Ted's Reviews > The Autobiography of Malcolm X

"This book I dedicate to my beloved wife Betty and to our children whose understanding and whose sacrifices made it possible for me to do my work."



Malcolm's dedication of the book.
Note: I will often refer to Malcolm X in the following as simply “X”.


the edition I read

Besides the first person narration, this edition contains a Foreword by Malcolm’s eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz; an Introduction by M.S. Handler, a NYT reporter whom Malcolm X reportedly believed had "none of the usual prejudices or sentimentalities about black people"; an indispensable Epilogue by the writer of this book, Alex Haley (written for the first edition I believe); and a short essay, “On Malcom X”, by Ossie Davis.



Attallah Shabazz



Alex Haley, the writer. Also the author of Roots



Ossie Davis - Civil Rights Activist, Director, Actor, Playwright


can a review of such a book worry about spoilers?

Normally one would think that a review of an autobiography could just jump around when talking about the book and the protagonist. This book is a bit different, in that the interviews that Alex Haley (the writer) had with Malcom X (the first person “narrator”) were mostly done before a major turning point in Malcolm X’s life. They both agreed, as the proofs neared their final version, that the sudden change in X’s views that occurred very late in his life should be left as the interviews originally made them – basically, a surprise ending.

That said, I’m still not going to do spoilers. I’ll tell what I feel like telling, when I feel like telling it.


who was Malcolm X?





Let Z = the number of people who have ever heard of him. Then I would suggest there are Z+2 views of who he was. One for each of those Z people, one that he believed about himself, and one that he really was.

If you read this book, you’ll gain an idea of who you think he was, and who he thought he was. If you can read the Forward that’s in this edition, by Attallah Shabazz, you’ll discover who she thought he was; and if you can read the long epilogue written by Alex Haley (which you must, but only after the part told by X), you’ll find out who Haley thought he was. And the review will give you an idea of who I think he was.



the narrator: the arc of his life


Here are some of the things I (mostly) remember about Malcolm’s life, as he related it.

His father, who traveled between various Black churches within driving distance of their home, espousing the ideas of Marcus Garvey; who was reviled by local whites, and was probably murdered, when Malcolm was six.

His mother and siblings, who made do with almost no income for years, until the children were taken away and the mother put in an asylum when Malcolm was thirteen.

The scattering of the children, to different foster homes. Malcolm lived with white families, whom he seems to remember fondly in the second chapter of the biography. Malcolm’s school years, in integrated schools in Lansing and Mason Michigan. His intelligence and popularity, his election as class president in seventh grade, one of the top students in school. Then that fateful day when a white eighth-grade teacher asked him what he wanted to be in life. Malcolm, who hadn’t thought about it, blurted out “a lawyer”. The teacher thought to help Malcolm by saying, “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic… you’re good with your hands, why don’t you plan on carpentry?” X calls this “this first major turning point in my life.”

His leaving Mason at fourteen to stay with his half-sister near Boston. (“All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston; if I hadn’t, I’d probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.”) The friends he made there, good and bad. The stylish, tall, younger-than-he-looked manchild who, among many jobs, worked on a train so he could travel for free.

1943, age 18, settling into the world of Harlem, taking to the life of the streets and crime – drug dealing, gambling, racketeering, robbery, pimping.

In 1945 Malcolm Little, now called “Detroit Red” for his hair color, returned to Boston, where he led a gang of housebreakers. The next year he was arrested, convicted, sentenced to 8-to-10 years in Charlestown State Prison, where he began reading and studying. The introduction, through fellow-inmates and letters from some of his siblings, to the Nation of Islam and the teachings of Elijah Muhammed. The interesting aspects of those teachings: how people of the white race had been created as devils, how their abiding goal was to subjugate all non-whites; how the white man attempted to further these aims by foisting a religion (Christianity) on non-whites – a religion which would help satisfy natural desires in this world by promising rewards in another. How Malcolm came to accept these views as an explanation of the behavior of whites toward Black people.

Paroled from prison in 1952, Malcolm journeyed to Chicago to meet Elijah Muhammed, impressed him with his intelligence and allegiance to Elijah’s teachings; and both wanted and was granted the role of principle agent for organizing Nation of Islam Mosques (“Temples”) in cities far and wide.

The notoriety X gained, once the white world in the U.S. began taking notice of the Nation of Islam in the late ‘50s. He, rather than Elijah Mohammad, became the flashpoint for the white public’s fear of the Black Muslims.

1961-2, the break with Elijah Mohammad, over sexual indiscretions of the leader on X’s part, and (presumably) fear and jealousy on Elijah’s part. The silencing of X by Elijah, accepted with humility by X.

Then the pilgrimage to Mecca, on which everything changed. (See below, So.)



posthumous public views of Malcolm X, positive and negative

Malcolm X was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965.


From Haley’s Epilogue, we learn that Attallah, at that time six years old, carefully wrote a letter: “Dear Daddy, I love you so. O dear, O dear, I wish you wasn’t dead.” Also that Carl T. Rowan, at that time Director of the U.S. Information Agency, and in later years a highly respected Afro-American commentator, at the time said, “Mind you, here was a Negro who preached segregation and race hatred … All this about an ex-convict, ex-dope peddler who became a racial fanatic.”

Well, I wonder if Mr. Rowan became somewhat less vociferous about X with the passage of time. For with the passage of time, Afro-Americans who “wished they were white” (as Malcolm used to say) seemed to come around – as did many whites who in the early sixties seemed terrified of the views of Malcom X (though probably, it must be said, not knowing or understanding very much about them).

In fact, some of this may have started almost as soon as the book here reviewed was published, the year after his death. The New York Times reviewer described it as a "brilliant, painful, important book". Two years later, historian John William Ward wrote that it would become a classic American autobiography. In 1998, Time named it one of the ten most important nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

By now, the list of “Memorials and Tributes” to Malcolm X cannot be enumerated easily. Places that he lived are now adorned with Historic markers; many streets (in Harlem, Brooklyn, Dallas, Lansing) and schools have been named after him - grade schools, high schools, the El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Academy, a public charter school with an Afrocentric focus, located in the building where he attended elementary school. In cities around the world, Malcolm X's birthday (May 19) is commemorated as Malcolm X Day.
In 1996, the first library named after Malcolm X was opened, the Malcolm X Branch Library and Performing Arts Center of the San Diego Public Library system. In 2005, Columbia University announced the opening of the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. The memorial is located in the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated.

And the U.S. Postal Service issued a Malcolm X postage stamp in 1999. [This was the inspiration for the Foreward in this book by his daughter.]






who I think Malcolm X was – I think

Having read this book, I do have a view of Malcom X. I never really did before. But first,


an aside

At the time that X was beginning his mission to found mosques for the Nation of Islam, I, like almost all whites in the U.S. (except perhaps certain people in the FBI), had never heard of the man. But my ignorance was much more long-lasting. By 1962, when I graduated from high school, X had achieved a good deal of public notoriety. But I have no memories from that time of having heard his name.

I was raised in a small town in west central Minnesota. I don’t think there was ever a Black person living there as I grew up. Never a Black kid in school with me. We may have occasionally played a football or basketball game against a larger school’s team that included a Black player, I can’t say for sure. And even though I was a reader, it was books I read, not newspapers. Look, I imagine there were adults in town who had read something about Malcolm X. But I’d never heard any talk, that I can remember.

Well, then I went off to college. Out East. Okay, now I start knowing some Blacks, right? Uh-uh. Not at Georgetown University in the years I was there. [Don’t blame me, take it up with the Jesuits. We didn’t even have a Black on the basketball team in those years.] But hadn’t I wanted to go to college to broaden my horizons? Specifically, to become more diverse in my outlook? Heck, I didn’t even know what that use of “diverse” would have referred to. I thought it was pretty cool that I had the first couple of Jewish friends I’d ever had. But a Black?

Whoa! I just thought of a Black at Georgetown in those years. A janitor who was often seen around the basketball arena. We all knew him, sort of. Pebbles.

Well, I can’t recall ever hearing Pebbles talk about Malcolm X. Maybe he did. But even in February 1965, when X was killed, I have no recollection of knowing anything about it – or about him.


So.

After twenty plus years of utter ignorance, and then a few more decades of knowing so little that I never even considered having an opinion about Malcom X, this is the way the book affected me.

As I read the early chapters, I kept having thoughts of Manchild in the Promised Land, which I read last year. When X, at the age of 18, got to Harlem in 1943, Claude Brown was four years old (and I wasn’t born). A lot of the experiences that Malcolm had in the Harlem years were pretty much lived by Brown, starting when he was only about eight years old.

Thus the early part of the book, while incredibly interesting, and well-written, didn’t really affect my too much. Yes, here was an urban Black living by the way of the streets. But I’d read about it already. But then, reading on, as X went to prison and then became familiar with the teachings of Mr. Elijah Mohammad, suddenly I was reading these views about whites being devils, all whites being racists – that stuff.

And here I am, thinking, “no, that’s not right. Not ALL whites. Not ME!” But every now and then, X would say something in a certain way, make a certain point, that would bring me up short. And I’d think, well MAYBE when it’s put like that … maybe … maybe he’s got something there, I’ve never looked at things from that exact angle.

This actually happened several times, going from “not ALL whites” to suddenly “well maybe …”. And that really confusing state of mind, is what I would have been left with, had the book ended at the chapter before X went to Mecca.

When Malcolm made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964, he flew to Jedda, Saudi Arabia as a starting point. There he connected with a man he’d been referred to in America, Dr. Omar Azzam. X relates how this man would have been perceived as “white” in the U.S. Yet Azzam treated him as if he, Malcom X, were royalty.

That morning was when I first began to reappraise the “white man”. It was when I first began to perceive that “white man,” as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, “white man” meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been.

That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about “white” men.

X had dinner at Azzam’s home. Azzam’s father treated Malcom like a son, and explained to him, “how color, the complexities of color, and the problems of color which exist in the Muslim world, exist only where, and to the extent that, that area of the Muslim world has been influenced by the West.”

X wrote to his wife, “America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem… people who in America would have been considered ‘white’ [have had] the ‘white’ attitude removed from the minds by the religion of Islam… I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the oneness of God, then perhaps too they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man… With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called ‘Christian’ white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem.”

So, in Saudi Arabia, X learned that the ‘Islam’ taught by Elijah Mohammad was not the true Islam of the world’s Muslims, which did not teach that the people of the white race were devils, and that these ideas that had seemed so right to his sense of injustice for many years were a chimera. From that day forward his ideas about racism in America began shifting significantly.

Knowledge of this change in X’s ideas preceded him home. When he arrived back in the U.S. a press conference had been arranged. In Haley’s Epilogue he decribes what happened (he was there) when X was asked, “Do we correctly understand that you now do not think that all whites are evil?”

”True, sir! My trip to Mecca has opened my eyes. I no longer subscribe to racism! I have adjusted my thinking to the point where I believe that whites are human beings … as long as this is borne out by their humane attitudes toward Negroes.”

They picked at his “racist” image. “I’m not a racist. I’m not condemning whites for being whites, but for their deeds. I condemn what whites collectively have done to our people collectively.”

The Times’ Handler, beside me, was taking notes and muttering under his breath, “Incredible! Incredible!” I was thinking the same thing.

Several pages later Haley describes a Canadian TV program on which X was asked about integration and intermarriage:

”I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being – neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being …

And Haley writes, “From this, it would be fair to say that one month before his death, Malcolm had revised his views on intermarriage to the point where he regarded it as simply a personal matter.”

My view of the man is still colored somewhat by the fact that two different versions of a religion were of such enormous importance in forming his own outlook on the racial problem. (But in a way this isn’t quite fair, since I, a generation younger than X, look at things from a viewpoint of having lived through the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, supporting that, and at the same time losing religion pretty completely.)

At any rate, Haley tells us that in his last few weeks, X seemed often a confused man. In an interview he had said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now, but I’m flexible.” A few days before his death, he had said to a Life magazine photographer/author whom he’d long respected, “In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a Muslim [ie, as a Nation of Islam Muslim] that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then – like all [of them] – I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost. It cost me twelve years.”

Malcolm X led a fascinating, and significant, life. This book is an honest telling of his story. As he changed at critical junctures, he gained and lost friends, admirers, disciples, enemies – on both sides of the color line. In the end, I believe he had reached a point where, if he’d lived, he would have been acknowledged by most as a great man; not just from a nostalgic, rose-colored-glasses viewpoint, but from the leadership that he might well have provided in bringing black and white people together. But I could be wrong.

Read the book. Decide for yourself.


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