Transcript Malcolm X

Memory of the Civil War:
Malcolm’s Catalyst
JESUS VACA
Interview with Alex Haley

“Many people are completely misinformed
about Lincoln and the Negro. That war
involved two thieves, the North and the
South, fighting over the spoils. The further we
get away from the actual incident, the more
they are trying to make it sound as though
the battle was over the Black man. Lincoln
said that if he could save the Union without
freeing the slaves, he would. But after two
years of killing and carnage he found out he
would have to free the slaves. He was not
interested in the slaves but in the Union. As for
the Emancipation Proclamation, it was an
empty document.”
Politics in the South

“You today are in a government of
segregationists’, he told one black
audience. ‘Racists. White
supremacists.’ His evidence for this
was that one Southern White man
occupied the Presidency – ‘They will
Lynch you in Texas, as quick as they
will Lynch you in Mississippi’ – and that
others held the chairmanships of the
ten sixteen standing committees in
the Senate and twelve of the twenty
in the House. ‘And at the same time,
he mocked, they are going to tell you
and me that the South lost the Civil
War.’” (Rally in Detroit 1963)
LBJ and Kennedy:
Mirrors of Lincoln

“None of them have ever done anything for Negroes. All of them have tricked the
Negro, and made false promises to him at election times which they never fulfilled.
Lincoln’s concern was not freedom for the blacks but to save the Union.” (Interview
with Alex Haley)