. They would break them in down there. When they broke them in, then they would bring the ones whose spirit had been broken on to America. They had all kinds of tactics for breaking them in. They bred fear into them, for one thing.

I read in one book how the slave maker used to take a pregnant woman, a Black woman, and make her watch as her man would be tortured and put to death. One of those slave makers had trees that he planted in positions where he would bend them and tie them, and then tie the hand of a Black man to one, a hand to the other, and his legs to two more, and he'd cut the rope. And when he'd cut the rope, that tree would snap up and pull the arm of the Black man right out of his socket, pull him up into four different parts. I'll show you books where you can read it, they write about it. And they made the pregnant Black women stand there and watch as they did it, so that all this grief and fear that they felt would go right into that baby, that Black baby that was yet to be born. It would be born afraid, born with fear in it. And you've got it in you right now—right now, you've still got it. When you get in front of that blue-eyed thing, you start to itching, don't you? And you don't know why. It was bred into you. But when you find out how they did it, you can get it out of you and put it right back in them.

Now, I'm not talking racism.[Applause] This isn't racism—this is history, we're dealing with just a little bit of history tonight. We've only got a few minutes left, so I'm trying to go fast. I'm kind of tired, so I can't go too fast—you'll have to excuse me—but I just want to get the rest of this out.

They used to take a Black woman who would be pregnant and tie her up by her toes, let her be hanging head down, and they would take a knife and cut her stomach open, let that Black unborn child fall out, and then stomp its head in the ground. I'll show you books where they write about this, I'll name them to you: Slave Trade by Spears; From Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin; Negro Family in the U.S. by Frazier touches on some of it. All night long—Anti-Slavery by Dwight Lowell Dumond—I'll cite you books all night long, where they write themselves on what they did to you and me. And have got the nerve to say we teach hate because we're talking about what they did. Why, they're lucky, really, they're lucky, they're fortunate.[Applause]

 

[Medicate]

Slaves used to sing that song about "My Lord's going to move this wicked race and raise up a righteous nation that will obey." They knew what they were talking about—they were talking about the man. They used to sing a song, "Good News, a Chariot Is Coming." If you notice, everything they sang in those spirituals was talking about going to get away from here. None of them wanted to stay here. You're the only ones, sitting around here now like a knot on a log, wanting to stay here. You're supposed to be educated and hip, you're supposed to know what's happening, you know—they're not supposed to know what's happening. But everything they sang, every song, had a hint in it that they weren't satisfied here, that they weren't being treated right, that somebody had to go.

The slave maker knew that he couldn't make these people slaves until he first made them dumb. And one of the best ways to make a man dumb is to take his tongue, take his language. A man who can't talk, what do they call him? A dummy. Once your language is gone, you are a dummy. You can't communicate with people who are your relatives, you can never have access to information from your family—you just can't communicate.

Also, if you'll notice, the natural tongue that one speaks is referred to as one's mother tongue—mother tongue. And the natural intelligence that a person has before he goes to school is called mother wit. Not father wit—it's called mother wit because everything a child knows before it gets to school, it learns from its mother, not its father. And if it never goes to school, whatever native intelligence it has, it got it primarily from its mother, not its father; so it's called mother wit. And the mother is also the one who teaches the child how to speak its language, so that the natural tongue is called the mother tongue. Whenever you find as many people as we who aren't able to speak any mother tongue, why, that's evidence right there something was done to our mother. Something had to have happened to her.

 

[Medicate]

They had laws in those days that made it mandatory for a Black child to be taken from its mother as fast as that child was born. The mother never had a chance to rear it. The child would be brought up somewhere else away from the mother, so that the mother couldn't teach the child what she knew—about itself, about her past, about its heritage. It would have to grow up in complete darkness, knowing nothing about the land where it came from or the people that it came from. Not even about its own mother. There was no relationship between the Black child and its mother; it was against the law. And if the master would ever find any of those children who had any knowledge of its mother tongue, that child was put to death. They had to stamp out the language; they did it scientifically. If they found any one of them that could speak it, off went its head, or they would put it to death, they would kill it, in front of the mother, if necessary. This is history; this is how they took your language. You didn't lose it, it didn't evaporate—they took it with a scientific process, because they knew they had to take it to make you dumb, or into the dummy that you and I now are.

I read in some books where it said that some of the slave mothers would try and get tricky. In order to teach their child, who'd be off in another field somewhere, they themselves would be praying and they'd pray in a loud voice, and in their own language. The child in the distant field would hear his mother's voice, and he'd learn how to pray in the same way; and in learning how to pray, he'd pick up on some of the language. And the master found that this was being done, and immediately he stepped up his efforts to kill all the little children that were benefiting from this. And so it became against the law even for the slave to be caught praying in his tongue, if he knew it. It was against the law. You've heard some of the people say they had to pray with their heads in a bucket. Well, they weren't praying to the Jesus that they're praying to now. The white man will let you call on that Jesus all day long; in fact he'll make it possible for you to call on him. If you were calling on somebody else, then he'd have more fear of it. Your calling on that somebody else in that other language—that causes him a bit of fear, a bit of fright.

 

[Medicate]

They used to have to steal away and pray. All those songs that the slaves talked, or sang, and called spirituals, had wrapped up in them some of what was happening to them. And when the child realized that it couldn't hear its mother pray any more, the slaves would come up with a song, "I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray," or the song "Motherless Child": "Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child. Father gone, mother gone, motherless child sees a hard time." All of these songs were describing what was happening to us then, in the only way the slaves knew how to communicate—in song. They didn't dare say it outright, so they put it in song.

They pretended that they were singing about Moses in "Go Down, Moses." They weren't talking about Moses and telling "old Pharaoh to let my people go." They were trying to talk some kind of talk to each other, over the slave master's head. Now you've got ahold of the thing and you're believing in it for real. Yes, I hear you singing "Go down, Moses," and you're still talking about Moses four thousand years ago—you're out of your mind. But those slaves had a whole lot of sense. Everything they sang was designed toward freedom, designed toward going back home, or designed toward getting this big white ape off their backs.

 

[Medicate]

For three hundred years we stayed at that level. Finally we got to where we had no language, no history, no name. The white man named us after himself—Jones, Smith, Johnson, Bunche, and names like those.[Laughter] We couldn'tspeak our own language; we had none. And he then began to teach us that we came from a jungle, where the people had no language. This was the crime that was committed—he convinced us that our people back home were savages and animals in the jungle, and the reason we couldn't talk was because we never had a language. And we grew up thinking that we never had one.

In the meantime, while he was working on us, his brothers —in England and in France and in Belgium and in Spain and in Italy and in Germany—were working on the African continent. While he was working on us over here, they were running wild on the African continent, stomping out all signs that ever there was a civilization over there, making slaves out of them over there too. And by working together as partners, the man on the European continent, in cahoots with this white man on the American continent, succeeded in taking over Africa and Asia and the entire world, while we went to sleep.

Then in 1865 he came up with a trick, pretending that he was fighting a Civil War to set us free—which wasn't to set us free. He came up with another trick, that he was issuing an Emancipation Proclamation to set us free—which wasn't to set us free. And then he also pretended that he was putting someamendments to the Constitution to set us free—which wasn't to set us free. Later on, he came up with a Supreme Court decision which he said was to give us free access to better education—which wasn't to do that. And then last year he came up with a bill that he called also to give us more freedom—which also wasn't to do that.

 

[Medicate]

Any man who will know the level of civilization that we started out on and came from, any man who knows the criminal deeds that were done to us by his people to bring us to the level that we've been on for the past three hundred years, knows he is so deceptive, so deceitful, so criminally deceitful, that it is almost beyond his nature or desire to come up with anything meaningful that will undo what has been done to us over the past three hundred years. It is absolutely necessary—anything that is done for us, has to be done by us.

 

[Medicate]

"Indians? He's on the reservation. They put me and you on the plantation, and put the Indians on the reservation— that's how they built this nation. The Indian is in worse shape than we are. I was out in the desert at an Arizona reservation a couple of years ago. They're in bad shape. But they have more respect for the Indians than they do for you and me. You know why? Because they fought them. You don't hear any white man talking about he's got Black trouble, but in a minute you'll hear him say he's got some Indian trouble.

A white man will say that. Haven't you heard it? Sure, they'll claim the Indians, but nobody is going to claim you and me—because we're nonviolent. Nobody wants to be related to anything nonviolent, nobody.[Applause] You're going to be a peaceful slave, a nonviolent slave. No, that Indian, brother, he drank blood, he tomahawked.[Laughter] Imagine taking a man's scalp. And then he's going to say he's got your blood. He'll respect you. No, that's what you need to learn how to do. The Indians said they had forked tongues, which means they're liars, you know. The Indians knew them. And they show you every time you turn on the television— any old cowboy picture shows you a white man lying to the Indian. He doesn't hide it."

 

[Medicate]

"Yes. I know some of you all never read Mandingo, did you? It is true that they used to have special Black slaves that they called bucks, I think, whose job was to do nothing but breed. I see a lot of them, I think, around Harlem now.[Laughter] In those days a child born of a slave woman never knew its father, didn't know who the father was; didn't make any difference. And, you know, this has affected our society.

Even right now you read some of the conclusions reached by some of these so-called sociologists. They admit that the tendency of our women to have babies born out of wedlock is a throwback right to a habit that was born during slavery. In slavery, it was nothing for a Black woman to have a baby—she was supposed to have a baby. And the father, the Black man who fathered the baby, was never permitted to have the responsibility of a father. All he did was make the baby. He couldn't recognize it as his; it was going to be sold as soon as the master wanted to sell it. He was never permitted to develop a sense of responsibility for taking care of his own offspring.

And that came right down from slavery to the Black community today. You'll find many men who are married and have two or three children, walk away from that woman like she didn't even exist, and leave those children in the house without a second thought, without a second thought. Well, you wouldn't find an African doing this. We weren't like this in Africa. This is a throwback, this is a holdover, from slavery. We've got to get rid of it. But you're never going to get rid of it until you get rid of the cause, and man, you know who the cause is."[Applause]

 

[KOohbt]

Good thread homie

One of the best things about studying Malcolm is that he continued to evolve his thoughts and strategies on racial oppression in America. Like Huey Newton, he was exposed to numerous ways to organize and realized at the last minute that addressing the oppression from a RADICAL economic standpoint instead of a EXTREMIST religious standpoint was the best way to go about solving problems

That's why I'm so adamant about the use of economics as leverage for our liberation.

 

[kp404]

That's why I'm so adamant about the use of economics as leverage for our liberation.

Agreed; There is no other means to liberation than shifting the means of production. Its really that simple. The question is, how to change the foundation of an economically unjust system...

 

[Scientific Playa]

RBG-Like It Is with Gil Noble / El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) | A Documentary Film

RBGStreetScholar

 

[KOohbt]

Agreed; There is no other means to liberation than shifting the means of production. Its really that simple. The question is, how to change the foundation of an economically unjust system...

I think economy is much more then simply money and control of production. I think the ideal way to do it is to have open air markets in these economically deprived areas, black owned of course. That gives way to culture building. You have a lot of entrepreneurs in one area, all communicating. That would cause ideas to spread quickly to producers. That could be used as sort of a meeting place where the ideas can be organized and used to communicate our needs and think of ways to get our people in to positions in local politics. I think taking control of local politics will work better with those conditions and from there we can work our way towards that goal of shifting the foundation to a more just system. We just need control and input from a more diverse crowd of folks.

 

[kp404]

I think economy is much more then simply money and control of production. I think the ideal way to do it is to have open air markets in these economically deprived areas, black owned of course. That gives way to culture building. You have a lot of entrepreneurs in one area, all communicating. That would cause ideas to spread quickly to producers. That could be used as sort of a meeting place where the ideas can be organized and used to communicate our needs and think of ways to get our people in to positions in local politics. I think taking control of local politics will work better with those conditions and from there we can work our way towards that goal of shifting the foundation to a more just system. We just need control and input from a more diverse crowd of folks.

That brings me back to my original question...what percentage of African Americans are business owners? very few. The reasons why more African Americans cannot be business owners is because it would upset the means of production and the surplus value. There is a book by Jay R. mandle called "Not slave, not free" that details the collapse of black Business in American history because of how the system is set up. You should check it out. Control of production, meaning supply and capital, is key to everything, breh