Race, Freedom & Equality
Poli 110J
Never cross a man not afraid to die.
• Adult language advisory
Emmett Till, 1941-1955
Emmett Till
• Born in Chicago, visiting family (sharecroppers)in
Money, Mississippi.
• Mamie Carthan Till, mother, was worried that
Emmett would not understand the differences
between Chicago and the Mississippi Delta
– “Mind your manners.”
– Tensions on the rise after Brown v. Board of Education
(1954)
– The permanent awareness of existing within an
actively hostile majority
Emmett Till
• Facts uncertain
• At local grocery store, Till probably dared by
friends to flirt with Carolyn Bryant, a 21 yearold white woman.
– Whistled? (most probable)
– Grabbed hand, asked for date?
– Said, “Bye, baby.” on leaving?
Emmett Till
• One of friends runs off to tell Emmet’s cousin,
Wheeler Parker, Jr.
– Advised to get away fast
– Parker on Till: “"He loved pranks, he loved fun, he
loved jokes... in Mississippi, people didn't think
the same jokes were funny." “
– All Delta natives know what can happen
• The permanent threat of violence is a fact of life
Emmett Till
• Word spreads quickly among town’s whites
• Bryant’s husband vows to “teach the boy a
lesson”
• At 12:30am, the Bryants, half-brother J.W.
Milam, one other man drive to house of Rev.
Wright, where Till was staying, take him away
in the back of a pickup
Emmett Till
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Taken to a shed
Beaten, skull fractured
Eye gouged out
Shot in the head
Wrapped in barbed wire, bound to 70 lb.
cotton gin fan, dumped in river
– Mother demanded open casket at funeral
Emmett Till
Emmett Till
• NAACP leader Medgar Evars arrives to help
investigate in face of police indifference
• Murdered in Mississippi, June 12, 1963 by rifle shot to the head
(Malcolm X: 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr.: 1968)
• At trial, positive identification by witnesses, other
black witnesses not even called
• Some black witnesses arrested to prevent testimony
• All white jury acquits Bryants, others, in 67
minutes
– "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have
taken us too long.”
Emmett Till
• After trial, Bryant & Milam admit to murder
• Look magazine pays for interview.
– They had meant to “just whip him... and scare some
sense into him.”
• Till: "You bastards, I'm not afraid of you. I'm as good as you
are. I've 'had' white women. My grandmother was a white
woman.”
• Milam: “Chicago boy, I'm tired of 'em sending your kind
down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to
make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how
me and my folks stand.'”
• He was killed because he wasn’t afraid.
– Link to interview, subsequent letters to the editor on website
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Read this text as an argument
in the first person, not a
personal affirmation
– The claim is not that Malcolm
X’s experience is remarkable,
but that it is not
• Malcolm Little  Satan 
Malcolm X  El-Hajj Malik ElShabazz
• Atheist  Nation of Islam 
Sunni Islam
• Themes
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Systematic racism
Degradation & dehumanization
Pervasive violence and domination
Self-loathing
Oppression of ideas
Liberating power of truth
Positive liberty
Race consciousness
Dignity, honesty & order
Systematic Violence
• “When my mother was pregnant with me, she
told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan
riders galloped up to our home in Omaha,
Nebraska, one night.” (3)
– From even before the beginning
Systematic Violence
• Sundown Towns
– No blacks allowed on streets after dark
• Mother the product of rape by a white man
• Father murdered by white supremacist Black
Legion
– Four of father’s six brothers killed by whites
• Home burned to the ground by Black Legion
– “The white police and firemen cam and stood around
watching as the house burned down to the ground.”
(6)
Systematic Violence
• Example of systematized racism:
• Father’s skull crushed, laid across streetcar
tracks and cut almost in half
– Ruled a suicide
• “How could my father bash himself in the head, then
get down across the streetcar tracks to be run over?”
(14)
– Insurance won’t pay off
– Family sinks into poverty
Systematic Racism
• Mother must raise eight children alone
– Life of constant insult: living on charity and
passing as white
– Fired whenever it is discovered that she is black
• Constant humiliation & degradation
– Stress & shame causes mental illness
– Family broken up by welfare agency
• “The monthly welfare check was their pass. They acted
as if they owned us, as if we were their private
property.” (16)
The oppressive power of names
• “Soon, nearly everywhere my father went,
Black Legionnaires were reviling him as an
‘uppity nigger’ for wanting to own a store, for
living outside the Lansing Negro district, for
spreading unrest and dissention among ‘the
good niggers.’” (5)
– Good = subservient
– To want to live as a free & independent man is
“uppity”, i.e. not to be permitted of black men.
The oppressive power of names
• “The white kids didn’t make any great thing abut us,
either. They called us ‘nigger’ and ‘darkie’ and ‘Rastus’
so much that we thought those were our natural
names. But they didn’t think of it as an insult; it was
just the way they thought about us.” (12)
– Internalizing the contempt of the oppressor
– The contempt is casual, unthinking. So habitual that it isn’t
even thought of as an insult.
– Demonstrates the unquestioned systematization of white
power
– Part of Malcolm X’s goal is to reveal this power & strip it of
it’s legitimacy
The oppressive power of names
• From his favorite teacher: “Malcolm, one of
life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t
misunderstand me, now. We all here like you,
you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic
about being a nigger.”
– Systematic racial oppression seen as just the way
it is.
The oppressive power of names
• “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger.
You need to think about something you can
be. You’re good with your hands—making
things. Everybody admires your carpentry
shop work. Why don’t you plan on
carpentry?” (43)
– Don’t be what you are or what you can be, be
what the system of racist oppression wants to
make of you.
The oppressive power of names
• “Where ‘nigger’ had slipped off my back
before, wherever I heard it now, I stopped and
looked at whoever said it. And they looked
surprised that I did.
• “I quit hearing so much ‘nigger’ and ‘What’s
wrong?’—which was the way I wanted it.” (44)
Internalizing Contempt
• For Malcolm X, the problem is not only
oppression by white society, but its
acceptance by blacks themselves.
• “I actually believe that as anti-white as my
father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted
with the white man’s brainwashing of Negroes
that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I
was his lightest child.” (7)
Internalizing Contempt
• “I was among the millions of Negroes who
were insane enough to feel that it was some
kind of status symbol to be born lightcomplexioned—that one was actually
fortunate to be born thus.” (5)
Internalizing Contempt
• “How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand
there lost in admiration of my hair now
looking ‘white,’… I vowed that I’d never again
be without a conk, and I never was for many
years.
• This was my first really big step toward selfdegradation: when I endured all that pain,
literally burning my flesh to have it look like a
white man’s hair.” (64)
Internalizing Contempt
• “In any black ghetto in America, to have a
white woman who wasn’t a known, common
whore was—for the average black man, at
least—a status symbol of the first order.” (78)
Internalizing Contempt
• “They prided themselves on being
incomparably more ‘cultured,’ ‘cultivated,’
‘dignified,’ and better off than their black
brethren down in the ghetto, which was no
further away than you could throw a rock.
Under the pitiful misapprehension that it
would make them ‘better,’ these Hill Negroes
were breaking their backs trying to imitate
white people.” (48)
Internaliz Contempt
• “So many of those so-called ‘upper class’
Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the
white man that they are ‘different from those
others’ that they can’t see they are only
helping the white man to keep his low opinion
of all Negroes.” (123)
– Division of the black community against itself
– Identification with the oppressor
– “White” understood to mean “better”, “black” to
mean “worse”
Dehumanization
• “In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has
forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view
everyday living as survival—and in that kind of
community, survival is what is respected.” (105)
– A life of oppression and brutality leaves the individual
brutalized
– In the absence of even the possibility of better things,
Malcolm X at this point in his life embraces a form of
nihilism. He sees his life of self-loathing, drugs, sex, and
crime as self-degradation.
– This is due in part to a lack of self-knowledge and selfrespect
The color line
• “We laughed about the scared little Chinese
whose restaurant didn’t have a hand laid on it,
because the rioters just about convulsed
laughing when they saw the sign the Chinese
had hastily stuck on his door: ‘Me Colored
Too.’” (131)
The color line
• “Hymie really liked me, and I liked him. He loved
to talk. Half his talk was about Jews and Negroes.
Jews who had anglicized their names were
Hymie’s favorite hate. Spitting and curling his
mouth in scorn, he would reel off names of
people he said had done this.” (143)
• The race card: “Who in the world’s history has
ever played a worse ‘skin game’ than the white
man?” (206)
• “She knew from personal experience how
crime existed only to the degree that the law
cooperated with it. She showed me how, in
the country’s entire social, political and
economic structure, the criminal, the law, and
the politicians were actually inseparable
partners.” (134)
– No legitimate authority: Law, religion, society all
complicit in racist oppression & hypocrisy
• The curse of Ham
Being toward death
• “I believed that a man should do anything that
he was slick enough, or bad and bold enough,
to do and that a woman was nothing but
another commodity.” (155)
• “Deep down, I actually believed that after
living as fully as humanly possible, one should
then die violently.” (159)
• “I lived and thought like a predatory animal.”
(155)
“The white man is the devil.”
My mind “flashed across the entire spectrum
of white people I had ever known; and for
some reason it stopped upon Hymie, the Jew,
who had been so good to me….
I said, “Without any exception?”
“Without any exception.”
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Black Legion
Welfare officials
Judges
Teachers
Cops
Johns
Customers
Sophia
Etc.
• “Here is a black man caged behind bars,
probably for years, put there by the white
man. Usually the convict comes from among
those bottom-of-the-pile Negroes, the
Negroes who throughout their entire lives
have been kicked about, treated like
children—Negroes who have never met one
white man who didn’t either try to take
something from them or do something to
them.” (211)
• “You don’t even know who you are,” Reginald
had said. “You don’t even know, the white devil
has hidden it from you, that you are from a race
of people of ancient civilizations, and riches in
gold and kings.” (186)
– History & education
• Slavery
• Opium war
– “History had been ‘whitened’” (187)
– “This ‘Negro’ had been taught to worship an alien God
having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as
the slavemaster.” (188)
This History of Yacub
• ‘Muslim’ used to refer both to members of the
Nation of Islam and followers of orthodox
Islam
• “The humans resulting, he knew, would be, as
they became lighter, and weaker, progressively
also more susceptible to wickedness and evil.”
– Affirmation of blackness
– Devaluation of whiteness
Conversion
• “If you will take one step toward Allah—Allah
will take two steps toward you.” (181)
• “I was going through the hardest thing, also
the greatest thing, for any human being to do;
to accept that which is already within you, and
around you.” (189)
• “The very enormity of my previous life’s guilt
prepared me to accept the truth.” (189)
Ordering
• “I had never dreamed of anything like that
atmosphere among black people who had
learned to be proud they were black, who had
learned to love other black people instead of
being jealous and suspicious”
• Prayer, ablution, family order
• “Even the children spoke to other children” with
“mutual respect and dignity…. Beautiful!” (224)
– Order, cleanliness, & respect
– The problem is not with us...
A new self
• For me, my “X” replaced the white
slavemaster name of “Little” which some blue
eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my
paternal forebears.” (229)
– Break with the past
– Rejection of whiteness
• “Think of hearing wives, mothers, daughters
being raped! And you were too filled with
fear of the rapist to do anything about it?”
(232)
– Fear, power, & violence
The whole point in a joke
• “’Do you know what white racists call black
Ph.D’s? He said something like, “I believe I
happen to not be aware of that”—you know,
one of these ultra-proper talking Negroes.
And I laid the word down on him, loud:
Nigger!” (327)
• “If Malcolm X were not a Negro, his
autobiography would be little more than a
journal of abnormal psychology, the story of a
burglar, dope pusher, addict, and jailbird—
with a family history of insanity—who
acquires messianic delusions and sets forth to
preach an upside-down religion of ‘brotherly’
hatred.” Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 12, 1965
• “For the white man to ask the black man if he
hates him, is just like the rapist asking the
raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, ‘Do you
hate me?’ The white man is in no moral
position to accuse anyone else of hate!” (277)
• “The Jew will never forget that lesson [of the
Holocaust]… they used violence to force the
British to help them take Palestine, “and then
the Jews set up Israel, their own country—the
one thing that every race of man in the world
respects, and understands.” (320)
– Why is this something universally understood?
The Transformative Power of Truth
• Marcuse and the destructive & soteriological
potential of the Truth over fact
– Asceticism
– Order
– Transformation
• Nation of Islam’s 6-step recovery program
• 1. Admit you’re a junkie
– Usually “fished” by a converted friend & former
junkie, overcoming distrust & suspicion
• 2. Understand why you’re a junkie
– “Narcotizing themselves against being a black man
in the white man’s America.” Helps to “prove”
inferiority of the black man. (300)
– “What’s a black man buying Whitey’s dope for but
to make Whitey richer—killing yourself!”
– “The Muslim often collects audiences of junkies.
They listen only because they know the clean-cut
proud Muslim had earlier been like them.” (299)
• 3. The way to quit drugs is through the
message of the Nation of Islam
– Brought to a Muslim restaurant, “the addict hears
himself called, genuinely, ‘Brother,’ ‘Sir,’ and ‘Mr.’
No one cares about his past.”
• 4. The message of the Nation gives lets the
addict realize that he has the inner strength to
change.
– “For the first time he is feeling the effect of black
self-pride. That’s a powerful motivation for a man
who has been existing in the mud of society. In
fact, once he is motivated no one can change
more completely than the man who has been at
the bottom. I call myself the best example of
that.”
• 5. Voluntarily go cold turkey
– When the ordeal is over, “he will never forget
these brothers who stood by him during this time.
He will never forget that it was the Nation of
Islam’s program which rescued him from the
special hell of dope.” (301)
• 6. The convert in turn goes “fishing”
– “The ex-addict, when he is proud, clean, renewed,
can scarcely wait to hit the same junkie jungle he
was in, to ‘fish’ out some buddy and salvage him!”
(301)
• “The only thing that anybody… could ever find
me guilty of, was being open-minded. I said I
was seeking for the truth…” (428)
– Deep commitment to truth
– His faith in the Hon. Elijah Muhammed was the
core of his being
• “It felt as though something in nature had failed, like
the sun, or the stars.” (351)
• Who is he now?
The last conversion
• Takes the Hajj
– On the Hajj, “You could be a king or a peasant and no
one would know.”
– “Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere
accented the Oneness of Man under one God” (380)
– Kindness & brotherhood with all Muslims, even those
who would be white
– “The holy city of Mecca had been the first time that I
had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a
complete human being.” (420)
• Double consciousness
• White & black people not the problem, whiteness
and blackness are the problem
– “That morning was when I first began to reappraise
the ‘white man.’ It was when I first began to perceive
that ‘white man,’ as commonly used, means
complexion only secondarily; primarily it described
attitudes and actions. In America, ‘white man’ meant
specific attitudes and actions toward the black man,
and toward all other non-white men.” (383)
• Whiteness is essentially defined in US by rejection of &
dominance over non-whites
• While approach to race changes, militancy
does not
– Racial cooperation
• “I don’t mind shaking hands with human beings. Are
you one?” (418)
– Black militancy
– Not black nationalism, but black inter-nationalism.
• “To come right down to it, if I take the kind of
things in which I believe, then add to that the
kind of temperament that I have, plus the one
hundred percent dedication I have to
whatever I believe in—these are the
ingredients which make it just about
impossible for me to die of old age.” (435)
• “If I can’t be safe among my own kind, where
can I be?” (497)
Ossie Davis’ Eulogy
• “Malcolm said to hell with that! Get up off
your knees and fight your own battles. That’s
the way to win back your self-respect. That’s
the way to make the white man respect you.
And if he won’t let you live like a man, he
certainly can’t keep you from dying like one!”
Ossie Davis’ Eulogy
• Malcolm X, John Brown, and responsibility
Ossie Davis’ Eulogy
• “It was impossible to remain defensive and
apologetic about being a negro in his
presence. He wouldn’t let you. And you
always left his presence with the sneaky
suspicion that maybe, after all, you were a
man!”