Lending more credence to the adage that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” a letter written by civil rights activist Malcolm X in 1964 has been discovered in a California storage locker among items that were headed for the trash. It is now on sale for $1.25 million, reports the New York Post.
The seller, Gary Zimet, told the Post’s Page Six, “It was discovered in a storage locker and almost thrown out. Only because the owner saw some Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez autographs was it saved.”
The six-page letter was written on stationery imprinted with Arabic writing and illustrations of historic sites, the Post says. Malcolm X wrote the letter by hand after his much publicized pilgrimage to Mecca. In it, he recalled his encounters with “Muslims here of all colors and from every part of this earth.” The activist, who was assassinated in 1965, wrote that if Americans converted to Islam, it would stop racism, according to the Post.
“If white Americans could accept the religion of Islam … they, too, could then sincerely accept the Oneness of Men, and cease to measure others always in terms of their ‘difference in color,’ ” he wrote, the Post reports. “And with racism now plaguing America like an incurable cancer, all thinking Americans should be more respective to Islam as an already proven solution to the race problem.”
In a bold prediction, he said that the “insane obsession” in the United States with racism could lead to the same outcome as in Hitler’s Nazi Germany: destruction. He wrote that an embrace of Islam is the only way “white America can [ward] off the inevitable disaster that racism always leads to.”
Read more at the New York Post.