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Who really said it

When 'I' is replaced with 'we,' illness becomes wellness

Not Malcolm X — earliest trace is Charles Roppel Charles Roppel Head of the Mental Health Promotion Branch, California Department of Mental Health · earliest documented user of the line, March 1984
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Malcolm X died in 1965, and Quote Investigator ↗ located no instance of this wordplay before March 1984 — when Charles Roppel, a California mental-health official on a speaking tour of Louisiana, told an audience in Baton Rouge, “Take the I out of illness, add W and E, and you have wellness.” QI concludes that Roppel helped popularise the saying and may have coined it, and that the citations linking it to Malcolm X “occurred late and provide only weak evidence”; the earliest of them QI found is a tweet from December 2013.

Last verified 4 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“When 'I' is replaced with 'we,' illness becomes wellness” Not Malcolm X. The earliest documented use of the illness/wellness wordplay is a speech by Charles Roppel, head of the Mental Health Promotion Branch of the California Department of Mental Health, reported in the Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 17 March 1984, p. D1: "Take the I out of illness, add W and E, and you have wellness." Malcolm X died in 1965; Quote Investigator located no match before 1984 and dates the Malcolm X credit to a December 2013 tweet. Two former researchers for Columbia University's Malcolm X Project report finding no trace of the line in his writings, speeches, diaries, interviews or declassified FBI files. — Quotle.info

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Provenance

The earliest documented instance

Earliest documented use
Speaker notes friends ‘good medicine’
Published
Morning Advocate, Baton Rouge, Louisiana — 17 March 1984, p. D1, col. 2, reported by Annabelle Armstrong
Speaker
Charles Roppel, head of the Mental Health Promotion Branch, California Department of Mental Health
In Malcolm X’s works
Not found — absent from his writings, speeches, diaries, interviews and declassified FBI files, per two former Malcolm X Project researchers

He says, “Take the I out of illness, add W and E, and you have wellness.” Earliest documented, March 1984

As transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from the Morning Advocate of 17 March 1984. Roppel gave the same line at least twice more that week: a Lafayette paper on 18 March had “if you take the ‘I’ out of illness, and add ‘we’, you end up with wellness,” and a Rayville paper on 20 March had “You take the I out of illness and add we, and you have wellness.” The smooth modern phrasing — “When ‘I’ is replaced with ‘we,’ illness becomes wellness” — is a later tightening: a close unattributed variant appears in an October 2012 message, and QI documents no instance of the exact modern wording before the December 2013 tweet that credits Malcolm X. None of the passages QI quotes from the three 1984 reports mentions Malcolm X.

Quote Investigator: tracing the illness/wellness wordplay

How we know

  • Quote Investigator ↗ reports that its earliest match appeared in a Baton Rouge, Louisiana newspaper in March 1984, spoken by Charles Roppel, and states plainly: “Malcolm X died in 1965. QI has not yet located any matches before 1984. The ascription to Malcolm X occurred by 2013. Thus, based on current evidence the linkage to Malcolm X is weak.”
  • QI also shows the phrase “illness to wellness” circulating without any letter swap long before — in an 1896 book on homoeopathy and in William Crosbie Hunter’s 1915 Evening Round-Up — so the raw ingredients predate the joke. See the chronology ↗.
  • Maytha Alhassen and Zaheer Ali, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books ↗ on 19 May 2021, say that having worked as researchers for Columbia University’s Malcolm X Project they were “both bewildered by the origin of this quotation,” and that the notion was “fully fleshed out in a 1984 speech by Charles Roppel … citing a 1982 campaign promoting friendship as good medicine.”
  • Wikiquote’s Malcolm X page ↗ arranges his quotations by year and adds an Attributed section; the illness/wellness line appears in neither.

No rights status can honestly be asserted for the popular wording. “When ‘I’ is replaced with ‘we,’ illness becomes wellness” is a later tightening with no identifiable author — a close unattributed variant appears in an October 2012 message (“When ‘I’ becomes ‘WE,’ Illness becomes Wellness”), and Quote Investigator documents no instance of the exact modern wording before the December 2013 tweet that credits Malcolm X. The earliest known form is a spoken remark by Charles Roppel reported in the Morning Advocate on 17 March 1984; that newspaper text is well after 1931 and would sit with its publisher, not in the public domain. Nothing here is public domain by virtue of Malcolm X, because nothing ties the line to him.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Who gets the credit, and why they shouldn’t

This is a textbook magnet misattribution: a warm, quotable line with no citation, pinned to a name big enough that nobody asks. Two different people have been credited, and neither claim survives contact with the paper trail.

Malcolm X Misattributed

He died in February 1965. Quote Investigator ↗ located no instance of the wordplay before March 1984 and found the earliest ascription to him on a tweet dated 12 December 2013 — concluding that “the citations linking Malcolm X to the saying occurred late and provide only weak evidence.” Maytha Alhassen and Zaheer Ali, who worked as researchers for Columbia University’s Malcolm X Project, write that in all their archival study of his “writings, speeches, diaries, interviews, and even declassified FBI files, neither of us could recall ever encountering this line” (LARB, 19 May 2021 ↗). Wikiquote ↗ does not carry it either.

Shannon L. Adler Also unsupported

The 2015 book Understanding Schizophrenia printed “Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When ‘I’ is replaced by ‘We,’ illness becomes wellness” over the credit “Shannon L. Adler, Author.” Quote Investigator ↗ records that attribution but places it long after the 1984 citations, and does not endorse it.

CNN, Instagram and Malcolm X institutions Amplifiers

Alhassen and Ali name the vectors: the graffiti artist Faust plastered the line on New York bus stops and phone booths, the spiritual writer Lalah Delia shared it with tens of thousands of followers, and CNN host Chris Cuomo “opened and closed one of his broadcasts with this line.” Worse, they note, “centers and museums devoted to Malcolm X digitally reposted or retweeted the quotation” (LARB ↗). Cuomo’s defence, they observe, was that his wife had checked it — cultural ubiquity standing in for a source.

The best evidence points not to Harlem but to a mental-health speaking tour of Louisiana in March 1984, where a California official named Charles Roppel said “Take the I out of illness, add W and E, and you have wellness” — a line Quote Investigator ↗ says he popularised and may have coined.

Context

Why this one stuck to Malcolm X

The line is a piece of orthographic wordplay: knock the I out of illness, drop in a we, and you get wellness. It reads like an aphorism about solidarity, which is why it feels at home in Malcolm X’s mouth — and why almost nobody checks. But the phrase “illness to wellness” had been drifting around in health writing long before anyone thought to spell out the trick: Quote Investigator ↗ finds it in an 1896 book on homoeopathy and again in a 1915 self-improvement book, both without the letter swap.

The swap itself surfaces in March 1984, in the very unglamorous setting of a public-health speaking tour. Writing on Malcolm X’s birthday in 2021, Maytha Alhassen and Zaheer Ali — both former researchers for Columbia University’s Malcolm X Project — argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books ↗ that the meme’s virality “reveals our desire to hear a figure like Malcolm X deliver a message of interconnectedness in our deeply divided era.” Their verdict on what it tells us: “What this misattributed quotation reveals, we believe, has more to do with us than with Malcolm.”

“Neither of us could recall ever encountering this line.”

The 1984 paper trail, and a Toni Morrison line that actually exists

Quote Investigator lists three Roppel speeches inside four days. The Morning Advocate of Baton Rouge, 17 March 1984, reports him saying, “Take the I out of illness, add W and E, and you have wellness.” The next day The Sunday Advertiser of Lafayette rendered it, “if you take the ‘I’ out of illness, and add ‘we’, you end up with wellness.” On 20 March the Richland Beacon-News of Rayville had, “You take the I out of illness and add we, and you have wellness.” None of the passages QI quotes from the three reports names Malcolm X.

The smoother modern shape arrives later. A close unattributed variant — “When ‘I’ becomes ‘WE,’ Illness becomes Wellness” — turns up in an October 2012 message in a Google Group with no credit at all; the exact popular wording is not documented before the December 2013 tweet that carries the Malcolm X tag, per Quote Investigator ↗.

If you want a real quotation on the same thought from a writer of stature, Alhassen and Ali point to one: in a 1976 lecture titled “Moral Inhabitants,” Toni Morrison said, “I refuse the prison of the ‘I,’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we.’” That one is cited by name and date ↗.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Friendship Kindness Purpose

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full chronology, 1896 to 2015quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Dates the earliest match to the Morning Advocate of 17 March 1984, transcribes three Roppel speeches, and rules the Malcolm X link weak.
By Any Memes Necessary: A Case for Critical Media Literacylareviewofbooks.org

Maytha Alhassen and Zaheer Ali, 19 May 2021. Two former Malcolm X Project researchers on why they could not find this line in any primary source, and how it went viral anyway.
Wikiquote: Malcolm Xen.wikiquote.org

The sourced record, arranged by year, plus an Attributed section. The illness/wellness line appears in neither — a telling absence.
Malcolm Xen.wikipedia.org

Biography of Malcolm Little, born 19 May 1925 and assassinated 21 February 1965 — the death date that sits well before the earliest documented instance of this line.
Zaheer Alizaheerali.com

One of the two authors of the LARB piece. His site states he was “project manager of Columbia University’s Malcolm X Project” and that his oral history interviews informed Manning Marable’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011)openlibrary.org

Open Library’s catalogue record for Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X — Viking, 2011, 594 pages. The standard modern life, drawing on new research from his youth to his assassination.

The best-evidenced originator

So who actually said it?

Charles Roppel

California mental-health official · earliest documented use of the illness/wellness wordplay, March 1984

Charles Roppel headed the Mental Health Promotion Branch of the California Department of Mental Health, and in March 1984 he toured Louisiana giving talks on friendship, relationships and “wellness” that were written up in at least three newspapers — in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Rayville. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the earliest known form of the illness/wellness letter-swap to those speeches and concludes he may have coined it. The historians Maytha Alhassen and Zaheer Ali, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books ↗, likewise say the idea was “fully fleshed out in a 1984 speech by Charles Roppel,” who was citing a 1982 campaign promoting friendship as good medicine. Beyond that job title and that week of speeches, the documentary record on him is thin — which is part of why a punchier name got attached to his line.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented source

Earliest documented instance: Annabelle Armstrong, “Speaker notes friends ‘good medicine’,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), 17 March 1984, p. D1, col. 2, quoting Charles Roppel. Chronology established by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: If You Take the ‘I’ Out of Illness, and Add ‘We’, You End Up With Wellness,” 3 May 2020. No instance is documented in any work of Malcolm X.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘When 'I' is replaced with 'we,' illness becomes wellness’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/when-i-is-replaced-with-we-illness-becomes-wellness/

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