The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (1965). Content and Description

Written by Alex Haley after extensive interviews, informal conversations, and research, The Autobiography of Malcolm X chronicles the life and times of a key figure in the Civil Rights movement and provides an essential understanding of the social context for black nationalism. In addition to its value as a historical document, Malcolm X’s Autobiography tells a human story, a story of a man who rose from poverty to become one of the most important and revolutionary spokespersons for the rights of African Americans in the 20th century.

The transformation of Malcolm Little, a boy in an oppressed family in Nebraska, into Malcolm X, staunch defender of his people against the “white devil,” and, finally, the reflective humanist El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, testifies to the protean nature of the human mind. Moreover, it traces the ceaseless movement of an intellect receptive to new ideas and modes of living. This spiritual journey is set against the backdrop of an unjust world, a world that Malcolm X reflects upon after embracing orthodox Islam and traveling to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

Though the Autobiography stands as an important historical and political document, it is also a literary work, a work that draws from multiple literary traditions. Malcolm’s story, fashioned by Haley, resembles the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, both of whom recount their experiences of racial oppression, followed by their self-education, and, ultimately, their emancipation from slavery. As Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography does, Haley’s narrative presents Malcolm’s life as a process of diligent self-improvement, not only a quest for knowledge and truth, but also a continuous effort to find the best way to live— both privately, that is to say, spiritually, and as a social being.

But, as the theorist and commentator bell hooks points out, Malcolm’s Autobiography possesses a psychological depth lacking from the texts it draws upon: “Only Malcolm X charts the decolonization of a black mind in a manner that far surpasses any experience described in slave narratives” (hooks 79). Hooks attributes this depth to the distinctly religious and spiritual nature of Malcolm’s “journey of self-realization,” a journey that ultimately leads him to Mecca and his subsequent recognition of the oneness of humanity before a benevolent God (hooks 80).

The book can be divided into three major sections. First are the early years. At a young age, Malcolm Little’s experiences often mirrored those of others in the African-American community. After the death of his father, Malcolm’s mother struggled as a single parent reliant on inadequate social welfare policies, as did so many other single African- American women. Upon entering the workforce, racial segregation and discouragement from his teachers prevented Malcolm from becoming a lawyer, and he resorted to shoe shining, a career soon abandoned for the lucrative opportunities afforded by “hustling.”

Moving first to Boston and then New York City, a zoot suit-sporting Malcolm became enamored of the glamorous life afforded by selling marijuana and frequenting nightclubs. Despite the dangers of this life, Malcolm Little excelled as “Detroit Red,” an alias he chose while hustling on the streets of Harlem. Reflecting on the way people lived in Harlem and his own descent into activities associated with hustling, an older and wiser Malcolm X observes: “In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view everyday living as survival—and in that kind of a community, survival is what is expected” (Autobiography 93).

In Harlem, Malcolm used drugs, sold drugs, lived a life of crime, carried multiple firearms, and earned a reputation as a man not to cross. Now engaging in prostitution, burglary, robbery, and bootlegging, “Detroit Red” was involved in activities that put him into contact with the Mafia. Malcolm learned much about corruption in American society from his apprenticeship in the criminal underworld, claiming, “The country’s entire social, political, and economic structure, the criminal, the law, and the politicians were actually inseparable partners” (Autobiography 119).

As might be expected, this life of violent excess landed Malcolm in jail after nearly being murdered. He was arrested for breaking into a residence with his friend Shorty and two white women. Malcolm was outraged when he discovered that the involvement of the white women caused his sentence to be severe.

In her analysis of the Autobiography as spiritual journey, bell hooks likens Malcolm’s time as a hustler to the “wandering in the wilderness” most protagonists of traditional religious literature endure before a spiritual awakening (hooks 80). As Dante, for example, finds himself in a dark wood before embarking on his journey through hell, then purgatory, and finally paradise, so does Malcolm descend from the streets of Harlem into the bowels of the American justice system.

Malcolm’s imprisonment in Massachusetts marks the second major phase of his life story. While incarcerated, a time characterized by hooks as his “dark night of the soul,” Malcolm began to believe that no matter the enormity of a sinner’s error, redemption is forever possible (hooks 80). This was a dramatic change for Malcolm, whose atheism and cursing of God after arriving had earned him the nickname Satan. Malcolm saw a chance for his salvation after receiving a letter from his brother, Reginald, who wrote of the Nation of Islam (NOI). With the encouragement of his family, now members of the NOI in Detroit, Malcolm started corresponding with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad while still in prison, finally meeting him in Chicago after his release in 1952.

Not long after this meeting, Malcolm Little replaced his last name with the letter X: a letter symbolizing the namelessness of his enslaved ancestors. During his time in prison, Malcolm reflected upon his life and the world of knowledge available to him in the prison library. As he says in The Autobiography, “I would just like to study. I mean ranging study, because I have a wide-open mind” (Autobiography 388). With a renewed sense of self and an ever- expanding mind, Malcolm was ready to reach out to the world and make a difference in others’ lives.

For the next decade, Malcolm X endeavored to redeem the community he now recognized as his own, tirelessly working on behalf of his people by whatever means necessary while espousing values he thought would benefit and nurture the “so-called Negro.” As a spokesperson for the NOI, most of Malcolm’s statements were dictated by the organizations’ ideology, an ideology that espoused the values of the American dream—material prosperity, self-reliance, individual responsibility—while also advocating racial separatism. Redeemed and motivated to do good, Malcolm X strove to make this dream a reality for those who believed in the leadership and teachings of Elijah Muhammad.

Malcolm X’s discovery of corruption in the upper ranks of the NOI ushered in the third phase of his life story and the text’s narrative. Berating the leadership for elevating themselves above the rest of NOI members, Malcolm X describes various abuses of power by Elijah Muhammad and his lieutenants. This corruption could not help but remind him of the world he had explored as “Detroit Red”: For Malcolm X, both of these situations—street hustling and NOI rivalries—were rotten with corruption, situations that would inevitably lead to envy, jealousy, greed, and murder.

Malcolm’s feud with Elijah Muhammad, who had assumed a godlike stature in his mind, has been compared by bell hooks to “the anguish [of Christ] in the garden of Gethesmane, expressed in his tortured cry ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” (hooks 87). This crisis of faith ultimately leads Malcolm again to question his beliefs and worldly conduct, resulting in the ultimate fulfillment of the spiritual narrative running throughout the Autobiography. No longer under the spell of the Nation of Islam and its racist policies, the last section of The Autobiography chronicles Malcolm X’s intellectual development after making the hajj. Journeying to Mecca, Malcolm witnessed harmonious interracial relations for the first time in his life as he prayed with thousands of others from different parts of the world at the Kaaba.

He was also exposed to the orthodox teachings of Islam, teachings that did not demonize people according to the color of their skin. The man who emerged, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, accepted responsibility for the improvement of his community, a task he associated with a much greater and more ambitious goal: to improve the lives of those living in all parts of the postcolonial, undeveloped world.

Malcolm X’s teachings on black nationalism were deeply influenced by his extensive travels in former colonies. More inclusive and independent than his previous ways of thinking, these teachings are partially reflected in the tone and perspective from which The Autobiography is told. However, as Haley states in his epilogue, Malcolm had expressed concern over the glowing descriptions of Elijah Muhammad and the NOI that he had written in the Autobiography before his break with them, ultimately deciding to let them go unchanged (Autobiography 419).

Such details raise more general concerns about the perspective of the narrative, concerns that become even more complicated with the intervention of Haley in the composition process. In his essay “Malcolm X across the Genres,” the critic Neil Painter asserts that autobiography, even when it is not “told to” another but is written by the person who lived the life, reworks existential fragments into a meaningful new whole, as seen from a particular vantage point. Even when the autobiography is not a collaboration, the narrator passes over much in silence and highlights certain themes that become salient in light of what the narrator concludes he or she has become. (Painter 433)

Though it is generally agreed that Haley was faithful to Malcolm’s wishes regarding how his life was to be portrayed, Malcolm never saw the final product (which includes a 70-page epilogue penned by Haley after Malcolm’s death). Recognizing such issues should not detract from the power and validity of the Autobiography and the insights it contains, but merely emphasize the text’s status as a work of literature, rather than an unadulterated historical account of one man’s life. Commenting on Malcolm’s re-creation and alteration of events, the writer and critic David Bradley asserts that such discrepancies point to the aesthetic achievement of the Autobiography as a “literary expression,” a “consciously crafted [myth] of struggle and uplift” (Bradley 42).

By the time Malcolm finished collaborating with Haley, he knew his fate and prophesied not only his death but also the stereotypical and reactionary way he would be viewed in the last pages of the Autobiography:

[Each] day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do. When I am dead—I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form—I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with “hate.” (Autobiography 388-389)

When Malcolm X was murdered, his family was left fatherless, his community was left with one less capable leader, and violence was proven, once again, to be an effective political weapon. Despite Malcolm’s failure to found a viable black nationalist party or take the case of African-American human rights before the United Nations, his life, as captured in his Autobiography, was one of triumph.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. In what ways does the story of Malcolm X offer validation of the belief that “life is significant because of its journey, not its final destination”?

2. Using Malcolm X’s Autobiography, write a well- developed essay that explores how the American dream of “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps” weighs against the corruptions that accompany successful attainment of power, status, and privilege. How can the Autobiography be read as a critique of the American dream and its insistence that self-reliance is the key to success? What characteristics are common to both Malcolm X’s life and the American dream?

3. As Malcolm matured, he focused first on the level of comfort available to him as an individual followed by the level of achievement realized by the Afro-American community. The third phase of his life concludes with his developing concern about the status of the world’s underserved peoples. Are there examples that support this view of his life? With these examples in mind, construct a well-developed essay on the stages of Malcolm X’s life, detailing his thinking and the way it changed during each of these phases.

4. Read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of a Slave. Next, think about the issues both Malcolm X and Douglass had to face. Finally, write a well-developed essay that compares the solutions each provides and the audience each addresses. How, in both cases, does the audience determine what is said and how it is said?