Free Malcolm X by Clayborne Carson Page A

whites to blacks. Denying their own esteem, such blacks wear “mental chains”; they are bound in thought as well as deed to their white oppressor. Paradoxically, they act and think more like slaves than did their forefathers whose hands and feet may in fact have been manacled but whose minds were free. Not atypically, Malcolm then prophesies doom for the white oppressor (“Why do you think [Muslims] call the last day Judgment Day and the devils call it doomsday?”) and salvation for all the black brothers and sisters who have heeded the call of Elijah Muhammad, for they are the true “gods of the planet earth and children of Almighty God.”
    [BUREAU DELETION] the following remarks were made at a meeting of the MCI at Philadelphia [BUREAU DELETION] by the subject.
    Editor’s note. “We have a black body with a white head,” Malcolm tells his audience in the Bureau extract of his remarks on this occasion. Black people’s habits, all of them, “good and bad, belong to the white man,” Malcolm continues; so do their customs—because black people have been dispossessed of their birthright and their culture. From their forefathers blacks have learned only what the white man allowed them to teach, and from the white man himself they have learned only “slavery, suffering and death and his dying religion.” This white man’s Christian religion teaches blacks that their Savior died for them two thousand years ago; but, for all their churchgoing and praying, blacks have not been saved, and they have yet to know “any freedom, justice or equality.” What Malcolm would have his people realize, then, is that the time has come for them to end their years of bondage and suffering under the yoke of a white man’s religion, for what’s good for whites has not in any way proved to begood for blacks. He would awaken them to the truth that shall make them truly free, the truth offered them here and now by Islam in the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. The white man’s day—the day of their slavemaster and enemy—is ending; the future lies with Elijah and in Islam salvation for the blacks .
    [BUREAU DELETION] subject’s lecture before a meeting of the MCI held at Philadelphia [BUREAU DELETION]
    He stated that there were twenty-four scientists in the east that were responsible for the operation of the universe and that they were spoken of in the Bible as the twenty-four olders, that they had determined that the time allotted to the present rulers of the world had expired and that because of the evil they had created in the world they too must be destroyed. The black man, who has been their victim, must first be given a chance to save himself.
    Then the speaker told them that Allah had come to earth himself and that he was a man and he pointed out that since it was stated that he had talked to MOSES face-to-face, that he must have had a face and if that was so, he must have had a body, so he must have been a man. He stated the head of the twenty-four olders wrote history before it happened, that he was the supreme being and that he had taught ELIJAH MUHAMMAD that he might be the door by which the black man and woman could be saved.
ACTIVITY IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
    [BUREAU DELETION] LITTLE was the principal speaker at a meeting of the Boston Temple [BUREAU DELETION]. At the meeting [BUREAU DELETION] LITTLE gave warning to those who the FBI might visit and cautioned them not to talk to government agents about Islam, but to state briefly that Islam is a religion of peace and beyond that it should not be discussed.
    He advised that should a FBI agent “visit your home, request his identification, hold it in your hand for quite a while, then return it to the agent telling him that you do not wish to discuss your religion.”

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
    Reporting Office: New York
    Office of Origin: New York
    Date when made: 4/23/57
    Period for which