In the years to come, I was going to have to face a psychological and spiritual crisis.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MINISTER MALCOLM X
I quit the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln-Mercury Division. It had becomeclear to me that Mr.
Muhammad needed ministers to spread his teachings, to establish more temples among the
twenty-two million black brothers who were brainwashed and sleeping in the cities of North
America.
My decision came relatively quickly. I have always been an activist, and my personal chemistry
perhaps made me reach more quickly than most ministers in the Nation of Islam that stage of
dedication. But every minister in the Nation, in his own time, in his own way, in the privacy of his
own soul, came to the conviction that it was written that all of his "before" life had been only
conditioning and preparation to become a disciple of Mr. Muhammad's.
Everything that happens-Islam teaches-is written.
Mr. Muhammad invited me to visit his home in Chicago, as often as possible, while he trained me,
for months.
Never in prison had I studied and absorbed so intensely as I did now under Mr. Muhammad's
guidance. I was immersed in the worship rituals; in what he taught us were the true natures of
men and women; the organizational and administrative procedures; the real meanings, and the
interrelated meanings, and uses, of the Bible and the Quran.
I went to bed every night ever more awed. If not Allah, who else could have put such wisdom into
that little humble lamb of a man from the Georgia fourth grade and sawmills and cotton patches.
The "lamb of a man" analogy I drew for myself from the prophecy in the Book of Revelations of a
symbolic lamb with a two-edged sword in its mouth. Mr. Muhammad's two-edged sword was his
teachings, which cut back and forth to free the black man's mind from the white man.
My adoration of Mr. Muhammad grew, in the sense of the Latin root wordadorare. It means
much more than our "adoration" or "adore." It means that my worship of him was so awesome
that he was the first man whom I had ever feared-not fear such as of a man with a gun, but the
fear such as one has of the power of the sun.
Mr. Muhammad, when he felt me able, permitted me to go to Boston. Brother Lloyd X lived there.
He invited people whom he had gotten interested in Islam to hear me in his living room.
I quote what I said when I was just starting out, and then later on in other places, as I can best
remember the general pattern that I used, in successive phases, in those days. I know that then I
always liked to start off with my favorite analogy of Mr. Muhammad.
"God has given Mr. Muhammad some sharp truth," I told them. "It is like a two-edged sword. It
cuts into you. It causes you great pain, but if you can take the truth, it will cure you and save you
from what otherwise would be certain death."
Then I wouldn't waste any time to start opening their eyes about the devil white man. "I know you
don't realize the enormity, the horrors, of the so-called Christian white man's crime....
"Not even in the Bible is there such a crime! God in His wrath struck down with fire the
perpetrators of lesser crimes! One hundred million of us black people! Your grandparents!