Which Way USA? - Malcolm X

[Music] black people need some kind of economic security and the only way that this will be gotten is if the negro leadership develops enough maturity on its part to show our people how to set up these uh uh enterprises business enterprises or develop some type of industry and create equality of opportunity but instead of doing this there's a rule the negro community has condemned the white man after the white man has set up a factory then they'll go while they're studying while the negro is setting up the church the white man is setting up a factory and after the white man gets his factories set up the negro preacher will teach his congregation to go and accuse the white man of practicing discrimination because he won't employ them in their factory and it doesn't take any more money to set up the factory and it doesn't set up a church so what mr muhammad says is if the negro preacher can raise millions of dollars to set up churches and at the same time it doesn't have the ability to set up and establish and run a factory that will create employment for his own people while the white man is out of his mind to let the negro preacher tell him who to employ unless that negro preacher can prove his ability to set up some kind of uh economic enterprise himself we are black people who are muslims because we believe in the religion of islam and we practice the principles of the religion of islam and the principles of the religion of islam is what has cleaned us up what has reformed us what has rehabilitated us and what has given us the incentive to stand on our own feet and solve our problems ourselves instead of depending upon white people to solve them for us before he was assassinated in 1965 malcolm x shook up two worlds the white world and the black neither understood him today the black world understands and the white world is trying whenever a black man attains a very high level and is allowed to live uh too well he often forgets the severity of the condition that his people are still living in and what seems like progress to him has long since to be has long since ceased to be progress to his own people one of the things that has uh hurt our people many of the negro leaders don't live among negroes or live around negroes or eat with negroes and they have long since ceased to feel like negroes and to think like negro and then when you come along and meet a negro who still feels like a negro because he's catching hell like a negro and when he speaks like a negro he shocks you because you haven't heard one for a long time sooner or later when you take 20 million black people and make them fight all your wars and and pick all your cotton and work all your jobs and still you never give them any real honest recompense for what they've done sooner or later their their their patience and their uh confidence and their uh allegiance towards you is going to work thin and then you have a situation that you can't uh cope with you don't ever know how a negro really thinks or really feels until you hear mr muhammad speak or until you hear someone that has been uh taught by him speak because they're not trying to pat you on your back or flatter you or or lull you into a false sense of security they're letting you know they're the reality of their condition and the white man himself is intelligent enough that he knows if the white is as intelligent as the white man is or has been in the past if he knew the the intensity of the dissatisfaction and impatience that is building up in the minds of the masses of these black people you wouldn't see him running around here calling mr muhammad a hate teacher he would look upon mr muhammad as an alarm clock that's doing him a favor waking him up out of his sleep before it's too late [Music] you