Malcolm X:
Yes, it's important, but it's even more important for us to be re-established and connected to our roots. Douglass was great. I would rather have been taught about Toussaint L'Ouverture. We need to be taught about people who fought, who bled for freedom and made others bleed.

Interviewer:
The first guy that was shot at the moment of the war of Independence was a Negro.

Malcolm X:
He wasn't shot for Negroes. He was shot for America. I don't want to take away from Crispus Attucks, but he was shot. He was a slave. His people were slaves.

Interviewer:
He was a slave perhaps, but not on his knees - on his feet.

Malcolm X:
Sir, you can take a dog - a big vicious dog - and sic him on somebody else and he's fearless. I'd like to give you an example. No matter how fearless a dog is, you catch him out on the street, stomp your foot - he'll run because you're only threatening him. His master has never trained him how to defend himself, but the same dog - if you walk through the masters gate - will growl and bite. Why will he growl and bite over here and not growl and bite over here. Over here he's growling and biting for the defense of the master and the benefit of his master, but when his own interests are threatened he has no growl.

Not only Crispus Attucks, but many of us in America have died defending America. We defend our master. We're the most violent soldiers America has when she sends us to Korea or to the South Pacific or to Saigon, but when our mothers and our own property are being attacked we're nonviolent. Crispus Attucks laid down his life for America, but would he have laid down his life to stop the white man in America from enslaving black people?

So when you select heroes about which black people ought to be taught, let them be black heroes who have died fighting for the benefit of black people. We never were taught about Christophe or Dessalines. It was the slave revolt in Haiti when slaves, black slaves, had the soldiers of Napoleon tied down and forced to sell one-half of the American continent to the Americans. They don't teach us that. That is the kind of history we want to learn.

References: http://www.africanperspective.com/dyouknow/dyouk44.html#dyk1

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