LOMAX: I have heard you say that a thousand times, but it always jolts me. Why do you call the white man a devil?
MALCOLM X: Because that’s what he is. What do you want me to call him, a saint? Anybody who rapes, and plunders, and enslaves, and steals, and drops hell bombs on people ... anybody who does these things is nothing but a devil.
Look, Lomax, history rewards all research. And history fails to record one single instance in which the white man—as a people—did good. They have always been devils; they always will be devils, and they are about to be destroyed. The final proof that they are devils lies in the fact that they are about to destroy themselves. Only a devil—and a stupid devil at that—would destroy himself!
Now why would I want to integrate with somebody marked for destruction?
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us to get away from the devil as soon and as fast as we can. This is why we are demanding a separate state. Tell the slave master we will no longer beg for crumbs from his table; let him give us some land of our own so we can go for ourselves. If he doesn’t give us some land, there is going to be hell to pay. As I said at Howard University and Queens College, once the white man let the Negro get an education, the Negro began to want what the white man has. But he let Negroes get education and now they are demanding integration; they want to have exactly what he has. And the white man is not going to give it to them!
LOMAX: But we have made some gains....
MALCOLM X: What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism—one or two Negroes in a job or at a lunch counter so the rest of you will be quiet. It took the United States Army to get one Negro in the University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in white schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South. It has been nine years since the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools, yet less than ten per cent of the Negro students in the South are in integrated schools. That isn’t integration, that’s tokenism! In spite of all the dogs, and fire hoses, and club-swinging policemen, I have yet to read of anybody eating an integrated hamburger in Birmingham.
You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man’s nature to integrate you into his house. Even if he wanted to, he could no more do it than a Model T can sprout wings and fly. It isn’t in him.
Now The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says it would be the easiest thing in the world for the white man to destroy the Black Muslims. We contend that the white man is a devil. If he is not a devil, let him prove it!
He can’t do it, Lomax; it isn’t in him; it is against his nature.