The Autobiography of Malcolm X: Chapters 1–4

With the help of such disciples as my father, Garvey, from his headquarters in New York City’s Harlem, was raising the banner of black-race purity and exhorting the Negro masses to return to their ancestral African homeland — a cause which had made Garvey the most controversial black man on earth.

I told them how East Lansing harassed us so much that we had to move again, this time two miles out of town, into the country.

By that I mean that I don’t know a town with a higher percentage of complacent and misguided so-called “middle-class” Negroes — the typical status-symbol-oriented, integration-seeking type of Negroes.

I knew that the collections my father got for his preaching were mainly what fed and clothed us, and he also did other odd jobs, but still the image of him that made me proudest was his crusading and militant campaigning with the words of Marcus Garvey.

Mr. Lyons had been a famous football star at Mason High School, was highly thought of in Mason, and consequently he now worked around that town in menial jobs.

Some kind of psychological deterioration hit our family circle and began to eat away our pride.

She was the one who, years later, would tell me something that I remembered a long time: “Malcolm, there’s one thing I like about you. You’re no good, but you don’t try to hide it. You are not a hypocrite.”

Right then was when our home, our unity, began to disintegrate.

The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn’t know me.

With my deportment record, I wasn’t really shocked when the decision came that I had been expelled.

This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their “liberal” white friends, these so-called “good white people” — most of them anyway.

I couldn’t have feigned indifference if I had tried to.

I’ve often thought that if Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to “integrate.”

“I’m with an old family” was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks’ cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury that you couldn’t even understand them.

They never had seen the feather-lightness that she gave to Undying, a completely fresh style — and they were connoisseurs of styles.