Playboy Interview: Fidel Castro

[Q] Playboy: 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. He's saving the Government millions of dollars, taking black men off welfare, showing them how to do something for themselves. And Mr. Muhammad teaches us love for (concluded on page 296)Malcolm X(continued from page 135) our own kind. The white man has taught the black people in this country to hate themselves as inferior, to hate each other, to be divided against each other. Messenger Muhammad restores our love for our own kind, which enables us to work together in unity and harmony.

[Q] Playboy: How do you justify the announcement you made last year that Allah had brought you "the good news" that 120 white Atlantans had just been killed in an air crash en route to America from Paris?

[A] Malcolm X: Sir, as I see the law of justice, it says as you sow, so shall you reap. The white man has reveled as the rope snapped black men's necks. He has reveled around the lynching fire. It's only right for the black man's true God, Allah, to defend us -- hand for us to be joyous because our God manifests his ability to inflict pain on our enemy. We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God's divine wrath.

[Q] Playboy: 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] Playboy: Many white religious leaders have also gone on record against the Black Muslims. Writing in the official NAACP magazine, a Catholic priest described you as "a fascist-minded hate group," and B'nai B'rith has accused you of being not only anti-Christian but anti-Semitic. Do you consider this true?

[A] Malcolm X: 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.

[Q] Playboy: 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: White people are born devils by nature. They don't become so by deeds. If you never put popcorn in a skillet, it would still be popcorn. Put the heat to it, it will pop.

[Q] Playboy: 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] Playboy: 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? Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I found out that the history-whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done, or the great black men had gotten whitened.

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

[A] Malcolm X: Well, Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a black man. 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. Whole black empires, like the Moorish, have been whitened to hide the fact that a great black empire had conquered a white empire even before America was discovered.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe white people are genetically inferior to black people?

[A] Malcolm X: Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people. Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant. When you want strong coffee, you ask for black coffee. If you want it light, you want it weak, integrated with white milk. Just like these Negroes who weaken themselves and their race by this integrating and intermixing with whites. If you want bread with no nutritional value, you ask for white bread. All the good that was in it has been bleached out of it, and it will constipate you. If you want pure flour, you ask for dark flour, whole-wheat flour. If you want pure sugar, you want dark sugar.

[Q] Playboy: If all whites are devilish by nature, do you view all black men -- with the exception of their non-Muslim leaders -- has 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 Frankenstein. The top part is your bourgeois Negro. He's your integrator. He's not interested in his poor black brothers. 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.

[A] Then there's the middle class of the Negro masses, the ones not in the ghetto, who realize that life is a struggle. They're ready to take some stand against everything that's against them. 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] Playboy: 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?

[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. 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.

[A] 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. 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] Playboy: 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.

--May 1963, interviewed by Alex Haley