Malcolm X (3 page)

With the release of Lee’s three-hour biographical film
X
that same year, Malcolm reached a new generation. In a 1992 poll, 84 percent of African Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four described him as “a hero for black Americans today.” After years of relegating him to the periphery of modern black history, historians now began to see him as a central figure. He had become “an integral part of the scaffolding that supports a contemporary African-American identity,” historian Gerald Horne wrote. “His fascination with music and dance and night clubs undergirded his bond with blacks.” For many whites, however, his appeal was located in his conversion from militant black separatism to what might be described as multicultural universalism. His assimilation into the American mainstream occurred—ironically—at Harlem’s Apollo Theater on January 20, 1999, when the United States Postal Service celebrated the release of a Malcolm X stamp there. In a press statement accompanying the stamp’s issuance, the U.S. Postal Service claimed that, in the year prior to his assassination, Malcolm X had become an advocate of “a more integrationist solution to racial problems.”

A closer reading of the
Autobiography
as well as the actual details of Malcolm’s life reveals a more complicated history. Few of the book’s reviewers appreciated that it was actually a joint endeavor—and particularly that Alex Haley, a retired twenty-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, had an agenda of his own. A liberal Republican, Haley held the Nation of Islam’s racial separatism and religious extremism in contempt, but he was fascinated by the tortured tale of Malcolm’s personal life. In 1963, the beginning of the collaboration of these two very different men, Malcolm had labored to present a tale of moral uplift, to praise the power of the Nation’s leader, Elijah Muhammad. After Malcolm’s departure from the sect, he used his autobiography to explain his break from black separatism. Haley’s purpose was quite different; for him, the autobiography was a cautionary tale about human waste and the tragedies produced by racial segregation. In many ways, the published book is more Haley’s than its author's: because Malcolm died in February 1965, he had no opportunity to revise major elements of what would become known as his political testament.

My own curiosity about the
Autobiography
began more than two decades ago, when I was teaching it as part of a seminar on African-American political thought at Ohio State University. Among African-American leaders throughout history, Malcolm was unquestionably the most consummately “political” activist, a man who emphasized grassroots and participatory politics led by working-class and poor blacks. Yet the autobiography is virtually silent about his primary organization, the OAAU. Nowhere in the text does its agenda or its objectives appear. After years of research, I discovered that several chapters had been deleted prior to publication—chapters that envisioned the construction of a united front of Negroes, from a wide variety of political and social groups, led by the Black Muslims. According to Haley, the deletion had been at the author's request, after his return from Mecca. That probably is true; but Malcolm had absolutely no input on Haley’s decision to preface the
Autobiography
with an introductory essay by
New York Times
journalist M. S. Handler, who had covered Malcolm extensively during previous years, nor on Haley’s own rambling conclusion, which frames his subject firmly within mainstream civil rights respectability at the end of his life.

A deeper reading of the text also reveals numerous inconsistencies in names, dates, and facts. As both a historian and an African American, I was fascinated. How much isn’t true, and how much hasn’t been told?

The search for historical evidence and factual truth was made even more complicated by the complex and varied layers of the subject’s life. A master of public rhetoric, he could artfully recount tales about his life that were partially fiction, yet the stories resonated as true to most blacks who had encountered racism. From an early age Malcolm Little (as he was born) had constructed multiple masks that distanced his inner self from the outside world. Years later, whether in a Massachusetts prison cell or traveling alone across the African continent during anticolonial revolutions, he maintained the dual ability to anticipate the actions of others and to package himself to maximum effect. He acquired the subtle tools of an ethnographer, crafting his language to fit the cultural contexts of his diverse audiences. As a result, different groups perceived his personality and his evolving message through their own particular lens. No matter the context, Malcolm exuded charm and a healthy sense of humor, placing ideological opponents off guard and allowing him to advance provocative and even outrageous arguments.

Malcolm always assumed an approachable and intimate outward style, yet also held something in reserve. These layers of personality were even expressed as a series of different names, some of which he created, while others were bestowed upon him: Malcolm Little, Homeboy, Jack Carlton, Detroit Red, Big Red, Satan, Malachi Shabazz, Malik Shabazz, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. No single personality ever captured him fully. In this sense, his narrative is a brilliant series of reinventions, “Malcolm X” being just the best known.

Like a great method actor, Malcolm drew generously from his background, so that over time the distance between actual events and the public telling of them widened. After his death, other distortions—embellishments by devoted followers, friends, family members, and opponents—turned his life into a legend. Malcolm was fascinating to many whites in a sensual, animalistic way, and journalists who regularly covered his speeches picked up a subdued yet unmistakable sexual subtext. M. S. Handler, whose home Malcolm visited for an interview in early March of 1964, attributed his aura of physical prowess to his politics: “No man in our time aroused fear and hatred in the white man as did Malcolm, because in him the white man sensed an implacable foe who could not be had for any price—a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man.” Even Malcolm during his early years routinely employed evocative metaphors to describe his personality. For example, portraying his time in a Massachusetts prison in 1946, he likened his confinement to that of a trapped animal: “I would pace for hours like a caged leopard, viciously cursing aloud. . . . Eventually, the men in the cellblock had a name for me: ‘Satan.’” Handler's wife, who had been present when Malcolm had visited her home, admitted to her husband, “You know, it was like having tea with a black panther.”

To black Americans, however, Malcolm’s appeal was rooted in entirely different cultural imagery. What made him truly original was that he presented himself as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister. Janus-faced, the trickster is unpredictable, capable of outrageous transgressions; the minister saves souls, redeems shattered lives, and promises a new world. Malcolm was a committed student of black folk culture, and to make a political point he would constantly mix animal stories, rural metaphors, and trickster tales—for example, refashioning the fox vs. the wolf as Johnson vs. Goldwater. His speeches mesmerized audiences because he could orchestrate his themes into a narrative that promised ultimate salvation. He presented himself as an uncompromising man wholly dedicated to the empowerment of black people, without regard to his own personal safety. Even those who rejected his politics recognized his sincerity.

Obviously, the analogy between the actor as performer and the political leader as performer goes only so far, but the art of reinvention in politics does demand the selective rearrangement of a public figure’s past lives (and the elimination of embarrassing episodes, as Bill Clinton has taught us). In Malcolm’s case, the memoirs written by friends and relatives have illustrated that the notorious outlaw Detroit Red character Malcolm presented in his autobiography is highly exaggerated. The actual criminal record of Malcolm Little for the years 1941–46 supports the contention that he deliberately built up his criminal history, weaving elements of his past into an allegory documenting the destructive consequences of racism within the U.S. criminal justice and penal system. Self-invention was an effective way for him to reach the most marginalized sectors of the black community, giving justification to their hopes.

My primary purpose in this book is to go beyond the legend: to recount what actually occurred in Malcolm’s life. I also present the facts that Malcolm himself could not know, such as the extent of illegal FBI and New York Police Department surveillance and acts of disruption against him, the truth about those among his supporters who betrayed him politically and personally, and the identification of those responsible for Malcolm’s assassination.

One of the greatest challenges I encountered in reconstructing his life was the attempt to examine his activities inside the Nation of Islam. Most popular treatments focus heavily on his public career during his final two years. Part of the problem in unearthing his earlier speeches and letters from the 1950s was that the current NOI leadership, headed by the former Louis X Walcott, known today as Louis Farrakhan, had never permitted scholars to examine the sect’s archives. After years of effort, I was able to initiate a dialogue with the Nation of Islam; in May 2005 I sat with Farrakhan for an extraordinary nine-hour meeting. The Nation subsequently made available to me fifty-year-old audiotapes of Malcolm’s sermons and lectures delivered while he was still Mosque No. 7’s leader, providing significant insights into his spiritual and political evolution. Veteran members also came forward to be interviewed, the most important of whom was Larry 4X Prescott, later known as Akbar Muhammad, a former assistant minister of Malcolm’s who had sided with Elijah Muhammad during the sect’s split in March 1964. These sources presented a perspective that had not been adequately represented before: the views of the Nation of Islam and its adherents.

Malcolm’s journey of reinvention was in many ways centered on his lifelong quest to discern the meaning and substance of faith. As a prisoner, he embraced an antiwhite, quasi-Islamic sect that nevertheless validated his fragmented sense of humanity and ethnic identity. But as he traveled across the world, Malcolm learned that orthodox Islam was in many ways at odds with the racial stigmatization and intolerance at the center of the Nation of Islam’s creed. Malcolm came to adopt true Islam’s universalism, and its belief that all could find Allah’s grace regardless of race. Islam was also the spiritual platform from which he constructed a politics of Third World revolution, with striking parallels to the Argentinean guerrilla and coleader of the 1959 Cuban revolution, Che Guevara. It was also the political bridge that brought Malcolm into contact with the Islamic Brotherhood in Lebanon, as well as in Egypt and Gaza, with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Soliciting the support of the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser for his activities on behalf of orthodox Islam in the United States may have made it necessary to adopt Nasser's political positions, such as fierce opposition to Israel.

There also remain many unresolved questions about Malcolm’s death, and what parties were responsible for the order to kill him. History is not a cold-case investigation; I have had to weigh forensic probabilities, not certainties. Although in 1966 three NOI members were convicted of the murder, extensive evidence suggests that two of those men were completely innocent of the crime, that both the FBI and the NYPD had advance knowledge of it, and that the New York County District Attorney’s office may have cared more about protecting the identities of undercover police officers and informants than arresting the real killers. That the case has remained unsolved after more than forty years helps place it in a special category in the annals of African-American and U.S. history. Unlike the murders of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., gunned down by lone white supremacists, or the killing of George Jackson, carried out by California prison guards, Malcolm was killed before a large audience in the heart of urban black America. In the rush to judgment, his death was attributed solely to the Nation of Islam. The media-constructed image of Malcolm X as a dangerous demagogue made it impossible to conduct a thorough investigation of his death, and it was only within black American communities that he was seen as a political martyr. It would take most of white America almost three decades to alter its perceptions.

The great temptation for the biographer of an iconic figure is to portray him or her as a virtual saint, without the normal contradictions and blemishes that all human beings have. I have devoted so many years in the effort to understand the interior personality and mind of Malcolm that this temptation disappeared long ago. He was a truly historical figure in the sense that, more than any of his contemporaries, he embodied the spirit, vitality, and political mood of an entire population—black urban mid-twentieth-century America. He spoke with clarity, humor, and urgency, and black audiences both in the United States and throughout Africa responded enthusiastically. Even when he made controversial statements with which the majority of African Americans strongly disagreed, few questioned his sincerity and commitment. On the other hand, any comprehensive review of his public record reveals major mistakes of judgment, including negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan. But unlike many other leaders, Malcolm had the courage to admit his mistakes, and to seek out and apologize to those he had offended. Even when I have disagreed with him, I deeply admire the strength and integrity of his character, and the love he obviously felt toward the African-American people and their culture.