About the Author

Alex Murray Palmer Haley has been one of the most recognizable names in African-American literature since his publication of Roots: The Saga of an American Family which was released in 1976. The book was based on his own research into his familial history, which he succeeded in tracing back to an African man of seventeen years old named Kunta Kinte who was abducted from the village of Juffure in Gambia. The television presentation proceeded into a week long series that provoked the attention of Americans nation-wide, and inspired innumerable African-Americans to follow suite and investigate their own ancestral lines.

What many Americans today do not realize is that more than ten years before he published Roots, Haley spent two years interviewing the infamous Malcolm X, and published his dictated autobiography in 1963. This project culminated into a four hundred plus paged book chronicling the prestigious leader’s life and development into the strong and influential figure that he became.

In the epilogue of the book, Haley spends a good amount of time describing the process of interviewing Malcolm, as a fond and profound experience. He leads the reader even further into the world in which Malcolm lived and the mind behind the face that caused so many different reactions in so many different people.

Before he was a writer though, Haley was born in Ithaca, New York during 1921. He was the oldest of three boys, and spent his crucial formative years in Henning, Tennessee. Only ten years later his father sent him to Alcorn State University. At eighteen he took his father’s advice and joined the armed services. He spent twenty years with the American Coast Guard, where he eventually made his way to the position of Chief Petty Officer as a journalist. He was administered several prestigious awards during his time in the Coast Guard, until he retired in the year 1959. It was then that he was able to focus all of his attention on his writing career.

It was during his career with Playboy that he established the inclination of interviewing extremely influential figures, with the likes of Myles Davis and Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Sammy Davis Junior.

The Need to Understand the Man

“We declare our right on this earth…to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” Malcolm X spoke these profound words as a demand for equality in all it’s aspects for African-Americans. While many took these words as inspirational, there were many who found them threatening.

This is exactly the kind of paradigm of judgment passed over Malcolm that was prevalent during his lifetime, and even now, so many years later, still encompasses general thought about him and his ideas.

The book was released during a time of significant strife and overt racial tension in many places in the nation. Just after his assassination in February of 1965, the release of his autobiography would have provided insight into the ideas that formed his convictions; and the life that shaped him.

Much of the popular image of Malcolm X, even today, would illustrate a man of hatred, a separatist, anti-patriotic, radical, and an extremist. By talking about his life in his own words, it allows the public to understand what it was that he worked so hard to communicate and accomplish for his people. It provided some sort of leveling in the field where much of what he has said and done has been misconstrued by those who feared his message and the power behind it.

Today this necessity is just as great as it was at the time the book was released. This is because of the huge deficiency in education on matters of ethnic histories, like African-American history, Mexican-American history, or Asian-American history. The source of identity development is intrinsic to the strength of one’s character, in opposition to being oppressed. These histories, and others like them, have been ignored and skewed for such a great amount of time that it has become accepted to have only a tightly controlled image of these people portrayed to the general public. We are still fighting what Malcolm X spoke against during his life time, which is being complacent in instances of subjugation, and being content as a powerless entity.

Sources Used

The greatest source that Haley used to write this work were the interviews with Malcolm themselves. The book is predominantly narrated in the first person perspective, giving voice to Malcolm, letting him speak for himself. Other than these interviews, Haley cited many of the speeches and separate interviews he had done.

Summary

The first few pages of this profound work count the circumstances under which Malcom X was born. The influence of his father, a Baptist preacher and adamant follower of Marcus Garvey’s teachings, the strong character of his long suffering mother, and the vehemently violent conditions into which he was born strung together to weave his early child hood into a menagerie of affliction and triumph.

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska to Earl and Louise Little, the seventh of nine children. He expressed the relationship between himself and his parents an interesting one. He described his father as having favored him, he believed due to his being lighter skinned compared to his siblings. His mother though, was the parent who administered his punishment.

He spoke openly about the trials his family experienced thanks to racism and the violence and threat that the Klu Klux Klan enforced on them. He, in an interview, professed that the Klan had indeed murdered his father. He does not leave this untold in the book.

With the death of his father, the pressure of raising her children as a single mother, and the constant threat of state agencies accusing her of being incompetent, his mother was eventually institutionalized in Kalamazoo and he and his siblings were separated.

He says at the end of the first chapter “I truly believe that if ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours. We wanted and tried to stay together. Our home didn’t have to be destroyed….And ours was not the only case of this kind.” (pg. 25)

The next chapter is titled Mascot, and it delves into the state system that he survived in. He described being the lone African-American and being “liked”, expected to act a particular way, and fulfill the anticipations of the Anglo authorities and classmates that surrounded him.

At a young age he moved to Boston to live with his older sister and became mesmerized with the “cats” he hung out with, who took him under their wing. He worked at the Roseland State Ballroom and began shining shoes and listening to the music that would soon turn him into a “hipster”, when the lindy-hop became his sole obsession, and he soon began to deal in the fast paced life of a hustler.

“Red,” as he was called by his associates, described the point that he really began to contribute his share of vice and confusion where he first begins his relationship with Sophia, which he painfully illustrates in the chapter titled Laura.

When he found a job with a rail road, he made Harlem his main stay and began to pull himself into an unproductive life style. He said in the chapter entitled Hustler “After selling reefers with the bands as they traveled, I was known to almost every popular Negro musician around New York in 1944-1945.” (pg. 121)

Skipping through much of the information of his early life, the turning point for this future leader came when he developed a house thieving scheme, with Sophia, his long time friend Shorty and other accomplices and they robbed the houses of rich Anglo-Americans. This crime lead to his eventual arrest and conviction, and he was sentenced to ten years.

It was during his time in prison that he began both his academic and his religious education. In Saved, he described his feeling as he read a letter that Elijah Muhammad sent him. The truths of racial identity and the exposition of the oppressive Anglo-American community struck a chord with him and turned him into one thing that most Anglos at the time feared intensely, an educated, confident African-American man.

His movement through the realm of the “Black Muslim” nation was full of true belief and effort to relay Elijah Muhammad’s message to the African-Americans. He felt that the greatest populations of African Americans had been lead to self-medication for the oppression that they existed under with things like drugs, alcohol, vice and violence. Their mis-education and the sub-standard conditions in which many were forced to live had been the legacy of long delegated race relations in the county since the implementation of slavery. This is what he was trying to get his people to understand, and he, much in the tradition of Marcus Garvey, spoke passionately about what the nation and African-Americans had to do to change their position in a country that would always convict them.

When controversy within the Nation of Islam and conspiracy against him forced Malcolm out side of his religious domicile, he became a man alone. He was a persecuted and questioned man throughout America, and without the Nation of Islam to support him, he moved on to take a religious pilgrimage to Mecca that would change his life entirely, and the message that he brought to his people.

On his trip outside of the country, he visited places where he was astonished with the interaction between people of all races. At Mecca, he had reached a place where no longer were the color of his skin, or his facial features the mitigating factor in his identity as a human being; nor did they dictate where he could go, or how he would be treated by those people around him.

In Africa he reached the conclusion that outside of America, there were Africans who were supportive of their brothers and sisters here in America. They had managed to come together and create legislations and societies that supported them and had broken through the chains of oppression to mold their equality into what they deserved. It was, needless to say, an inspirational, eye-opening experience.

In the end, before his death, Malcolm X had changed his thinking and message, to be a much more encompassing ideal. He had evolved to an amazing understanding of how African-Americans could and should fight for their civil rights; for the right to be treated like human beings.

This was also the time when he was most persecuted, having gained many public enemies. In the first two pages of the book he notes “It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.” (pg. 4) This chilling prophecy of his own demise is one that also allows insight into the kind of leader that he was, having already known that it would indeed take “any means necessary” to carry out his agenda, and the agenda of so many charismatic leaders of the time.

Evaluation

After having read the book, I must profess that even still, when I see a picture of this brave man’s face, a chill runs down my spine. Those eyes narrowed behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, were always at the ready to retort to whatever patronizing comment some interviewer would have for him. It is impossible to write about the book and not comment on Malcolm himself.

In bold white and red letters the title is stamped, unapologetic ally across the cover just over his tight jawed, mustachioed face, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His message was a clear one, one that he professed several times, he did not merely plea for the decolonization of the mind of the African-American, but he demanded it.

This strong man, leader, figure of a hopeful future, told his life in this book. I feel that viewing his entire life, from child hood up until his death is important to understand what spurred him to preach the gospel of equality and of a history, and present that was and is ignored by mainstream media.

I think that this book is something that every person, regardless of creed or color, should read, more than once. It is essential to understanding the struggle that the African-American community has endured for so many long, lamented years. And I will repeat myself in saying that it is just as significant today, as it was at the time that it was released.