LOMAX: Minister Malcolm, we are all by now familiar with your basic philosophy; we have heard you speak, seen you on television, and read your remarks in magazines and newspapers. By now, I think, everybody knows your position that the white man is a devil, a man incapable of doing right; you hold that the black man is of God’s divine nature, that he fell from power because of weakness; you hold further that the white man’s rule over the earth was scheduled to end in 1914, but that his end has been delayed because of the need to get the American Negro into the fold of black brotherhood. MALCOLM X: Yes, sir, that is what The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us. The white devil’s time is up; it has been up for almost fifty years now. It has taken us that long to get the deaf, dumb, and blind black men in the wilderness of North America to wake up and understand who they are. You see, sir, when a man understands who he is, who God is, who the devil is ... then he can pick himself up out of the gutter; he can clean himself up and stand up like a man should before his God. This is why we teach that in order for a man to really understand himself he must be part of a nation; he must have some land of his own, a God of his own, a language of his own. Most of all he must have love and devotion for his own kind. LOMAX: Wouldn’t you say the Negro has a nation--America? MALCOLM X: Sir, how can a Negro say America is _his_ nation? He was brought here in chains; he was put in slavery and worked like a mule for three hundred years; he was separated from his land, his culture, his God, his language! The Negro was taught to speak the white man’s tongue, worship the white God, and accept the white man as his superior. This is a white man’s country, and the Negro is nothing but an ex-slave who is now trying to get himself integrated into the slave master’s house. And the slave master doesn’t want you! You fought and bled and died in every war the white man waged, and he still won’t give you justice. You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won’t give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you and raped your women, but he still won’t give you equality. Now, you integration-minded Negroes are trying to force yourselves on your former slave master, trying to make him accept you in his drawing room; you want to hang out with his women rather than with women of your own kind. LOMAX: Are you suggesting that all of us who fight for integration are after a white woman? MALCOLM X: I wouldn’t say _all_ of you, but let the evidence speak for itself. Check up on these integration leaders, and you will find that most of them are either married to or hooked up with some white woman. Take that meeting between James Baldwin and Robert Kennedy; practically everybody there was interracially married. Harry Belafonte is married to a white woman; Lorraine Hansberry is married to a white man; Lena Horne is married to a white man.