Memory of the Civil War:Malcolm’s Catalyst

JESUS VACA

Interview with Alex Haley “Many people are completely misinformed

about Lincoln and the Negro. That war involved two thieves, the North and the South, fighting over the spoils. The further we get away from the actual incident, the more they are trying to make it sound as though the battle was over the Black man. Lincoln said that if he could save the Union without freeing the slaves, he would. But after two years of killing and carnage he found out he would have to free the slaves. He was not interested in the slaves but in the Union. As for the Emancipation Proclamation, it was an empty document.”

Politics in the South “You today are in a government of

segregationists’, he told one black audience. ‘Racists. White supremacists.’ His evidence for this was that one Southern White man occupied the Presidency – ‘They will Lynch you in Texas, as quick as they will Lynch you in Mississippi’ – and that others held the chairmanships of the ten sixteen standing committees in the Senate and twelve of the twenty in the House. ‘And at the same time, he mocked, they are going to tell you and me that the South lost the Civil War.’” (Rally in Detroit 1963)

LBJ and Kennedy:Mirrors of Lincoln

“None of them have ever done anything for Negroes. All of them have tricked the Negro, and made false promises to him at election times which they never fulfilled. Lincoln’s concern was not freedom for the blacks but to save the Union.” (Interview with Alex Haley)