LOMAX: Do you deny that Negroes are now getting the protection of the Federal Government; after all, both the President and the Attorney General have come to our aid.
MALCOLM X: You never will get protection from the Federal Government. Just like King is asking Kennedy to go to Alabama to stand in a doorway—to put his body in a doorway. That’s like asking the fox to protect you from the wolf! The masses of black people can see this, and it is only the Negro leadership, the bourgeois, hand-picked, handful of Negroes who think that they’re going to get some kind of respect, recognition, or protection from the Government. The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in this country. The President has power. You notice he didn’t send any troops into Birmingham to protect the Negroes when the dogs were biting the Negroes. The only time he sent troops into Birmingham was when the Negroes erupted, and then the President sent the troops in there, not to protect the Negroes, but to protect them white people down there from those erupting Negroes.
LOMAX: Are not Negroes American citizens?
MALCOLM X: If they were citizens, you wouldn’t have a race problem. If the Emancipation Proclamation was authentic, you wouldn’t have a race problem. If the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were authentic, you wouldn’t have a race problem. If the Supreme Court desegregation decision was authentic, you wouldn’t have a race problem. All of this is hypocrisy that has been practiced by the so-called white so-called liberal for the past four hundred years that compounds the problem, makes it more complicated, instead of eliminating the problem.
LOMAX: What, then, do you see as the final result of all these demonstrations?
MALCOLM X: Any time you put too many sparks around a powder keg, the thing is going to explode, and if the thing that explodes is still inside the house, then the house will be destroyed. So The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is telling the white man, “Get this powder keg out of your house—let the black people in this country separate from you, while there’s still time.” If the black man is allowed to separate and go into some land of his own where he can solve his own problems, there won’t be any explosion, and the Negroes who want to stay with the white man, let them stay with the white man—but those who want to leave, let them go with The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
LOMAX: Now that you have mentioned the Messenger, I would like to ask you about this article in the [New York] Amsterdam News....
MALCOLM X: It’s a lie. Any article that says there is a “minor” difference between Mr. Muhammad and me is a lie. There is no such thing as a “minor” difference with the Messenger. Any difference with him is major. It is a lie, a lie, a lie somebody paid [the author] to write. I was up there in his office yesterday and I was ready to waste [harm, or kill] him for that. He planted a false seed, and it could start trouble. He [the author] knows my telephone number. If he ran on talk of a difference between me and the Messenger, he could have called me. No, he went ahead and printed this lie.
He was not there, but I told the editor of the paper that I was out to find him; I told them to call the police then, because as soon as I found the man who wrote this I was going to do him in.
How could there be any difference between the Messenger and me? I am his slave, his servant, his son. He is the leader, the only spokesman for the Black Muslims.