An excerpt from an interview with Malcolm X at the
University of California, Berkeley on Oct. 11, 1963.
The question that is asked, where will all of this
end? I repeat, America is faced with her worst
domestic crisis since the Civil War. The worst crisis
since the Revolutionary War. For America now
faces a race war. The entire country is on the verge of
erupting into racial violence and bloodshed simply
because 20 million ex-slaves here in America are
demanding freedom, justice, and equality from
their former slavemasters.
Twenty million so-called Negroes, second-class
citizens, seeking nothing but human dignity and
human rights, the right to live in dignity as a
human being. And rather than give genuine sincere
respect to your cry for human rights, the American
white man answers your nonviolence with violence.
He answers your prayers and freedom songs with
false promises, deceitful maneuvers, and outright
bloodshed.
According to what we were taught from the white
man's textbooks in school, the Revolutionary
War and the Civil War were two wars fought
on American soil supposedly for freedom and
democracy. But if these two wars were really fought
for freedom and human dignity of all men, why are
20 million of our people still confined and enslaved
here in America by second-class citizenship? The
truth is that the Revolutionary War was fought
on American soil to free the American white man
from the English white man. The Revolutionary
War was never fought to provide freedom and a
democracy in this white country for the Black man.
Our people remained slaves here in America even
after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
In fact most of the white Founding Fathers who
signed the Declaration of Independence were slave owners themselves.
