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cars and eat the cheapest cood. they act more 11ke the WLS BAN COED Che white Bau does himself. These ary ¢’ ones that hide their sympathy. f~r Mr. Muhammad's teachings. It conflicts with the sic. from which they get ther ¢ man's crumbs. This class -to us are the fence-sitters. They have one eye on the white wan end the other eye on the Muslims. They'll jump whichever way they see the wind blowing. Then there's the middle class of the Negro masses, the ones not in the ghetto, who realize that life is a struggle, who are conscious of a11 the injustices being done and of the constant state of insecurity in which they live, They're ready to take some stand against every- thing that's against them. Now, when this group hears Mr. Muhammad's teachings, they are the ones who come forth faster and identify themselves, and take immediate steps toward trying to bring into existence what Mr. Muhacmad advocates. At the bottam of the social heap is the black man in the big city ghetto. He lives night and day with the rats and cockroaches and drowns himself with alcohol and anesthetizes himself with dope, to try and forget where and what he is. That Negro has given up all hope. He's the hardest one for us to reach, because he's the deepest in the aud. But when you get him, you've got the best kind of Muslim. Because he makes the most drastic change. . He's the most fearless. He will stand the longest. He has nothing to lose, even his life, because he didn't have that in the first place. I look upon myself, sir, as a prime example of this category - and as graphic an example as you could find of the salvation of the black man. PLAYSOY: Could you give us a brief review of the early life that led to your own "salvation"? MAIC AIM VW. 01.A1-. Muw 14 Me If nbhe MALCOLM X: Gladly. I was born in Omaha on May 19, 1925. My light color of my mother's mother having been raped by a white man. I hate every drop of white blood in me. Before I am indicted for hate again, sir - is {t wrong to hate the blood of a rapist? But to continue: My father was a militant follower of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa" movement. The Lansing, Michigan, equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan warned him to stop preaching Garvey's message, but he kept on and one of my earliest memories 1s of being snatched awake one night with a lot of screaming going on because our home was afire. But my father got lovder about Garvey, and the next time he was found bludgeoned in the head, lying across streetcar tracks. He died soon and our fea- ily was in a bad way. We were so hungry we were dizzy and we had nowhere to turn. Finally the authorities came in and we children were scattered about in different places as public wards. I happened to become the ward of a white couple who ren a ccr- rectional school for white boys. This family liked me in the way they liked their house pets. They. got me enrolled in an all-white school. I was popular, I played sports and everything, and studied hard, and I stayed at the head of my class through the eighth grade. That summer I was 14, but I was big enough and looked old enough to get awey with telling a lie that I was 21, so I got a job working in the dining car of a train that ran between Boston and New York City. On my layovers im New York, I'd go to Rariem. That's where I saw in the bars al these men and women with what looked like the easiest life in the world. Plenty of money, big cars, all of it. I could tell they were in the rackets and vice, I hung around those bars whenever I came in town, and I kept my ears and eyes open and ny mouth shut. And they kept their eyes on me, too. Finally, one day a numbers man told me that he needed a runner, and I never caught the night train back to Boston. Right there was when I started my life in crime. I was in all of it that the white police and the gangsters left open to the black criminal, sir. I wag in numbers, bootleg liquor, "hot" goods, women. I sold the bodies of black women to white men, and white women to black men. I was in dope, I was in everything evil you could name, The only thing I could say good for myself, sir, was that I did not indulge in hitting anybody over the head. PLAYBOY: By the time you were 16, according to the record, you had several men working wus GS. Bt ahe? a a Some cemes im Phaeae vari oe wre d fOr you 1 tuese var GlSrprisss. Aiget: MALCOLM X: Yes, sir. I turned the things I mentioned to you over to them. And I had ~ a@ good working system of paying off policemen. It was here that I learned that vice c and crime can only exist, at least the kind and level that I was in, to the degree tha*” the police cooperate with it. I had several men working and I was a steerer myself. I steered white people with money from dowmtown to whatever kind of sin they wants * 4