Q&A with Malcolm X after his speech "The Black Revolution" It's interesting the question he gets at the "Militant Labor Forum"

About school integration

"But a segregated school system isn't necessarily the same situation that exists ini an all-white neighborhood. A school system in an all-white neighborhood is not a segregated school system. The only time it's segregated is when it is in a community that is other than white, but at the same time is controlled by the whites. So my understanding of a segregated school system, or a segregated community, or a segregated school, is a school that's controlled by people other than those that go there.

But in an all-white neighborhood, where you have an all-white sschool, that's not a segregated school. Usually they have a high-caliber education. Anytime someone else can put on you what they want, naturally you're going to have something that's inferior. So the schools in Harlem are not controlled by the people in Harlem, they're controlled by the man downtown. And the man downtown takes all of the tax dollars and spends them elsewhere, but he keeps the facilities, the schoolteachers, and the schoolbooks, material, in Harlem at the very lowerst level. So this produces a segregated education, which doesn't do our people any good.

On the other hand, if we can get an all-black school, that we can control, staff it ourselves with the type of teachers that have our good at heart, with the type of books that have in them many of the missing ingredients that have produced the inferiority complex in our people, then we don't feel that an all-black school is necessarily a segregated school. It's only segregated when it's controlled by someone from outside. I hope I'm making my point. I just can't see where if white people can go to a white classroom and there are no Negroes present and it doesn't affect the academic diet they're receiving, then I don't see where an all-black classroom can be affected by the absense of white children. If the absence of lblack children doesn't affect white students, I don't see how the absense of whites is going to affect the blacks.

So, what the integrationists, in my opinion, are saying when they say that whites and blacks must go to school together, is that the whites are so much superior that just their presence in a black classroom balances it out. I can't go along with that."

Can Black leaders achieve their freedom without the help of white radicals?

"England became powerful because she had others to fight for her. She used the African against the Asian and the Asian against the African. France used the Senegalese. All these white powers have had some little lackeys to do their fighting for them, and America has had 22 million African-Americans to do your fighting for you.

It is we who have fought your battles for you, and have picked your cotton for you. We built this house that you're living in. It was our labor that built this house. You sat beneath the old cotton tree telling us how long to work or how hard to work, but it was our labor, our sweat and our blood that made this country what it is, and we're the only ones who haven't benefited from it. All We're saying today is, it's payday - retroactive."