Everyone knew his name. Some feared him; many cursed him, but some loved him. He was once described as a black panther despite his reddish-brown hair and skin. He spoke boldly with uncompromising honesty that could make one feel defensive, outraged and decidedly nervous with the Nation of Islam minister, especially if you were a white person. However, before his assassination February 21, 1966, he revealed his life story to black brother Alex Haley and his beliefs had changed dramatically when the Nation suspended, or rather silenced him. Malcolm wanted this book to make its mark on history for the good of the world and I do believe it has.

If you don’t believe me, these are his words to be exact:

Sometimes, I have dared to dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice—which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency—that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.

The goal has always been the same, with the approaches to it as different as mine and Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent marching, that dramatizes the brutality and the evil of the white man against defenseless black. And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody’s guess which of the “extremes” in approach to the black man’s problems might ~personally~ meet a fatal catastrophe first—“non-violent” Dr. King, or so-called “violent” me. Pp.385

He knew his days were numbered and he did die first before his attempt at reconciling with the Black Muslims, or The Nation of Islam, could be heard. The bombing of his home and other murder attempts did not seem like their style, and maybe he was right. You’ll have to read Haley’s Epilogue yourself. You need to start with when he was born in 1925 in my own birthplace, Omaha, Nebraska, follow him to Lansing, Michigan where they settled and Malcolm finished eighth grade. His father was then murdered by the “white Black Legion” who hated the minister’s strident call for blacks to go back to Africa and get out from under white man’s control. Police claimed the grisly death to be a suicide and eventually their mother went crazy and her six youngest children were sent to other homes around town.

This auspicious beginning set Malcolm up perfectly for the white hater he became until a year or so before his death. He never went to high school, but learned to be a hustler, an animal on the streets of Harlem, which inevitably landed him in prison. The misery he endured there made him ripe for falling for the convoluted beliefs of an Elijah Mohammed who claimed to have met God as a man and so formed The Nation of Islam. After all, his father had basically preached it.

Malcolm Little then became Malcolm X to stand for his unknown, true African name and he gave the praise to Allah, the Muslim God, for transferring him to an elite prison where he could study history books and finally be released, a new man, early. He no longer smoked, drank, ate pork, did drugs or hustled. For the next twelve years he devoted himself completely to The Nation of Islam, building up his popularity with the blacks, or Negroes as he called them, as well as the media.

He became the second most requested speaker in the country, making cross-country flights up to four times a week to universities and rallies. Jealousy finally caused Elijah Mohammed to “suspend” him, but Malcolm knew it was more than a temporary banishment. In utter dismay and confusion he traveled to the Holy City of Mecca, which astounded him with how color was not an issue there and people from all over the East came together as brothers and sisters.

Immediately he let his friends and the media know of his change of heart, but the media never took him seriously to the extent of not protecting him at his last rally. They and his followers complained that he was confused and was really violent, inciting riots around the world when the very opposite was true. Malcolm at the end knew that blacks around the world had to become as one in order to heal the “Afro-Americans”. Only his friends understood him; the media, even in Africa where he also traveled, did not. It frustrated him so much he probably would’ve had a heart attack if he hadn’t been killed.

Final Thoughts

This book was fascinating when I read it straight through the first time a few years ago and no less this time when I stayed up all night reading almost all of it again. I skipped just a few pages of his preaching the Nation of Islam message. If it can disturb me now, you can imagine white people hearing it in the growing restlessness of the mid 60s. His chapters are aptly named with his stream of nicknames like “Homeboy,” “Detroit Red,” “Hustler,” “Satan,” and “Minister Malcolm X,” but there’s also such chapters as “Nightmare,” “Caught,” “Saved,” “Out,” and “1965,” the last chapter.

Reading this autobiography is just like listening to a storyteller who knows he’s going to die soon and he wants the world to really understand who he is and why he became that way. How was he able to remember so much detail and feeling if not that he sensed his impending death? I learned so much, from the stark poverty of the Depression to the drug-crazed ghetto culture of Harlem to the radical and the true forms of Islam that Malcolm was influenced by.

I have come away with the book with an overwhelming sense of awe for a man who was not afraid to tell the world what he fervently believed in and who dreamed of not being forgotten, but truly heard by all people everywhere. Truly, if you want to appreciate black history, you will see it in living color through Malcolm’s eyes. It leaves out nothing that keeps the story moving like a freight train. There’s no sex scenes bogging it down, for instance, but his world before prison was intensely sexual. If reading about how negroes craved whites for sex only bothers you, or how rich whites used negroes as slaves and then lusted for them, you might want to rethink reading this book.

A book Malcolm recommends highly is Black Like Me by John Griffin, but you may be even more horrified by it if you're a "complacent" white person as he put it.

Hopefully you’ll be as fascinated as I was by his tell-all and realize there was much more to the man than what he showed in the middle of his life in the middle of the explosive civil rights movement. There was a tremendous soul.



Recommended: Yes