Alex Haley's Candid Conversations

once upon a time, before there was "roots," alex haley was the first playboy interviewer; here, with a new introduction by the writer, are excerpts from his playboy interviews with some of america's most significant personalities during the sixties

It's difficult not to wax nostalgic in reminiscing about the Playboy Interviews I have conducted. There was my--and the magazine's--first, Miles Davis. A struggling writer, desperate to break into Playboy, I tried in vain to get an appointment with him. The prince of jazz trumpeters deeply mistrusted writers and simply refused to see me. I found out that he trained regularly in a Harlem gymnasium, so I bought myself some gym gear and enrolled. One afternoon, Miles spotted me from the boxing ring and, needing a sparring partner, asked me to join him. Afterward, in the informality of the locker room, we began to talk and the interview became a reality. Miles always did say about my prowess in the ring that I had taught him a great deal about clinching.

In the years that followed, I also interviewed Johnny Carson, Melvin Belli, Sammy Davis Jr. and Jim Brown (none excerpted here), but for my most sheerly exciting interview, I'd have to nominate the one with Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. As is explained in the introduction to the excerpt on page 260, when we asked for the interview, his only concern was whether or not I was a Jew--he never suspected I would be black. Once we met, and he unapologetically explained that he called "our kind" niggers. I replied, "I've been called 'nigger' many times, Commander, but this is the first time I'm being paid for it."

In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s schedule was so hectic that I made three trips to his Atlanta headquarters, waiting for days at a time without being able to talk to him. On my fourth trip, I was ready to give up when his secretary suggested I show up at a barbecue supper being sponsored by the men's club of Dr. King's church. I spotted Dr. King ambling about, eating from a paper plate, greeting people. When he got to me, he learned that I was the one who had failed to meet him so many times. He laughed and said, "Look, I've gone without sleep before. Come over to my office and we'll talk." We did just that--far into the night, until he simply nodded off at his desk from exhaustion. Feeling pity for him, I awakened him gently and left--with an extensive interview on tape.

Techniques of the trade? One device that worked for me was to bone up on my subjects far back into their childhood. I discovered that casually mentioning something they themselves had forgotten would surprise them and would immediately start them reminiscing. Malcolm X had refused to talk to me about anything but the Nation of Islam, but, once, when I asked about his mother, he stopped and looked curiously at me. When he spoke next, his voice had changed: "It's funny you should ask; I can remember everything about her...." From that night on, Malcolm X answered every question I put to him, and it was this relationship that led to our collaboration on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The manuscript was finished only two weeks before his assassination.

That fate befell three of my Playboy Interview subjects, in fact: Rockwell, Dr. King and Malcolm X all fell to assassins' bullets. It may seem a bit morbid, but I remember that when word got around as to what eventually happened to certain of my subjects, it became difficult for me to line up new interviews.

--Alex Haley, 1977

Miles Davis

Fifteen years ago, in the September 1962 issue, the first "Playboy Interview" appeared. Free-lance writer Alex Haley was assigned to do a profile of jazz great Miles Davis; but when the tapes of his interview were transcribed, Haley and the editors decided to publish them in question-and-answer form. It was not necessarily a new idea, but the thoroughness of the interview and its unique layout and design made it something special. Haley was thus the first Playboy interviewer and the only one to have become himself the subject of an interview, when "Roots" was published 14 years later.

[Q] Haley: Linked with your musical renown is your reputation for bad temper and rudeness to your audiences. Would you comment?

[A] Davis: Why is it that people just have to have so much to say about me? It bugs me because I'm not that important. Some critic that didn't have nothing else to do started this crap about I don't announce numbers, I don't look at the audience, I don't bow or talk to people, I walk off the stage, and all that.

Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player. I only can do one thing--play my horn--and that's what's at the bottom of the whole mess. I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician. Most of what's said about me is lies in the first place. Everything I do, I got a reason.

And they bitch that I won't talk to people when we go off after a set. That's a damn lie. I talk plenty of times if everything's going like it ought to and I feel right. But if I got my mind on something about my band or something else, well, hell, no, I don't want to talk. When I'm working I'm concentrating. I bet you if I was a doctor sewing on some son of a bitch's heart, they wouldn't want me to talk. A lot of people I meet now make me sick.

And I'm mad every time I run into the Jim Crow scene, I don't care what form it takes. You can't hardly play anywhere you don't run into some of these cats full of prejudice. I don't know how many I've told, "Look, you want me to talk to you and you're prejudiced against me and all that. Why'n't you go on back where you're sitting and be prejudiced by yourself and leave me alone?" I have enough problems without trying to make them feel better. Then they go off and join the rest saying I'm such a big bastard.

Even in jazz--you look at the white bandleaders--if they don't want anybody messing with them when they are working, you don't hear anybody squawking. It's just if a Negro is involved that there's something wrong with him. My troubles started when I learned to play the trumpet and hadn't learned to dance.

[Q] Haley: Generally speaking, what are your feelings with regard to race?

[A] Davis: I hate to talk about what I think of the mess because my friends are all colors. When I say that some of my best friends are white, I sure ain't lying. The only white people I don't like are the prejudiced white people. Those the shoe don't fit, well, they don't wear it. I don't like the white people that show me they can't understand that not just the Negroes, but the Chinese and Puerto Ricans and any other races that ain't white should be given dignity and respect like everybody else.

But let me straighten you--I ain't saying I think all Negroes are the salt of the earth. It's plenty of Negroes I can't stand, too. Especially those that act like they think white people want them to. They bug me worse than Uncle Toms.

[Q] Haley: Did you grow up with any white boys?

[A] Davis: I didn't grow up with any, not as friends, to speak of. But I went to school with some. In high school, I was the best in the music class on the trumpet. I knew it and all the rest knew it--but all the contest first prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. It made me so mad I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn. If I hadn't met that prejudice, I probably wouldn't have had as much drive in my work. I have thought about that a lot. I have thought that prejudice and curiosity have been responsible for what I have done in music.

[Q] Haley: What was the role of the curiosity?

[A] Davis: I mean I always had a curiosity about trying new things in music. A new sound, another way to do something--things like that. But man, look, you know one of the biggest things that needs straightening up? The whole communication system of this country! Take the movies and TV. How many times do you see anybody in the films but white people? You don't dig? Look, the next movie or TV you see, you count how many Negroes or any other race but white that you see. But you walk around in any city, you see the other races--I mean, in life they are part of the scene. But in the films supposed to represent this country, they ain't there. You won't hardly even see any in the street crowd scenes--because the studios didn't bother to hire any as extras.

This black-white business is ticklish to try to explain. You don't want to see Negroes every time you click on your set. That would be just as bad as now when you don't see nobody but white people. But if movies and TV are supposed to reflect this country, and this country's supposed to be democratic, then why don't they do it? Let's see all kinds of people dancing and acting. I see all kinds of kids downtown at the schools of dancing and acting, but from what I see in the movies and TV, it's just the white ones that are getting any work.

I tell you why I feel so strong about the communication system. I never have forgotten one time in Europe this nice old man told me how in World War Two, the Europeans didn't know what to make of Negro troops. They had their picture of this country from our magazines and movies, and with a very few exceptions like Pops Armstrong and Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, they didn't know about any Negroes except servants and laborers.

Look, not long ago this big magazine had this Southern truck driver saying he'd carry sandwiches if they let Negroes eat in them Maryland highway restaurants. But where he wants to eat ain't my point--I'm talking about what he said. He said, "You give them a finger, they take an arm" and a lot more. You dig? When it comes to human rights, these prejudiced white people keep on acting like they own the damn franchise! And, man, with the world in the mess it's in now, we trying to influence on our side all them Africans and Arabs and Indians and Chinese.... You know two thirds of the people in the world ain't white? They see all this crap with Negroes and supposed to feel white people really think any different about them? Man, somebody better get straight!

[Q] Haley: In your field, music, don't some Negro jazzmen discriminate against white musicians?

[A] Davis: Crow Jim is what they call that. Yeah. It's a lot of the Negro musicians mad because most of the best-paying jobs go to the white musicians playing what the Negroes created. But I don't go for this, because I think prejudice one way is just as bad as the other way. I wouldn't have no other arranger but Gil Evans--we couldn't be much closer if he was my brother. And I remember one time when I hired Lee Konitz, some colored cats bitched a lot about me hiring an ofay in my band when Negroes didn't have work. I said if a cat could play like Lee, I would hire him, I didn't give a damn if he was green and had red breath.

[Q] Haley: Are there any particular places or clubs that you don't like to play?

[A] Davis: I told you I ain't going to play nowhere in the South that Negroes can't come. But I ain't going to play nowhere in the North that Negroes don't come. It's one of two reasons they won't, either because they know they ain't wanted or because they don't like the joint's regular run of music. Negroes ain't got as much money to throw away in night clubs as white people. So a club that Negroes patronize, you can figure that everybody that goes there comes expecting to hear good music.

[Q] Haley: Would it please you if the image of you changed, that people quit regarding you as a tough guy?

[A] Davis: Well, nobody wants to be always accused of something he ain't done. But people that want to think that, it's their worry, it ain't mine. I'm like I am, and I ain't planning to change. I ain't scared of nothing or nobody, I already been through too much. I ought to be dead from just what I went through when I was on dope. I ain't going around anywhere trying to be tough and a racist. I just say what I think, and that bugs people, especially a lot of white people. When they look in my eyes and don't see no fear, they know it's a draw.

[Q] Haley: Have you always been so sensitive about being a Negro?

[A] Davis: About the first thing I can remember as a little boy was a white man running me down a street hollering "Nigger! Nigger!" My father went hunting him (continued on page 250)Alex Haley(continued from page 134) with a shotgun. Being sensitive and having race pride has been in my family since slave days. The slave Davises played classical string music on the plantations.

[Q] Haley: You're said to be one of the financially best-off popular musicians. Is this correct?

[A] Davis: Well, I don't have any access to other musicians' bankbooks. But I never have been what you would call poor.

Now I got a pretty good portfolio of stock investments, and I got this house--it's worth into six figures, including everything in it. My four kids are coming up fine. When the boys get in from school, I want you to see them working out on the bags in our gym downstairs. I keep myself in shape and teach the kids how to box. They can handle themselves. Ain't nothing better that a father can pass along.

Then I got my music, I got Frances, and my Ferrari--and our friends. I got everything a man could want--if it just wasn't for this prejudice crap. It ain't that I'm mad at white people, I just see what I see and I know what's happening. I am going to speak my mind about anything that drags me about this Jim Crow scene. This whole prejudice mess is something you would feel so good if it could just be got rid of, like a big sore eating inside of your belly.

Malcolm X

In May 1963, the publication in a mass-circulation magazine of an extended interview with a radical religious leader who professed to hate whites was considered extraordinary. Haley interviewed Malcolm X at a secluded table in a Harlem restaurant owned by the Muslims. He remembers that, except for moments of impassioned execration of all whites, Malcolm X spoke "in the impersonal tones of a self-assured corporation executive." The tapes of this interview formed the basis of the book Haley later wrote in collaboration with the Muslim leader: "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."

[Q] Haley: What is the ambition of the Black Muslims?

[A] Malcolm X: Freedom, justice and equality are our principal ambitions. And to faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves, and of our own people. He cleans us up-- morally, mentally and spiritually--and he reforms us of the vices that have blinded us here in the Western society. He stops black men from getting drunk, stops their dope addiction if they had it, stops nicotine, gambling, stealing, lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, prostitution, juvenile delinquency. I think of this whenever somebody talks about someone investigating us. Why investigate the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? They should subsidize him. He's cleaning up the mess that white men have made.

The brainwashed black man can never learn to stand on his own two feet until he is on his own. We must learn to become our own producers, manufacturers and traders; we must have industry of our own, to employ our own. The white man resists this because he wants to keep the black man under his thumb and jurisdiction in white society. He wants to keep the black man always dependent and begging--for jobs, food, clothes, shelter, education. The white man doesn't want to lose somebody to be supreme over. He wants to keep the black man where he can be watched and retarded. Mr. Muhammad teaches that as soon as we separate from the white man, we will learn that we can do without the white man just as he can do without us. The white man knows that once black men get off to themselves and learn they can do for themselves, the black man's full potential will explode and he will surpass the white man.

Sir, I'm going to tell you a secret: The black man is a whole lot smarter than white people think he is. The black man has survived in this country by fooling the white man. He's been dancing and grinning and white men never guessed what he was thinking. Now you'll hear the bourgeois Negroes pretending to be alienated, but they're just making the white man think they don't go for what Mr. Muhammad is saying. This Negro that will tell you he's so against us, he's just protecting the crumbs he gets from the white man's table. This kind of Negro is so busy trying to be like the white man that he doesn't know what the real masses of his own people are thinking. A fine car and house and clothes and liquor have made a lot think themselves different from their poor black brothers. But Mr. Muhammad says that Allah is going to wake up all black men to see the white man as he really is, and see what Christianity has done to them. The time is near when the white man will be finished. The signs are all around us.

[Q] Haley: You refer to whites as the guilty and the enemy; you predict divine retribution against them; and you preach absolute separation from the white community. Do not these views substantiate that your movement is predicated on race hatred?

[A] Malcolm X: The black masses for the first time are understanding that it's not a case of being anti-white or anti-Christian, but it's a case of seeing the true nature of the white man. We're anti-evil, anti-oppression, anti-lynching. You can't be antithose things unless you're also anti-the oppressor and the lyncher. You can't be anti-slavery and pro-slavemaster; you can't be anti-crime and pro-criminal. In fact, Mr. Muhammad teaches that if the present generation of whites would study their own race in the light of their true history, they would be anti-white themselves.

[Q] Haley: Are you?

[A] Malcolm X: What I want to know is how the white man, with the blood of black people dripping off his fingers, can have the audacity to be asking black people do they hate him. That takes a lot of nerve.

[Q] Haley: Do you admire and respect any other American Negro leaders--Martin Luther King, for example?

[A] Malcolm X: I am a Muslim, sir. Muslims can see only one leader who has the qualifications necessary to unite all elements of black people in America. This is the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

[Q] Haley: B'nai B'rith has accused you of being not only anti-Christian but anti-Semitic. Do you consider this true?

[A] Malcolm X: Anybody that gives even a just criticism of the Jew is instantly labeled anti-Semite. The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him. You can tell the truth about any minority in America, but make a true observation about the Jew, and if it doesn't pat him on the back, then he uses his grip on the news media to label you anti-Semite. Let me say just a word about the Jew and the black man. The Jew is always anxious to advise the black man. But they never advise him how to solve his problem the way the Jews solved their problem. The Jew never went sitting-in and crawling-in and sliding-in and freedom-riding, like he teaches and helps Negroes to do. The Jews stood up, and stood together, and they used their ultimate power, the economic weapon. That's exactly what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is trying to teach black men to do. The Jews pooled their money and bought the hotels that barred them. They bought Atlantic City and Miami Beach and anything else they wanted. Who owns Hollywood? Who runs the garment industry, the largest industry in New York City? But the Jew that's advising the Negro joins the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League and others. With money donations, the Jew gains control, then he sends the black man doing all this wading-in, boring-in, even burying-in--everything but buying-in. Never shows him how to set up factories and hotels. Never advises him how to own what he wants. No, when there's something worth owning, the Jew's got it.

[Q] Haley: Is there any white man on earth whom you would concede to have the Negro's welfare genuinely at heart?

[A] Malcolm X: I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without evidence. If any man will study the entire history of the relationship between the white man and the black man, no evidence will be found that justifies any confidence or faith that the black man might have in the white man today.

[Q] Haley: Then you consider it impossible for the white man to be anything but an exploiter and a hypocrite in his relations with the Negro?

[A] Malcolm X: Is it wrong to attribute a predisposition to wheat before it comes up out of the ground? Wheat's characteristics and nature make it wheat. It differs from barley because of its nature. Wheat perpetuates its own characteristics just as the white race does. White people are born devils by nature.

[Q] Haley: You say that white men are devils by nature. Was Christ a devil?

[A] Malcolm X: Christ wasn't white. Christ was a black man.

[Q] Haley: On what Scripture do you base this assertion?

[A] Malcolm X: Sir, Billy Graham has made the same statement in public. Why not ask him what Scripture he found it in? When Pope Pius XII died, Life magazine carried a picture of him in his private study kneeling before a black Christ.

[Q] Haley: Those are hardly quotations from Scripture. Was he not reviled as "King of the Jews"--a people the Black Muslims attack?

[A] Malcolm X: Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that the history-whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done or some of the great black men had gotten whitened.

[Q] Haley: Would you list a few of these men?

[A] Malcolm X: Well, Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a black man. So was Beethoven; Beethoven's father was one of the blackamoors that hired themselves out in Europe as professional soldiers. Haydn, Beethoven's teacher, was of African descent. Columbus, the discoverer of America, was a half-black man.

[Q] Haley: Since your classification of black peoples apparently includes the light-skinned Oriental, Middle Eastern and possibly even Latin races as well as the darker Indian and Negroid strains, just how do you decide how light-skinned it's permissible to be before being condemned as white? And if Caucasian whites are devils by nature, do you classify people by degrees of devilishness according to the lightness of their skin?

[A] Malcolm X: I don't worry about these little technicalities. But I know that white society has always considered that one drop of black blood makes you black. To me, if one drop can do this, it only shows the power of one drop of black blood. And I know another thing--that Negroes who used to be light enough to pass for white have seen the handwriting on the wall and are beginning to come back and identify with their own kind. And white people who also are seeing the pendulum of time catching up with them are now trying to join with blacks, or even find traces of black blood in their own veins, hoping that it will save them from the catastrophe they see ahead. Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people.

[Q] Haley: If all whites are devilish by nature, as you have alleged, and if black and white are essentially opposite, as you have just stated, do you view all black men--with the exception of their non-Muslim leaders--as fundamentally angelic?

[A] Malcolm X: No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They're robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it's the truth. They are a black body with a white brain. Like the monster in Frankenstein. The top part is your bourgeois Negro. He's your integrator. He's not interested in his poor black brothers. He's usually so deep in debt from trying to copy the white man's social habits that he doesn't have time to worry about nothing else. They buy the most expensive clothes and cars and eat the cheapest food. They act more like the white man than the white man does himself. These are the ones that hide their sympathy for Mr. Muhammad's teachings. It conflicts with the sources from which they get their white-man's crumbs. This class to us are the fence-sitters. They have one eye on the white man and the other eye on the Muslims. They'll jump whichever way they see the wind blowing. Then there's the middle class of the Negro masses, the ones not in the ghetto, who realize that life is a struggle, who are conscious of all the injustices being done and of the constant state of insecurity in which they live. They're ready to take some stand against everything that's against them. Now, when this group hears Mr. Muhammad's teachings, they are the ones who come forth faster and identify themselves, and take immediate steps toward trying to bring into existence what Mr. Muhammad advocates. At the bottom of the social heap is the black man in the big-city ghetto. He lives night and day with the rats and cockroaches and drowns himself with alcohol and anesthetizes himself with dope, to try and forget where and what he is. That Negro has given up all hope. He's the hardest one for us to reach, because he's the deepest in the mud. But when you get him, you've got the best kind of Muslim. Because he makes the most drastic change. He's the most fearless. He will stand the longest. He has nothing to lose, even his life, because he didn't have that in the first place. I look upon myself, sir, as a prime example of this category--and as graphic an example as you could find of the salvation of the black man.

[Q] Haley: Could you give us a brief review of the early life that led to your own "salvation"?

[A] Malcolm X: The first time I heard the Honorable Elijah Muhammad's statement "The white man is the devil," it just clicked. I am a good example of why Islam is spreading so rapidly across the land. I was nothing but another convict, a semi-illiterate criminal. Mr. Muhammad's teachings were able to reach into prison, which is the level where people are considered to have fallen as low as they can go. His teachings brought me from behind prison walls and placed me on the podiums of some of the leading colleges and universities in the country. I often think, sir, that in 1946, I was sentenced to eight to ten years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a common thief who had never passed the eighth grade. And the next time I went back to Cambridge was in March 1961, as a guest speaker at the Harvard Law School Forum. This is the best example of Mr. Muhammad's ability to take nothing and make something, to take nobody and make somebody.

[Q] Haley: How do you feel about Negro civil and human rights in South Africa, where the doctrine of apartheid is enforced by the government of Prime Minister Verwoerd?

[A] Malcolm X: They don't stand for anything different in South Africa than America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery. America preaches integration and practices segregation. Verwoerd is an honest white man. So are the Barnetts, Faubuses, Eastlands and Rockwells. They want to keep all white people white. And we want to keep all black people black. As between the racists and the integrationists, I highly prefer the racists. I'd rather walk among rattlesnakes, whose constant rattle warns me where they are, than among those Northern snakes who grin and make you forget you're still in a snake pit. Any white man is against blacks. The entire American economy is based on white supremacy. Even the religious philosophy is, in essence, white supremacy. A white Jesus. A white Virgin. White angels. White everything. But a black Devil, of course. The "Uncle Sam" political foundation is based on white supremacy, relegating nonwhites to second-class citizenship. It goes without saying that the social philosophy is strictly white supremacist. And the educational system perpetuates white supremacy.

[Q] Haley: Are you contradicting yourself by denouncing white supremacy while praising its practitioners, since you admit that you share their goal of separation?

[A] Malcolm X: The fact that I prefer the candor of the Southern segregationist to the hypocrisy of the Northern integrationist doesn't alter the basic immorality of white supremacy. A devil is still a devil whether he wears a bed sheet or a Brooks Brothers suit. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches separation simply because any forcible attempt to integrate America completely would result in another Civil War, a catastrophic explosion among whites which would destroy America--and still not solve the problem. But Mr. Muhammad's solution of separate black and white would solve the problem neatly for both the white and black man, and America would be saved. Then the whole world would give Uncle Sam credit for being something other than a hypocrite.

[Q] Haley: Despite the fact that the goal of racial equality is not yet realized, many sociologists--and many Negro commentators--agree that no minority group on earth has made as much social, civil and economic progress as the American Negro in the past 100 years. What is your reaction to this view?

[A] Malcolm X: Sir, I hear that everywhere almost exactly as you state it. This is one of the biggest myths that the American black man himself believes in. Every immigrant ethnic group that has come to this country is now a genuinely first-class citizen group--every one of them but the black man, who was here when they came. While everybody else is sharing the fruit, the black man is just now starting to be thrown some seeds. You talk about the progress of the Negro--I'll tell you, mister, it's just because the Negro has been in America while America has gone forward that the Negro appears to have gone forward.

[Q] Haley: Is there anything then, in your opinion, that could be done--by either whites or blacks--to expedite the social and economic progress of the Negro in America?

[A] Malcolm X: First of all, the white man must finally realize that he's the one who has committed the crimes that have produced the miserable condition that our people are in. He can't hide this guilt by reviling us today because we answer his criminal acts--past and present--with extreme and uncompromising resentment. He cannot hide his guilt by accusing us, his victims, of being racists, extremists and black supremacists. The white man must realize that the sins of the fathers are about to be visited upon the heads of the children who have continued those sins, only in more sophisticated ways. Mr. Elijah Muhammad is warning this generation of white people that they, too, are also facing a time of harvest in which they will have to pay for the crime committed when their grandfathers made slaves out of us.

But there is something the white man can do to avert this fate. He must atone--and this can only be done by allowing black men, those who choose, to leave this land of bondage and go to a land of our own. But if he doesn't want a mass movement of our people away from this house of bondage, then he should separate this country. He should give us several states here on American soil, where those of us who wish to can go and set up our own government, our own economic system, our own civilization. Since we have given over 300 years of our slave labor to the white man's America, helped to build it up for him, it's only right that white America should give us everything we need in finance and materials for the next 25 years, until our own nation is able to stand on its feet. Then, if the Western Hemisphere is attacked by outside enemies, we would have both the capability and the motivation to join in defending the hemisphere, in which we would then have a sovereign stake.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that the black man has served under the rule of all the other peoples of the earth at one time or another in the past. He teaches that it is now God's intention to put the black man back at the top of civilization, where he was in the beginning--before Adam, the white man, was created. The world since Adam has been white--and corrupt. The world of tomorrow will be black--and righteous. In the white world there has been nothing but slavery, suffering, death and colonialism. In the black world of tomorrow, there will be true freedom, justice and equality for all. And that day is coming--sooner than you think.

[Q] Haley: If Muslims ultimately gain control as you predict, do you plan to bestow "true freedom" on white people?

[A] Malcolm X: It's not a case of what would we do, it's a case of what would God do with whites. What does a judge do with the guilty? Either the guilty atone or God executes judgment.

Cassius Clay

Playboy published two interviews with the heavyweight champion of the world: one in October 1964, when most of the press still referred to him as Cassius Clay, and the other in November 1975. Haley conducted the first one and reported at the time (using the editorial we):

"We approached the mercurial Muslim with our request for a searching interview about his fame, his heavyweight crown and his faith. Readily consenting, he invited us to join him on his peripatetic social rounds of New York's Harlem, where he rents a three-room suite at the Hotel Theresa (in which another celebrated guest, Fidel Castro, hung his hat and plucked his chickens during a memorable visit to the UN).

"For the next two weeks, we walked with him on brisk morning constitutionals, ate with him at immaculate Muslim restaurants (no pork served), sat with him during his daily shoeshine, rode with him in his chauffeured, air-conditioned Cadillac limousine on leisurely drives through Harlem. We interjected our questions as the opportunities presented themselves--between waves and shouts exchanged by the champion and ogling pedestrians, and usually over the din of the limousine's dashboard phonograph, blaring Clay's recording of 'I Am the Greatest.' We began the conversation on our own blaring note."

[Q] Haley: Are you really the loudmouthed exhibitionist you seem to be, or is it all for the sake of publicity?

[A] Clay: I been attracting attention ever since I been able to walk and talk. When I was just a little boy in school, I caught on to how nearly everybody likes to watch somebody that acts different. Like, I wouldn't ride the school bus, I would run to school alongside it, and all the kids would be waving and hollering at me and calling me nuts. It made me somebody special. Or at recess time, I'd start a fight with somebody to draw a crowd. I always liked drawing crowds. When I started fighting serious, I found out that grown people, the fight fans, acted just like those school kids. Almost from my first fights, I'd bigmouth to anybody who would listen about what I was going to do to whoever I was going to fight, and people would go out of their way to come and see, hoping I would get beat.

[Q] Haley: How did your first fight come about?

[A] Clay: Well, on my 12th birthday, I got a new bicycle as a present from my folks, and I rode it to a fair that was being held at the Columbia Gymnasium, and when I come out, my bike was gone. I was so mad I was crying, and a policeman, Joe Martin, come up and I told him I was going to whip whoever took my bike. He said I ought to take some boxing lessons to learn how to whip the thief better, and I did. That's when I started fighting. Six weeks later, I won my first fight over another boy 12 years old, a white boy. And in a year I was fighting on TV. Joe Martin advised me against trying to just fight my way up in clubs and preliminaries, which could take years and maybe get me all beat up. He said I ought to try the Olympics, and if I won, that would give me automatically a number-ten pro rating. And that's just what I did.

[Q] Haley: At what point in your career did you first put your yelling technique into practice?

[A] Clay: Right after I had won the Olympic Gold Medal. One day, back home in Louisville, I was riding on a bus. I was reading a paper about Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. I didn't have no doubt I could beat either one of them, if I had a chance to fight them. But Machen, Folley, Jones and all of them other bums were standing in the way, and I decided I wasn't just about to stand around like them. I'd won the Olympic title, that was all in the papers, but hadn't nobody really heard of me, though, and they never would as long as I just sat thinking about it. Right there on that bus is where I figured I'd just open up my big mouth and start people listening and paying attention to me. Not just talking, but really screaming, and acting like some kind of a nut. I didn't want nobody thinking nothing except that I was a joke. And when it come to Liston, they was all saying it was the end of the line for me. I might even get killed in there; he was going to put his big fist in my big mouth so far they was going to have to get doctors to pull it out, stuff like that. You couldn't read nothing else. That's how come, later on, I made them reporters tell me I was the greatest. They had been so busy looking at Liston's record with Patterson that didn't nobody stop to think about how it was making Liston just about a setup for me. People can't stand a blowhard, but they'll always listen to him. Even people in Europe and Africa and Asia was hearing my big mouth. I didn't miss no radio or television show or newspaper I could get in. And in between them, on the street, I'd walk up to people and they'd tell one another about what "that crazy Cassius Clay" said. And then, on top of this, what the public didn't know was that every chance I got, I was needling Liston direct. I had bought this used 30-passenger bus, a 1953 Flexible--you know, the kind you see around airports. We had painted it red and white with World's most colorful fighter across the top. Then I had Liston must go in Eight painted across the side right after Liston took the title. We had been driving around Los Angeles, and up and down the freeways in the bus, blowing the horn, "Oink! Oink! Oink!" drawing people's attention to me. When I say I'm colorful, I believe in being colorful. Anyway, this time, when we started out for New York, we decided it would be a good time to pay Liston a visit at his new house.

We had the address from the newspapers, and we pulled up in his front yard in the bus about three o'clock in the morning and started blowing: "Oink! Oink! Oink! Oink!" In other houses, lights went on and windows went up. You know how them white people felt about that black man just moved in there anyway, and we sure wasn't helping it none. People was hollering things, and we got out with the headlights blazing and went up to Liston's door, just about as Liston got there. He had on nylon shorty pajamas. And he was mad. He first recognized Howard Bingham, the photographer, whom he had seen in Los Angeles. "What you want, black mother?" he said to Howard. I was standing right behind Howard, flinging my cane back and forth in the headlights, hollering loud enough for everybody in a mile to hear me, "Come on out of there! I'm going to whip you right now! Come on out of there and protect your home! If you don't come out of that door, I'm going to break it down!"

You know that look of Liston's you hear so much about? Well, he sure had it on standing in that door that night. Man, he was tore up! He didn't know what to do. He wanted to come out there after me, but he was already in enough troubles with the police and everything. And you know, if a man figures you're crazy, he'll think twice before he acts, because he figures you're liable to do anything. But before he could make up his mind, the police came rushing in with all their sirens going, and they broke it up, telling us we would be arrested for disturbing the peace if we didn't get out of there. So we left. I made up my mind right then that by the time we got to Miami in training, I was going to have him so mad that he would forget everything he knew about fighting, just trying to kill me.

[Q] Haley: Then the fight went about as you had planned?

[A] Clay: Almost. He came in there at 220 pounds, and untrained to go more than two rounds, and as old as he is--too old--against a kid, and I didn't have an ounce of fat on me. And he didn't have no respect for me as a fighter. He was figuring on killing me inside of two rounds. He was a perfect setup. If you remember, I didn't throw many punches, but when I did, they made their mark. I have vicious combinations, and just like I had planned, I hurt his body and I closed his eyes.

[Q] Haley: What is your feeling about the fact that your purse was withheld after the fight?

[A] Clay: I don't understand it. I'm not involved in any tax problems. How can they justify holding up my money? But let me tell you something: I got bigger things on my mind than that. I got Islam on my mind.

[Q] Haley: Speaking of Islam, the National Boxing Association announced that it Was considering the revocation of your heavyweight title because of your membership in the Black Muslims, which you announced just after the fight. Have you heard any official word on their decision?

[A] Clay: It just fizzled out. But until it did, the N.B.A. was going to condemn me, try me, sentence me and execute me, all by themselves. Ain't this country supposed to be where every man can have the religion he wants, even no religion if that's what he wants? It ain't a court in America that would take a man's job, or his title, because of his religious convictions. The Constitution forbids Congress from making any laws involving a man's religion. But the N.B.A. would take it on itself to take away my title--for what? What have I done to hurt boxing? I've helped boxing. But the N.B.A. don't have no power no way. They can't stop nobody from fighting. And even if they could, it wouldn't matter, because I don't put that much value on no heavyweight crown anyway. Time was when I did, but that was before I found the religious convictions that I have. When I started getting attacked so bad because I am a Muslim, I had to decide, if it would come to me having to give up one or the other, what was most important to me, my religion or my fighting. I made up my mind that I could give up fighting and never look back. Because it's a whole pile of other ways I could make a living. Me being the world heavyweight champion feels very small and cheap to me when I put that alongside of how millions of my poor black brothers and sisters are having to struggle just to get their human rights here in America.

[Q] Haley: What or who made you decide to join the Muslims?

[A] Clay: Nobody or nothing made me decide. I make up my mind for myself. In 1960, this Muslim minister came to me and he asked me wouldn't I like to come to his mosque and hear about the history of my forefathers. I never had heard no black man talking about no forefathers, except that they were slaves, so I went to a meeting. And this minister started teaching, and the things he said really shook me up. Things like that we 20,000,000 black people in America didn't know our true identities, or even our true family names. And we were the direct descendants of black men and women stolen from a rich black continent and brought here and stripped of all knowledge of themselves and taught to hate themselves and their kind. And that's how us so-called Negroes had come to be the only race among mankind that loved its enemies. Now, I'm the kind that catches on quick. I said to myself, listen here, this man's saying something! I hope don't nobody never hit me in the ring hard as it did when that brother minister said the Chinese are named after China, Russians after Russia, Cubans after Cuba, Italians after Italy, the English after England, and clear on down the line everybody was named for somewhere he could call home, except us. He said, "What country are we so-called Negroes named for? No country! We are just a lost race." Well, boom! That really shook me up. I remember right in our house back in Louisville, all the pictures on the walls were white people. Nothing about us black people. A picture of a white Jesus Christ. Now, what painter ever saw Jesus? So who says Jesus was white? And all my life, I had been seeing the black man getting his head whipped by the white man, and stuck in the white man's jails, and things like that. And myself, I had to admit that up to then, I had always hated being black, just like other Negroes, hating our kind, instead of loving one another. The more I saw and thought, the more the truth made sense to me. Whatever I'm for, I always have believed in talking it up, and the first thing you know, I was in Muslim meetings calling out just like the rest, "Right, brother! Tell it, brother! Keep it coming!" And today my religion is Islam, and I'm proud of it.

[Q] Haley: How has it changed your life?

[A] Clay: In every way. It's pulled me up and cleaned me up as a human being. Before I became a Muslim, I used to drink. Yes, I did. The truth is the truth. And after I had fought and beat somebody, I didn't hardly go nowhere without two big, pretty women beside me. But my change is one of the things that will mark me as a great man in history. When you can live righteous in the hell of North America--when a man can control his life, his physical needs, his lower self, he elevates himself. The downfall of so many great men is that they haven't been able to control their appetite for women.

[Q] Haley: But you have?

[A] Clay: We Muslims don't touch a woman unless we're married to her.

[Q] Haley: Don't you feel that whites have some reason for concern that the heavyweight champion belongs to an organization that is alleged to teach hatred of whites?

[A] Clay: Look, the black man that's trying to integrate, he's getting beat up and bombed and shot. But the black man that says he don't want to integrate, he gets called a "hate teacher."

I think that all of this "integration" started backfiring when it put the white man on the spot. It ain't going to go on much further. I think that the black man needs to get together with his own kind. He needs to say, "Let's don't go where we're not wanted." You take Sonny Liston. He was the champion of the world, and that's supposed to include America. But when he tried to buy a house in a segregated neighborhood in Miami, he was turned down. The white people don't want integration. I don't believe in forcing it and the Muslims don't either.

The fact is that my being a Muslim moved me from the sports pages to the front pages. Twenty-four hours a day I get offers--to tour somewhere overseas, to visit colleges, to make speeches. Places like Harvard and Tuskegee, television shows, interviews, recordings. I get letters from all over. They are addressed to me in ways like "The Greatest Boxer in the World, U. S. A." and they come straight to me wherever they're mailed from. People want to write books about me. And I ought to have stock in Western Union and cable companies, I get so many of them. I'm trying to show you how I been elevated from the normal stature of fighters to being a world figure, a leader, a statesman.

[Q] Haley: Statesman?

[A] Clay: That's what I said. Listen, after I beat Liston, some African diplomats invited me to the United Nations. And because I'm a Muslim, I was welcomed like a king on my tour of Africa and the Middle East. I'm the first world champion that ever toured the world that he is champion of.

[Q] Haley: Are you the greatest now fighting, or the greatest in boxing history?

[A] Clay: Now, a whole lot of people ain't going to like this. But I'm going to tell you the truth--you asked me. It's too many great old champions to go listing them one by one. But ain't no need to. I think that Joe Louis, in his prime, could have whipped them all--I mean anyone you want to name. And I would have beat Louis. Now, look--people don't like to face the facts. All they can think about is Joe Louis' punch. Well, he did have a deadly punch, just like Liston has a deadly punch. But if Louis didn't hit nothing but air, like Liston didn't with me, then we got to look at other things. Even if Louis did hit me a few times, remember they all said Liston was a tougher one-punch man than even Joe Louis. And I took some of Liston's best shots. Remember that. Then, too, I'm taller than Louis. But I tell you what would decide the fight: I'm faster than Louis was. No, Louis and none of the rest of them couldn't whip me. Look--It ain't never been another fighter like me. Ain't never been no nothing like me.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In January 1965, we published Haley's interview with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., shortly after King received the Nobel Peace Prize. Back in those days, we still weren't identifying the interviewer by name, so Haley reported anonymously:

"So heavy were Martin Luther King, Jr.'s commitments when we called him last summer for an interview that two months elapsed before he was able to accept our request for an appointment. We kept it--only to spend a week in Atlanta waiting in vain for him to find a moment for more than an apology and a hurried handshake.... King was finally able to sandwich in a series of hour and half-hour conversations with us among the other demands of a grueling week. The resultant interview is the longest he has ever granted to any publication.

"Though he spoke with heartfelt and often eloquent sincerity, his tone was one of businesslike detachment. And his mood, except for one or two flickering smiles of irony, was gravely serious."

[Q] Haley: As one who grew up in the economically comfortable, socially insulated environment of a middle-income home in Atlanta, can you recall when it was that you yourself first became painfully and personally aware of racial prejudice?

[A] King: Very clearly. When I was 14, I had traveled from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia, with a dear teacher of mine, Mrs. Bradley; she's dead now. I had participated there in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks. It turned out to be a memorable day, for I had succeeded in winning the contest. My subject, I recall, ironically enough, was "The Negro and the Constitution." Anyway, that night, Mrs. Bradley and I were on a bus returning to Atlanta, and at a small town along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn't move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us, calling us "black sons of bitches." I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley finally urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. And so we stood up in the aisle for the 90 miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.

[Q] Haley: Wasn't it another such incident on a bus, years later, that thrust you into your present role as a civil rights leader?

[A] King: Yes, it was--in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter long identified with the NAACP, telephoned me late one night to tell me that Mrs. Rosa Parks had been arrested around 7:30 that evening when a bus driver demanded that she give up her seat, and she refused--because her feet hurt. Nixon had already bonded Mrs. Parks out of prison. He said, "It's time this stops; we ought to boycott the buses." I agreed and said, "Now." The next night we called a meeting of Negro community leaders to discuss it, and on Saturday and Sunday we appealed to the Negro community, with leaflets and from the pulpits, to boycott the buses on Monday. We had in mind a one-day boycott, and we were banking on 60 percent success. But the boycott saw instantaneous 99 percent success. We were so pleasantly surprised and impressed that we continued, and for the next 381 days the boycott of Montgomery's buses by Negroes was 99-9/10 percent successful.

[Q] Haley: Can you recall any mistakes you've made in leading the movement?

[A] King: Well, the most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our cause to the white power structure. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands--and some even took stands against us.

Let me hasten to say there are some outstanding exceptions. As one whose Christian roots go back through three generations of ministers--my father, grandfather and great-grandfather--I will remain true to the church as long as I live. But the laxity of the white church collectively has caused me to weep tears of love. There cannot be deep disappointment without deep love. Time and again in my travels, as I have seen the outward beauty of white churches, I have had to ask myself, "What kind of people worship there? Who is their God? Is their God the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and is their Savior the Savior who hung on the cross at Golgotha? Where were their voices when a black race took upon itself the cross of protest against man's injustice to man? Where were their voices when defiance and hatred were called for by white men who sat in these very churches?"

I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!" I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?

[Q] Haley: Do you still feel this way?

[A] King: No, time has healed the wounds--and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting--ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor's police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor's bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor's men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor's men fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.

[Q] Haley: Your detractors in the Negro community often refer to you snidely as "De Lawd" and "Booker T. King." What's your reaction to this sort of Uncle Tom label?

[A] King: I hear some of those names, but my reaction to them is never emotional. I don't think you can be in public life without being called bad names. As Lincoln said, "If I answered all criticism, I'd have time for nothing else." But with regard to both of the names you mentioned, I've always tried to be what I call militantly nonviolent. I don't believe that anyone could seriously accuse me of not being totally committed to the breakdown of segregation.

[Q] Haley: What do you mean by "militantly nonviolent"?

[A] King: I mean to say that a strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist. If I am to merit the trust invested in me by some of my race, I must be both of these things. This is why nonviolence is a powerful as well as a just weapon. If you confront a man who has long been cruelly misusing you, and say, "Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong," then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed. Wherever this weapon is used in a manner that stirs a community's, or a nation's, anguished conscience, then the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause.

We should not forget that, although nonviolent direct action did not originate in America, it found a natural home where it has been a revered tradition to rebel against injustice. This great weapon, which we first tried out in Montgomery during the bus boycott, has been further developed throughout the South over the past decade, until by today it has become instrumental in the greatest mass-action crusade for freedom that has occurred in America since the Revolutionary War.

[Q] Haley: Your dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Act reflects that of most other Negro spokesmen. According to recent polls, however, many whites resent this attitude, calling the Negro "ungrateful" and "unrealistic" to press his demands for more.

[A] King: This is a litany to those of us in this field. "What more will the Negro want?" "What will it take to make these demonstrations end?" Well, I would like to reply with another rhetorical question: Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America? I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom. This continued arrogant ladling out of pieces of the rights of citizenship has begun to generate a fury in the Negro. Even so, he is not pressing for revenge, or for conquest, or to gain spoils, or to enslave, or even to marry the sisters of those who have injured him. What the Negro wants--and will not stop until he gets--is absolute and unqualified freedom and equality here in this land of his birth, and not in Africa or in some imaginary state. The Negro no longer will be tolerant of anything less than his due right and heritage. He is pursuing only that which he knows is honorably his. He knows that he is right.

Few white people, even today, will face the clear fact that the very future and destiny of this country are tied up in what answer will be given to the Negro. And that answer must be given soon.

[Q] Haley: Relatively few dispute the justness of the struggle to eradicate racial injustice, but many whites feel that the Negro should be more patient, that only the passage of time--perhaps generations--will bring about the sweeping changes he demands in traditional attitudes and customs. Do you think this is true?

[A] King: No, I do not. I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills. In truth, time itself is only neutral. Increasingly, I feel that time has been used destructively by people of ill will much more than it has been used constructively by those of good will.

If I were to select a timetable for the equalization of human rights, it would be the intent of the "all deliberate speed" specified in the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision. But what has happened? A Supreme Court decision was met, and balked, with utter defiance. Ten years later, in most areas of the South, less than one percent of the Negro children have been integrated in schools, and in some of the deepest South, not even one tenth of one percent. Approximately 25 percent of employable Negro youth, for another example, are presently unemployed. Though many would prefer not to, we must face the fact that progress for the Negro--to which white "moderates" like to point in justifying gradualism--has been relatively insignificant, particularly in terms of the Negro masses. What little progress has been made--and that includes the Civil Rights Act--has applied primarily to the middle-class Negro. Among the masses, especially in the Northern ghettos, the situation remains about the same, and for some it is worse.

[Q] Haley: Haven't both the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan been implicated in connection with plots against your life?

[A] King: It's difficult to trace the authorship of these death threats. I seldom go through a day without one. Some are telephoned anonymously to my office; others are sent--unsigned, of course--through the mails. Drew Pearson wrote not long ago about one group of unknown affiliation that was committed to assassinate not only me but also Chief Justice Warren and President Johnson. And not long ago, when I was about to visit in Mississippi, I received some very urgent calls from Negro leaders in Mobile, who had been told by a very reliable source that a sort of guerrilla group led by a retired major was plotting to take my life during the visit. I was strongly urged to cancel the trip, but when I thought about it, I decided that I had no alternative but to go on into Mississippi.

[Q] Haley: Why?

[A] King: Because I have a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn't function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically. I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.

[Q] Haley: Do you feel you have the right to pass judgment on and defy the law--nonviolently or otherwise?

[A] King: Yes--morally, if not legally. For there are two kinds of laws: man's and God's. A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law. But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law. And an unjust law, as Saint Augustine said, is no law at all. Thus, a law that is unjust is morally null and void, and must be defied until it is legally null and void as well. Let us not forget, in the memories of 6,000,000 who died, that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal," and that everything the Freedom Fighters in Hungary did was "illegal." In spite of that, I am sure that I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers if I had lived in Germany during Hitler's reign, as some Christian priests and ministers did do, often at the cost of their lives. And if I lived now in a Communist country where principles dear to the Christian's faith are suppressed, I know that I would openly advocate defiance of that country's anti-religious laws--again, just as some Christian priests and ministers are doing today behind the Iron Curtain. Right here in America today there are white ministers, priests and rabbis who have shed blood in the support of our struggle against a web of human injustice, much of which is supported by immoral man-made laws.

[Q] Haley: If it's morally right for supporters of civil rights to violate segregation laws which they consider unjust, why is it wrong for segregationists to resist the enforcement of integration laws which they consider unjust?

[A] King: Because segregation, as even the segregationists know in their hearts, is morally wrong and sinful. If it weren't, the white South would not be haunted as it is by a deep sense of guilt for what it has done to the Negro--guilt for patronizing him, degrading him, brutalizing him, depersonalizing him, thingifying him; guilt for lying to itself. This is the source of the schizophrenia that the South will suffer until it goes through its crisis of conscience.

[Q] Haley: Is this crisis imminent?

[A] King: It may not come next week or next year, but it is certainly more imminent in the South than in the North. If the South is honest with itself, it may well outdistance the North in the improvement of race relations.

[Q] Haley: Why?

[A] King: Well, the Northern white, having had little actual contact with the Negro, is devoted to an abstract principle of cordial interracial relations. The North has long considered, in a theoretical way, that it supported brotherhood and the equality of man, but the truth is that deep prejudices and discriminations exist in hidden and subtle and covert disguises. The South's prejudice and discrimination, on the other hand, has been applied against the Negro in obvious, open, overt and glaring forms--which make the problem easier to get at. The Southern white man has the advantage of far more actual contact with Negroes than the Northerner. A major problem is that this contact has been paternalistic and poisoned by the myth of racial superiority.

[Q] Haley: Many Southern whites, supported by the "research" of several Southern anthropologists, vow that white racial superiority--and Negro inferiority--are biological facts.

[A] King: You may remember that during the rise of Nazi Germany, a rash of books by respected German scientists appeared, supporting the master-race theory. This utterly ignorant fallacy has been so thoroughly refuted by the social scientists, as well as by medical science, that any individual who goes on believing it is standing in an absolutely misguided and diminishing circle. The American Anthropological Association has unanimously adopted a resolution repudiating statements that Negroes are biologically, in innate mental ability or in any other way, inferior to whites. The collective weight and authority of world scientists are embodied in a UNESCO report on races which flatly refutes the theory of innate superiority among any ethnic group. And as far as Negro "blood" is concerned, medical science finds the same four blood types in all race groups. The Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals--the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.

[Q] Haley: Is it destined to be a violent revolution?

[A] King: God willing, no. But white Americans must be made to understand the basic motives underlying Negro demonstrations. Many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations are boiling inside the Negro, and he must release them. It is not a threat but a fact of history that if an oppressed people's pent-up emotions are not nonviolently released, they will be violently released. So let the Negro march. Let him make pilgrimages to city hall. Let him go on freedom rides. And above all, make an effort to understand why he must do this. For if his frustration and despair are allowed to continue piling up, millions of Negroes will seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies. And this, inevitably, would lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

[Q] Haley: If a nationwide program of preferential employment for Negroes were to be adopted, how would you propose to assuage the resentment of whites who already feel that their jobs are being jeopardized by the influx of Negroes resulting from desegregation?

[A] King: We must develop a Federal program of public works, retraining and jobs for all--so that none, white or black, will have cause to feel threatened. At the present time, thousands of jobs a week are disappearing in the wake of automation and other production efficiency techniques. Black and white, we will all be harmed unless something grand and imaginative is done. The unemployed, poverty-stricken white man must be made to realize that he is in the very same boat with the Negro. Together, they could exert massive pressure on the Government to get jobs for all. Together, they could form a grand alliance. Together, they could merge all people for the good of all.

[Q] Haley: If Negroes are also granted preferential treatment in housing, as you propose, how would you allay the alarm with which many white homeowners, fearing property devaluation, greet the arrival of Negroes in hitherto all-white neighborhoods?

[A] King: We must expunge from our society the myths and half-truths that engender such groundless fears as these. In the first place, there is no truth to the myth that Negroes depreciate property. The fact is that most Negroes are kept out of residential neighborhoods so long that when one of us is finally sold a home, it's already depreciated. In the second place, we must dispel the negative and harmful atmosphere that has been created by avaricious and unprincipled realtors who engage in "blockbusting." If we had in America really serious efforts to break down discrimination in housing, and at the same time a concerted program of Government aid to improve housing for Negroes, I think that many white people would be surprised at how many Negroes would choose to live among themselves, exactly as Poles and Jews and other ethnic groups do.

[Q] Haley: If you could send someone--anyone--to that proverbial desert island, who would it be?

[A] King: Let me see, I guess I wouldn't mind seeing Mr. Goldwater dispatched to a desert island. I hope they'd feed him and everything, of course. I am nonviolent, you know. Politically, though, he's already on a desert island, so it may be unnecessary to send him there.

[Q] Haley: We take it you weren't overly distressed by his defeat in the Presidential race.

[A] King: Until that defeat, Goldwater was the most dangerous man in America. He talked soft and nice, but he gave aid and comfort to the most vicious racists and the most extreme rightists in America. He gave respectability to views totally alien to the democratic process. Had he won, he would have led us down a fantastic path that would have totally destroyed America as we know it.

[Q] Haley: You became, in October of last year, the youngest man ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. What was your reaction to the news?

[A] King: It made me feel very humble, indeed. But I would like to think that the award is not a personal tribute, but a tribute to the entire freedom movement, and to the gallant people of both races who surround me in the drive for civil rights which will make the American dream a reality. I think that this internationally known award will call even more attention to our struggle, gain even greater sympathy and understanding for our cause, from people all over the world. I like to think that the award recognizes symbolically the gallantry, the courage and the amazing discipline of the Negro in America, for these things are to his eternal credit. Though we have had riots, the bloodshed that we would have known without the discipline of nonviolence would have been truly frightening. I know that many whites feel the civil rights movement is getting out of hand; this may reassure them. It may let them see that basically this is a disciplined struggle, let them appreciate the meaning of our struggle, let them see that a great struggle for human freedom can occur within the framework of a democratic society.

[Q] Haley: Do you intend to dedicate the rest of your life, then, to the Negro cause?

[A] King: If need be, yes. But I dream of the day when the demands presently cast upon me will be greatly diminished. I would say that in the next five years, though, I can't hope for much letup-- either in the South or in the North. After that time, it is my hope that things will taper off a bit.

[Q] Haley: In the meanwhile, you are now the universally acknowledged leader of the American civil rights movement, and chief spokesman for the nation's 20,000,000 Negroes. Are there ever moments when you feel awed by this burden of responsibility, or inadequate to its demands?

[A] King: One cannot be in my position, looked to by some for guidance, without being constantly reminded of the awesomeness of its responsibility.

I subject myself to self-purification and to endless self-analysis; I question and soul-search constantly into myself to be as certain as I can that I am fulfilling the true meaning of my work, that I am maintaining my sense of purpose, that I am holding fast to my ideals, that I am guiding my people in the right direction. But whatever my doubts, however heavy the burden, I feel that I must accept the task of helping to make this nation and this world a better place to live in--for all men, black and white alike.

I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. "What do you want?" the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, "Fee-dom." She couldn't even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me.

George Lincoln Rockwell

By April 1966, we were identifying the interviewer in the introductions to the "Playboy Interview," and that month it was especially right that we did so: Haley's report of his encounter with the fanatical Führer of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, deserves a lengthy excerpt by itself. (Incidentally, for reasons that will be obvious, it was the only time a Playboy interviewer referred to himself in the first person within the interview.)

"I called Rockwell at his Arlington, Virginia, headquarters and relayed Playboy's request for an exclusive interview. After assuring himself that I wasn't Jewish, he guardedly agreed. I didn't tell him I was a Negro. Five days later, as my taxi pulled up in front of Rockwell's International Headquarters, a nine-room white frame house in Arlington, I noticed a billboard-sized sign on the roof reading: White Man Fight--Smash the Black Revolution! I couldn't help wondering what kind of welcome I'd receive when they got a look at my non-Aryan complexion. I didn't have long to wait; the khaki-clad duty guard at the door stiffened as I stepped out of the cab and up the front stairs. When I identified myself, he ushered me uncertainly inside and told me to wait nearby in what he called 'the shrine room,' a small, black-walled chamber dimly lit by flickering red candles and adorned with American and Nazi flags, adjoining portraits of Adolf Hitler and George Washington, and a slightly larger, rather idealized painting of Rockwell himself--a self-portrait. On the table beside my chair sat a crudely bound and printed copy of Rockwell's self-published autobiography, 'This Time the World'; I was leafing through it when a pair of uniformed 'storm troopers' loomed suddenly in the doorway, gave the Nazi salute and informed me coolly that Commander Rockwell had ordered them to take me in one of the party staff cars to his nearby personal headquarters.

"Fifteen minutes later, with me and my tape recorder in the back and my two chaperones in the front, the car turned into a narrow, tree-lined road, slowed down as it passed a No Trespassing sign (stamped with a skull and crossbones) and a leashed Doberman watchdog, and finally pulled up in front of a white, 16-room farmhouse emblazoned at floorand second-story levels with four-foot-high red swastikas. About a dozen Nazis stared icily as the guards walked me past them and up the stairs to Rockwell's door, where a side-armed storm trooper frisked me expertly from head to toe. Within arm's reach, I noticed, was a wooden rack holding short combat lengths of sawed-off iron pipe. Finding me 'clean,' the guard ceremoniously opened the door, stepped inside, saluted, said, 'Sieg heill'--echoed brusquely from within--then stood aside and nodded permission for me to come ahead. I did.

"As if for dramatic effect, Rockwell was standing across the room, corncob pipe in hand, beneath a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Warned about my Negritude, he registered no surprise nor did he smile, speak or offer to shake hands. Instead, after surveying me up and down for a long moment, he motioned me peremptorily to a seat, then sat down himself in a nearby easy chair and watched silently while I set up my tape machine. Rockwell already had one of his own, I noticed, spinning on a nearby table. Then, with the burly guard standing at attention about halfway between us, he took out a pearl-handled revolver, placed it pointedly on the arm of his chair, sat back and spoke for the first time: 'I'm ready if you are.' Without any further pleasantries, I turned on my machine."

[Q] Haley: Before we begin, Commander, I wonder if you'd mind telling me why you're keeping that pistol there at your elbow, and this armed bodyguard between us.

[A] Rockwell: Just a precaution. You may not be aware of the fact that I have received literally thousands of threats against my life. Most of them are from cranks, but some of them haven't been; there are bullet holes all over the outside of this building. Just last week, two gallon jugs of flaming gasoline were flung against the house right under my window. I keep this gun within reach and a guard beside me during interviews because I've been attacked too many times to take any chances.

Just so we both know where we stand, I'd like to make something else crystal clear before we begin. I'm going to be honest and direct with you. You're here in your professional capacity; I'm here in my professional capacity. While here, you'll be treated well--but I see you're a black interviewer. It's nothing personal, but I want you to understand that I don't mix with your kind, and we call your race "niggers."

[Q] Haley: I've been called "nigger" many times, Commander, but this is the first time I'm being paid for it. So you go right ahead. What have you got against us "niggers"?

[A] Rockwell: I've got nothing against you. I just think you people would be happier back in Africa where you came from. When the Pilgrims got pushed around in Europe, they didn't have any sit-ins or crawl-ins; they got out and went to a wilderness and built a great civilization.

[Q] Haley: It was built with the help of Negroes.

[A] Rockwell: Help or no, the white people in America simply aren't going to allow you to mix totally with them, whether you like it or not.

[Q] Haley: The purpose of the civil rights movement is equality of rights and opportunity, Commander--not miscegenation, as you seem to be implying.

[A] Rockwell: Equality may be the stated purpose, but race mixing is what it boils down to in practice; and the harder you people push for that, the madder white people are going to get.

[Q] Haley: Do you think you're entitled to speak for white people?

[A] Rockwell: Malcolm X said the same thing I'm saying.

[Q] Haley: He certainly was in no position to speak for white people.

[A] Rockwell: Well, I think I am speaking for the majority of whites when I say that race mixing just isn't going to work. I think, therefore, that we should take the billions of dollars now being wasted on foreign aid to Communist countries which hate us and give that money to our own niggers to build their own civilized nation in Africa.

[Q] Haley: Apart from the fact that Africa is already spoken for territorially by sovereign nations, all but a few of the 20,000,000 Negroes in this country are native-born Americans who have just as much right to remain here as you do, Commander.

[A] Rockwell: That's not my point. The mass of average niggers simply don't "fit" in modern American society. A leopard doesn't change his spots just because you bring him in from the jungle and try to housebreak him and turn him into a pet. He may learn to sheathe his claws in order to beg a few scraps off the dinner table, and you may teach him to be a beast of burden, but it doesn't pay to forget that he'll always be what he was born: a wild animal.

[Q] Haley: We're talking about human beings, not animals.

[A] Rockwell: We're talking about niggers--and there's no doubt in my mind that they're basically animalistic.

[Q] Haley: In what way?

[A] Rockwell: Spiritually. Our white kids are being perverted, like Pavlov's dogs, by conditioned-reflex training. For instance, every time a white kid is getting a piece of ass, the car radio is blaring nigger bebop. Under such powerful stimuli, it's not long before a kid begins unconsciously to connect these savage sounds with intense pleasure and thus transfers his natural pleasurable reactions in sex to an unnatural love of the chaotic and animalistic nigger music, which destroys a love of order and real beauty among our kids. This is how you niggers corrupt our white kids--without even laying a dirty hand on them. Not that you wouldn't like to.

[Q] Haley: It's sometimes the other way around, Commander.

[A] Rockwell: Well, I'll have to admit one great failing of my own people: The white man is getting too soft. The niggers are forced to do hard manual labor, and as a result, most nigger bucks are healthy animals--rugged and tough, the way nature intended a male to be. When you take a look at how the average, bourgeois white man spends his time, though--hunched over a desk, going to the ballet, riding around on his electric lawn mower or squatting on his fur-lined toilet seat--you can't help but observe how soft and squishy a lot of white men allow themselves to become; especially some of the skinny, pasty-faced white peace creeps with their long hair, their fairy-looking clothes and the big yellow stripe up their spineless back. What normal woman would want one of these cruds? Unfortunately, some of our white women, especially in the crazy leftist environment on our college campuses, get carried away by Jewish propaganda into betraying their own instincts by choosing a healthy black buck instead of one of these skinny, pansified white peace creeps who swarm on our college campuses.

[Q] Haley: Are you implying that the Negro male is sexually superior to the white man?

[A] Rockwell: Certainly not. The average white workingman, the vast majority of white men, are just as tough and ballsy as any nigger who ever lived. It's the white intellectuals who have allowed themselves to be degenerate physically, mentally and especially spiritually, until I am forced to admit that a healthy nigger garbage man is certainly superior physically and sexually to a pasty-faced skinny white peace creep.

[Q] Haley: Do you consider Negroes superior to white men in any other way?

[A] Rockwell: On the contrary--I consider them inferior to the white man in every other way.

[Q] Haley: That's a fairly sweeping generalization. Can you document it?

[A] Rockwell: The fact is that any contribution of the niggers has been almost entirely manual and menial. Horses could have done most of it, or well-trained monkeys from the same trees they were flushed out of back in Africa. They've picked up a few more tricks since then--but only what they've learned from the white man. The fact is that the average nigger is not as intelligent as the average white man.

[Q] Haley: There's no genetic or anthropological evidence to substantiate that.

[A] Rockwell: I know you're going to say you can show me thousands of intelligent niggers and stupid white men. I'm well aware that there are exceptions on both sides. All I'm saying is that the average of your people is below the average of my people; and the pure-black ones are even further below us. I have living evidence of this sitting right in front of me.

[Q] Haley: If you mean me, I'm far from pure black--as you can see.

[A] Rockwell: That's just it: You're an intelligent person; I enjoy talking to you. But, you're not pure black like your ancestors in the Congo. Now, this may insult you, but we're not here to throw pansies at each other: There had to be some white people in your background somewhere, or you wouldn't be brown instead of black. Right?

[Q] Haley: Right.

[A] Rockwell: Well, I'm saying that your intelligence comes from the blood of my people. Whenever they trot out some smart nigger and say, "See? Look how brilliant niggers are," what they usually show you is a part-white man with some nigger blood in him. This doesn't prove that niggers are great. On the contrary; it proves that white blood can make a part-nigger more intelligent.

[Q] Haley: I understand you consider Jews inferior, too. How?

[A] Rockwell: Spiritually. Jews talk a lot about God. But actually, their god, just like Marx said, is money. Cash! This is where the Jews fail--in their lack of idealism. Most of them are strictly materialists at heart. Wherever the Jews have gone, they've moved into a friendly, unsuspecting country and promptly started to glut on its people and resources. They think they're engaging in business, but actually what they're doing is eating the country up alive. And when people begin to resent their viciousness and greed, and either kick the Jews out or kill them, they always scream "Persecution!" That's not persecution. It's self-defense.

[Q] Haley: Are you implying that Hitler was justified in exterminating 6,000,000 European Jews?

[A] Rockwell: I emphatically deny that there is any valid proof that innocent Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis. The photographs you've seen that have been passed off as pictures of dead Jews have been identified as pictures of the corpses of German civilians--mostly women and children and refugees--who were killed in the one-night Allied bombing of Dresden, which slaughtered 350,000 innocent people.

I have conclusive evidence to prove that some of these "documentary" photographs are frauds, pure and simple. In a magazine published by the Jews and sold all over America, they show a bottle supposedly containing soap made by the Germans out of the poor, dead, gassed Jews.

[Q] Haley: What evidence do you have for claiming that it's fraudulent?

[A] Rockwell: Common sense. That soap could have been made out of anything; it could have been melted down from a dozen bars of Lifebuoy.

[Q] Haley: If you had carte-blanche power to do so as the Chief Executive, would you create a dictatorship along the lines of Hitler's?

[A] Rockwell: No, I'd reinstitute the American Constitutional Republic the way it was set up by our authoritarian forefathers--who were, in essence, nothing more than National Socialists just like me.

[Q] Haley: In no way did the founding fathers attempt to abridge the democratic right to "liberty and justice for all." How can you call them Nazis?

[A] Rockwell: In the first place, I don't believe in democracy. In the second place, neither did our white forefathers. I believe, as they did, in a republic--an authoritarian republic with a limited electorate--just like the one the writers of our Constitution meant this country to be. When these white Christian patriots sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, there were no black citizens for them to worry about. In those days, all the niggers were slaves; but today, thanks to several misguided amendments, our Constitution provides even the blackest of savages with the same rights as his former white masters.

[Q] Haley: Then you advocate the disenfranchisement of Negroes?

[A] Rockwell: And the revocation of their citizenship.

[Q] Haley: And the restoration of slavery?

[A] Rockwell: No, we have machines to do their work now. I would simply revoke their citizenship and then offer them the alternatives of either returning to Africa with our generous help and assistance in establishing a modern industrial nation, or being relocated on reservations like the Indians were when they became a problem to the survival of the white people. This will apply to you, too, by the way. Nothing personal, you understand; I like you, personally; but I can't make any exceptions.

[Q] Haley: Of course not. What would you do with America's 6,000,000 Jews?

[A] Rockwell: I think the Jews can be dealt with individually rather than as a group--like the niggers must be because of their race. As I said earlier, I think all Jews--in fact, all those connected in any way with treason, whether Jews or not--should be investigated and their cases put before grand juries; if they're indicted, they should then be tried, and if convicted, they should be killed.

[Q] Haley: Having disposed of Jews and Negroes, would that complete your list of those slotted for removal?

[A] Rockwell: Not quite. I'd also purge the queers. I despise them worst of all. They're one of the ugliest problems of our society, and they must be removed--I don't know if with gas, or what, just so they don't poison society.

[Q] Haley: Have you considered the possibility that you might be killed?

[A] Rockwell: I've not only considered it; I expect it. And I'm ready for it. Being prepared to die is one of the great secrets of living. I know I'm going to go--probably in some violent manner; the only question is when and how. But I don't think that's going to happen to me until I complete my mission. I know this is irrational, but I believe that I was placed here for a purpose and I think God has something to do with it: Our country needs a leader. So I think I'll be spared. As Rommel said, "Stand next to me; I'm bulletproof."

[Q] Haley: Do you think you're bulletproof, too?

[A] Rockwell: Not literally, of course, but I firmly believe that the more arrogant and defiant you are of danger, the safer you are from harm. I think that's the reason I've survived so many times when people have shot at me. If you're fearless enough, it implants a certain psychology in the guy that's trying to shoot at you. It's almost as if he could smell your fearlessness, the way an animal smells fear. But the effect is the opposite: Instead of being emboldened to attack, he's so unsettled that his hand shakes when he goes to pull the trigger; and this makes it almost impossible for him to hit you.

[Q] Haley: We read a newspaper interview a few years ago in which you claimed you were being "gagged and slandered by the Jewish press," sabotaged by a nationwide journalistic conspiracy in your fight to put your case before the nation.

[A] Rockwell: You think I'm being paranoid, is that it?

[Q] Haley: Some people might.

[A] Rockwell: The Jew blackout on us is as real as a hand over my mouth. They know we're too poor to buy air time or advertising space, so they ban our publications from all channels of distribution, and they refuse to report our activities in the daily press. I could run naked across the White House lawn and they wouldn't report it. I'm being facetious. But I'm dead serious when I say that the only kind of free speech left in this country is that speech that doesn't criticize the Jews. If you criticize the Jews, you're either smeared or silenced. The Jews are never going to let me reach the people with my message in the American press; they can't afford to.

[Q] Haley: How do you reconcile that statement with the fact that you're being interviewed at this moment for a national magazine?

[A] Rockwell: I've been interviewed, taped and photographed thousands of times for just such presentations as these, but they never appear. The fact that you come here and get this interview doesn't prove that you'll print it, or that if you do, you'll print it straight. After the editors read over the transcript, they'll decide it's too hot to handle, and they'll chicken out rather than risk getting bombed by the Jews and the niggers when it comes out.

[Q] Haley: We'll take our chances, Commander--if you will.

[A] Rockwell: I'll take any chances to get my message read. But it's never going to happen. We've been kept out of the news too many times before. I'll bet you $100 this whole thing has been nothing but a waste of my time, because it's never going to reach the people who read your magazine.

"I got everything a man could want--if it wasn't for this prejudice crap."