The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

When I got home, Ella said there had been a telephone call from somebody named Shorty. He had left a message that over at the Ro ...

'em feel it." When things slowed a little, he said, "You ain't seen nothing tonight. You wait until you see a spooks' dance! Man ...

number or address to the white Johns whocame around the end of the dance looking for "black chicks." Most of Roseland's dances ...

"Showtime!" people would start hollering about the last hour of the dance. Then a couple of dozen really wild couples would stay ...

and a fine-toothed comb, one of those rubber hoses with a metal spray-head, a rubber apron and a pair of gloves. "Going to lay o ...

Then, he was using a razor, very delicately, on the back of my neck. Then, finally, shaping the sideburns. My first view in the ...

That paragraph is deliberate, of course; it's just to display a bit more of the slang that was used by everyone I respected as " ...

The morning after I quit Roseland, I was down at the men's clothing store bright and early. The salesman checked and found that ...

annoyed me. People like the sleep-in maid for Beacon Hill white folks who used to come in with her "ooh, my deah" manners and or ...

want to let me rest about that. "Malcolm, there's no reason you can't pick up right where you are and become alawyer." She had t ...

* If you've ever lindy-hopped, you'll know what I'm talking about. With most girls, you kind of work opposite them, circling, ...

first number, we both were wringing wet with sweat, and people were shouting and pounding our backs. I remember leaving early wi ...

. The spotlight was working mostly just us. I caught glimpses of the four or five other couples, the girls jungle-strong, animal ...

never asked, and she never said. Never ask a woman about other men. Either she'll tell you a lie, and you still won't know, or i ...

coach aisles of the New York, New Haven & Hartford's "Yankee Clipper." Old Man Rountree, an elderly Pullman porter and a fri ...

layover, I naturally went sightseeing in downtown Washington. I was astounded to find in the nation's capital, just a few blocks ...

coup over the U.S: State Department when it confined him to Manhattan, never dreaming that he'd stay uptown in Harlem and make s ...

railroad's commissary department could supply them. It didn't take me a week to learn that all you had to do was give white peop ...

By that time, they had a laughing bet going that I wasn't going to last, sales or not, because I had so rapidly become such an u ...

The only thing that brought me down to earth was the visit to the state hospital in Kalamazoo. My mother sort of half-sensed who ...