“ I must point this out because it shows you how tricky The Press can be. The Press can make you not have any sympathy whatsoever for the death of thousands of people who look just like yourself, but at the same time, they make tears roll down your face over the loss of a few lives that don’t look anything like yourself. They manipulate your feelings.
So my advice to any of you who at any time think that you’ll ever be placed in a position of responsibility—you owe it to others as well as to yourself to be very careful about letting others make up your mind for you. You have to learn how to see for yourself, hear for yourself, think for yourself, and then judge for yourself.
Secondly, I would like to say this: It concerns my own personal self, whose image they have projected in their own light. I am against any form of racism. We are all against racism.
The only difference between You and Me is that
You want to fight racism and racists non-violently and lovingly
and
I’ll fight Them the way They fight me.
Whatever weapon They use, that’s the one I’ll use.
I go for talking the kind of language He talks.
You can’t communicate with a person unless you use the language He uses.
If a man is speaking French, you can talk German all night long, he won’t know what you’re talking about. You have to find out what kind of language he understands and then you put it to him in the language that he understands.
I’m a Muslim, which means my religion is Islam. I believe in Allah. I believe in all of the prophets, whoever represented God on This Earth.
I believe what Muslims believe: prayer, fasting, charity, and the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Mecca, which I’ve been fortunate to have made four or five times.
I believe in the Brotherhood of Man, all Men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me.
I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return that treatment.
This is the only difference between You and Me.
You believe in treating everybody right whether they put a rope around your neck or whether they put you in the grave.
Well, my belief isn’t that strong.
[ And I Doubt Very Much That Yours' is, Either - It's just simply never been tested... That's All. ]
I believe in The Brotherhood of Man, but I think that anybody who wants to lynch a Negro is not qualified for that Brotherhood and I don’t put forth any effort to get them into that Brotherhood.
You want to Save Him and I don’t.
Despite the fact that I believe in the Brotherhood of Man as a Muslim, and in the religion of Islam, there is one fact also that I can’t overlook: I’m an Afro-American and Afro-Americans have problems that go well beyond religion.
We have problems that our religious organization in itself cannot solve and we have problems that no one organization can solve or no one leader can solve. We have a problem that is going to take the combined efforts of every leader and every organization if we are going to get a solution.
For that reason, I don’t believe that as a Muslim it is possible for me to bring my religion into any discussion with non-Muslims without causing more division, animosity, and hostility; then we will only be involved in a self-defeating action.
So based upon that, there is a group of us that have formed an organization. Besides being Muslims, we have gotten together and formed an organization that has nothing to do with religion at all; it is known as the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
In this organization we involve ourselves in the complete struggle of the Afro-American in this country, and Our Purpose in becoming involved with a non-religious group is to give us the latitude to use any means necessary for us to bring an end to the injustices that confront us.
I believe in Any Means Necessary.
I believe that the injustices that we have suffered and will continue to suffer will never be brought to a halt as long as we put ourselves in a straitjacket when fighting those injustices.
Those of us in the Organization of Afro-American Unity have adopted as our slogan “By Any Means Necessary” and we feel we are justified.
Whenever someone is treating you in a criminal, illegal, or immoral way, why, you are well within your rights to use anything at your disposal to bring an end to that unjust, illegal, and immoral condition. If we do it like that, we will find that we will get more respect and will be further down the road toward freedom, toward recognition and respect as human beings. But as long as we dillydally and try to appear that we’re more moral by taking a beating without fighting back, people will continue to refer to us as very moral and well disciplined persons, but at the same time we will be as far back a hundred years from now as we are today. So I believe that fighting those who fight us is the best course of action in any situation.
Again, if the Government doesn’t want Negroes fighting anyone who is fighting us, then the Government should do its job; the Government shouldn’t put the weight on us. If the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi is carrying on criminal activities to the point of murdering black people, then I think if black people are men, human beings, the same as anybody else, you and I should have the right to do the same thing in defense of our lives and our property that all other human beings on this earth do in defense of their lives and in defense of their property, and that is to talk the language that the Klan understands.
So I must emphasize, we are dealing with a powerful enemy, and again, I am not anti-American or un-American. I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense.
I don’t even call it Violence when it’s Self-Defense, I call it Intelligence.
https://malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com/2013/07/speech-to-peace-corps-workers-december.html
No comments:
Post a Comment