104
" Then, holding my gun in his hand, he signaled. And out from where they had been concealed walked two other detectives. They'd had me covered. One false move, I'd have been dead.
I was going to have a long time in prison to think about that.
If I hadn't been arrested right when I was, I could have been dead another way. Sophia's husband's friend had told her husband about me. And the husband had arrived that morning, and had gone to the apartment with a gun, looking for me. He was at the apartment just about when they took me to the precinct.
The detectives grilled me. They didn't beat me. They didn't even put a finger on me. And I knew it was because I hadn't tried to kill the detective. They got my address from some papers they found on me. The girls soon were picked up. Shorty was pulled right off the bandstand that night. The girls also had implicated Rudy. To this day, I have always marveled at how Rudy, somehow, got the word, and I know he must have caught the first thing smoking out of Boston, and he got away. They never got him.
I have thought a thousand times, I guess, about how I so narrowly escaped death twice that day. That's why I believe that everything is written. "
― Malcolm X , The Autobiography of Malcolm X
111
" A thousand ways every day, the white man is telling you "You can't live here, you can't enter here, you can't eat here, drink here, walk here, work here, you can't ride here, you can't play here, you can't study here." Haven't we seen enough to see that he has no plan to *unite* with you? "
― Malcolm X , The Autobiography of Malcolm X
113
" The greatest single reason for [the] Christian church’s failure . . . is its failure to combat racism. . . .
I believe that God now is giving the world’s so-called “Christian” white society its last opportunity to repent and atone for the crimes of exploiting and enslaving the world’s non-white peoples. It is exactly as when God gave Pharaoh a chance to repent. But Pharaoh persisted in his refusal to give justice to those whom he oppressed. And, we know, God finally destroyed Pharaoh.
Is white America really sorry for her crimes against the black people? Does white America have the capacity to repent—and to atone? Does the capacity to repent, to atone, exist in a majority, in one-half, in even one-third of American white society?
Most black [people] . . . would like to be able to forgive, to forget, the crimes.
But most American white people seem not to have it in them to make any serious atonement—to do justice to [black people].
Indeed, how can white society atone for enslaving, for raping, for unmanning, for otherwise brutalizing millions of human beings, for centuries? What atonement would the God of Justice demand for the robbery of the black people’s labor, their lives, their true identities, their culture, their history—and even their human dignity?
A desegregated cup of coffee, a theater, public toilets—the whole range of hypocritical 'integration'—these are not atonement. "
― Malcolm X , The Autobiography of Malcolm X