The Autobiography of Malcolm X: A Struggle With the Wrong Image

"You just watch," Malcolm X predicts in his autobiography, "the white man, in his press... will make use of me dead as he made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of 'hatred'".

Events by and large proved him right. More significant for those who wish to know something about this outspoken Negro leader, however, was not that his prediction was confirmed but that his character was, and still is, so completely distorted by this hate symbolism. Somewhere behind the press releases, the man was lost.

The predominance of the "hate image" complicates the task of discovering the man. On the other hand, it makes reading the new edition of his Autobiography or perusing this collection of his last speeches, letters, and press statements that much more fascinating. Out of the misrepresentation and misunderstanding surrounding this "hate monger," the man emerges with an intriguing and complex personality.

Malcolm Little came to Boston from Mason, Michigan, in 1941 to live with his aunt in Roxbury. Within a few months he had picked up the adornments that lent to ghetto negroes a kind of status he had never known in Michigan. He wore blue or shiny grey zoot suits, burned his long red hair straight by a process called "conking", peddled reefers and dope, and slept with a white woman. Later in Harlem his reputation as a hustler grew. He played and then worked the numbers racket, pimped for male and female prostitutes, sold and took dope in increasing amounts. Back in Cambridge, he organized and led a gang of burglars who worked out of an apartment in Harvard Square until he was caught and sentenced to ten years in the Charlestown State Prison. It was 1946. Malcolm X was almost 21.

This much of Malcolm X's life was not overlooked when he died in 1965. Those who wished to play down his contribution to the Negro revolution could dismiss his activities as the work of an "irresponsible" Negro militant.

When he was assassinated, sympathetic newspapers in other countries pictured Malcolm's death as a major setback in the fight for Negro rights in America. But these reactions, said Carl Rowan, then head of the United States Information Agency, were based on "misinformation." All the praise for Malcolm X, he said, was for "an ex-convict and ex-dope peddler, who became a racial fanatic." And so in the United States, the reaction to Malcolm's performance in the sixties was colored by his record in the forties, and only half of his story was discussed.

Press reactions shared the same slant. Time began its account of the assassination with:

Malcolm X had been a plmp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His cospel was hatred: "Your babies will get pollo" he cried to the 'white devils'." His credo was violence: "If ballots won't work, bullets will."

To dismiss Malcolm X with such facility is to do him an injustice. His was an extraordinarily elusive personality; his volatility and suspicion of all white men combined to give him the reputation of being the "angriest Negro in America." His character demanded total commitment, and so, when introduced to Muslim teachings and to Elijah Muhammed, he devoted himself almost compulsively to the religion and its leader.

But if he was always totally committed, he was not always totally dogmatic. Everything he said had to pass his own criteria for rationality and honesty, and as he matured, intellectually, those criteria became more difficult to meet. Ostensibly his break with the Black Muslims was a result of his ill-timed statement on the assassination of President Kennedy ("The chickens have come home to roost"), but really the break was based on ideological and practical differences over how the Black Muslims should be led. The fissure grew out of Malcolm's intellectual independence, not his dogmatism.

From the day of his excommunication early in 1964 to the day of his death, Malcolm spent more than half of his time abroad, making a pilgrimage to Mecca and visiting religious leaders and heads of state in Africa and the Middle East. There his beliefs moderated considerably. In Mecca he had been impressed with the genuine brotherhood between people of different colors: "I never would have believed possible--it shocked me when I considered it--the impact of the Muslim world's influence on my previous thinking." He no longer indicted the race of "blue-eyed devils" as a whole, emphasised cooperation instead of conflict, and abandoned the idea of the total separation of the races.

To implement his new beliefs he created the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization for Afro-American Unity, religious and secular organizations designed to appeal to a larger segment of the Negro masses than the Black Muslims.

Truth in Mecca

Again his commitment was absolute. By 1965, he would preface his statements with "Since I learned the truth in Mecca..." and elaborate on the need for an "honest black-white brotherhood."

Although he abandoned the Black Muslims' demand for separation of the races, he could see that black nationalism was a valuable tactic, and was groping for a non-Muslim definition of the term in the last months of his life. Black nationalism "had the ability to instill within black men the racal dignity, the incentive and the confdence that the black race needs today to get up off its knees... and stand up on its feet."

This was the side of Malcolm X that has been largely overlooked or contemptously dismissed. The new edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and the collection, Malcolm X Speaks, are valuable because they both provide information on these crucial last months of Malcolm's life.

While it is not meant to be a completely objective account, the Autobiography is much more than a partisan diatribe. Written with the cooperation of Alex Haley, the book contains its share of excerpts from Malcolm's speeches and glosses over a few unflattering situations (such as Malcolm's "chickens coming home to roost" statement, which is not even reproduced in its embarrassing entirely), but for the most part it is a surprisingly detached chronicle.

One should have no suspicions of Haley. He was neither a black nationalist (he had written for such "white" periodicals as The Reader's Digest and Playboy) nor what Malcolm called a "house Negro" who identified entirely with his white master. The two men developed a warm personal friendship, and the book benefits from the gifts each man brought to it.

To Malcolm X must go the credit for the incisive arguments and the colorful and conversational style which (although the Autobiography was written in its final form by Haley) bears a remarkable resemblance to his statements and speeches in Malcolm X Speaks. Malcolm was a public speaker, not a writer, and it is a tribute to Haley that he preserved this quality in the book. Haley must also be given credit for giving Malcolm's life story a degree of objectivity and coherence it might otherwise have lacked.

In his epilogue, Haley claims that in the later stages of the book Malcolm tried to delete many of the earlier passages praising Elijah Muhammed and depicting Malcolm's extremely close relationship with him. Haley finally prevailed upon Malcolm to leave the passages intact to preserve the dramatic development of the story. As a result, Malcolm's life is presented not from one perspective in time, but many. As the story moves, Malcolm literally grows up. Not only is the dramatic quality of the chronicle enhanced, but Malcolm's story is made more credible.

Having followed Malcolm through Michigan, Harlem, prison and in and out of the Black Muslims, the reader understands immediately the sincerity of Malcolms change of heart at Mecca. "There was precedent in my life for this [change]," Malcolm himself said. "My whole life had been a chronology of changes."

In this perspective, the significance of Malcolm's death emerges. If his shifts of attitude were not the power plays of an irresponsible Negro leader desiring a personal following--and these books say they were not--then what Malcolm was groping for when he died might have helped the Negro cause. If he was a demagogue ("I have cherished my demagogue role") and a fanatic Black Muslim Minister was a zombic then."), he was surprisingly open-minded, idealistic, and deeply committed to bettering lot of the Negro American. His assassin may have killed the fanatic, he also killed the promise of a new kind of dynamic Negro leadership