I thought this was a great book. It was clearly written by an admirer of Malcolm X, but it is also critical and incisive on analyzing Malcolm's weaknesses and flaws. It contains a compelling narrative about a fascinating life and was an easy book to read. It also carries special significance since it was published less than a year before the author's death, and that Marable received a Pulitzer Prize for his work.
Early Life
I was struck by how chaotic Malcolm X's life was as a child. And I was also struck by the many similarities to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life. X's life seemed very similar to King's life until it went off the rails following his father's death. X's father, Earl Little, had three children with his wife in Georgia before abandoning her to move north in 1915, marrying X's mothing in Montreal in 1919. Him and his new wife were both active Garveyites, spreading the conservative message of Marcus Garvey, who did not object to segregation, but hated white people and sought to build a better world for black people separate from white rule. Garvey founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and was often in conflict with the NAACP, which catered to a more middle-class crowd than Garvey. Garvey embraced capitalism, and told his followers that "wealth is strength" and the "real human rights." Garvey also favored separation of the races to such an extent that he met with Klan leader Edward Young Clarke and shared an opposition to intermarriage and social relations between the races.
Little and his new wife lived in Philadelphia for a while, but decided to move to Omaha, Nebraska, to be UNIA field organizers. In Omaha, the Little's found life very difficult, as it was the height of the 1920's KKK revival. In early 1925, while Earl was away, Klansmen rode out to the family home and demanded that Louise, pregnant with Malcolm, come out. She told them that she was alone with her three children and that her husband was in Milwaukee, preaching. They rode off after warning Louise to take her family and leave town.
The family next moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a few years until briefly moving to East Chicago, Indiana, before settling in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929. In November of that year, when Malcolm was four years old, the Little's house was bombed and burnt down, although no one was hurt. Instead of helping, police investigated Earl for setting the blaze to collect insurance, although it seems clear to historians that that was not the case. Then in 1931, when Malcolm was just six, his father died. It seems unclear whether it was an accident or not, but it seems like a murder the way Marable describes it. Earl was cut in half by a tram, as if he'd fallen in front of it, but it was in a part of town he wasn't expected to be in. It seems more likely that racist whites hit him with a car elsewhere and then threw his already mangled body in front of a tram in another spot. Louise was sure he had been murdered, but Malcolm was of two minds about it for the rest of his life.
With Earl dead, the family's life was upended, and debt collectors took much of what his life insurance policy gave to his family. Louise worked hard and managed to support the family until 1937, when a suitor of hers got her pregnant and then ran off, leaving her unable to care for her children. Welfare workers stepped in to look after the children. Initially, he was placed with neighbors close by so he could still visit home, but the new baby (her eighth) pushed Louise past her breaking point. After police found her walking barefoot along a road with her baby not knowing where she was in December 1938, she was committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she would be confined for twenty-four years. Malcolm rarely visited her there and was deeply ashamed. The next summer, social workers decided that Malcolm would be moved again, this time to Ingham County Juvenile Home in Mason, Michigan, ten miles to the south. At school, teachers discouraged him from following his dreams of becoming a lawyer, called him slurs, and encouraged him to take up manual labor. Within months, he was expelled from school.
He then moved to Boston, to live with his half sister, Ella, from Earl's other marriage. But things didn't go well there. Ella enrolled Malcolm in an all-boys private school, which he went to the first morning, and never returned to after seeing there were no girls there. He never went back to a classroom. Ella, meanwhile, was not an ideal guardian, being arrested over twenty-five times, although only convicted once. Malcolm was initially scared being exposed to the big city for the first time, but started to fall to its corrupting influences.
Soon, Malcolm was a petty criminal. He avoided the draft in 1943 by telling the psychiatrist that, "I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!" He was marked 4-F, unfit for duty, and never heard from the Army again. Malcolm was doing anything for money. The author even claims that he would go once a week to the house of a wealthy Bostonian, where he was paid to undress them both, pick up the old man, place him on a table, and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder until the man climaxed. He lived two lives: one in which he was a member of his family with Ella in Boston, and another in which he "participated in prostitution, marijuana sales, cocaine sessions, numbers running, the occasional robbery, and, apparently, paid homosexual encounters."
After being caught for a gun charge, X betrayed his accomplices from a string of robberies in exchange for a lighter sentence. Instead, because two of the accomplices were white women, the justice system went easier on them and harder on the black men involved. He was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison, and his own lawyer told him it was because "You had no business with white girls!" His white female accomplice, who had also been his girlfriend, told authorities that she "lived in constant fear" of him and served only seven months. This left a profound impact on Malcolm, writing later, "All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak."
Malcolm X in Prison
Once in prison, Malcolm was put into a mice-infested cell seven by eight feet across, without running water. Prisoners had to relieve themselves in buckets emptied only once every twenty-four hours. Prisoners also had to eat in their cells. In prison, Malcolm initially got clean, but then returned to drugs, getting high on ground up nutmeg, which can be a hallucinogen in large amounts with effects similar to ecstasy. In prison, Malcolm met Elton Bembry, twenty years older than him, who was extremely knowledgeable, and imparted wisdom on the young Malcolm. Self-study was not just for the joy on learning--it could get Malcolm a transfer to a more lenient facility, fulfilling requirements for a university extension and devouring books, including memorizing the dictionary.
In 1948, Malcolm's brother Philbert sent him an unusual letter, informing him that he and all the members of their family had converted to Islam. Not long after, his other brother, Reginald, wrote to him, "Don't eat any more pork, and don't smoke any more cigarettes. I'll show you how to get out of prison." Malcolm was puzzled for days, but decided to follow the advice. Malcolm was sent to Massachusetts' most lenient prison soon after, where he joined a debating club and discovered a passion for public speaking.
The Nation of Islam
After leaving jail, Malcolm was ready to join the Nation of Islam. While there had been some Muslims among the Africans enslaved in the Americas, the numbers were low. The Nation of Islam was a much newer idea that emerged in the 20th century, and had little connection to Islam as practiced around the world. The first people to bring Islam to the black community were part of the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded in 1913 but an African American named Timothy Drew. The Nation of Islam emerged in the 1930s, when a man named Wallace Fard started going door-to-door in Detroit seeking to join African-Americans to his new religion. Fard was olive-skinned, and it is unclear where he came from. It is also unclear where he went, as he disappeared in 1934 and was never seen again. But the religion became a phenomenon across the Midwest and then the Northeast among African Americans, and was led after 1934 by Elijah Muhammad. The religion found great appeal among Garveyites, since it preached a similar self-reliant, apolitical style. But it was hardly related to Islam, and preached a bizarre doctrine about the evil of white people, who were created by an evil black scientist. It resembles a cult much more than a religion. The leadership would extract huge sums of money from members in tithes and by requiring them to buy copious amounts of the periodical they produced, Muhammad Speaks.
Malcolm rose very quickly to become one of the Nation of Islam's top preachers in the 1950s. He stood out for being one of their most effective speakers and organizers, and was sent to different Temples across the country to represent Elijah Muhammad. But the problems he kept running into were that he sometimes outshone Elijah Muhammad himself, and that X wanted to get into politics, which Elijah Muhammad was extremely opposed to. Malcolm would continually organize protests which the NOI leadership kept trying to reign in.
As a representative of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm took a trip to the Middle East in 1959, which may have given him his first doubts about the NOI. He realized that all Muslims were clearly not black, and he also realized that he knew very little about orthodox Islam, and the Muslims of the Middle East were surprised that he could call himself Muslim without any knowledge of Arabic. Malcolm's trip would be one of the first of the trips made by senior NOI leaders that caused them to try to bring NOI closer to standard Islam. After Malcolm went, Elijah Muhammad started sending his own sons to the Middle East before and after he himself went in 1960. NOI was heavily criticized by American Muslims throughout its existence as being a heretical, fake branch of Islam. Islam is a universal religion that seeks to transcend race, and NOI was in fundamental conflict with that when it preached that Islam was a black person's religion.
Another reason for the eventual split between Malcolm and NOI was Malcolm's discovery that Elijah Muhammad wasn't really the holy man he portrayed himself as. In fact, Muhammad was cheating on his wife with several other women, abusing his position as leader to sleep with them. Moreover, he was abandoning his children by these women. And perhaps worst of all, one of the women was Evelyn Williams, a woman that Malcolm had dated and broke up with in the past, who he may have still had feelings for. One time, two of the women brought their children by Elijah Muhammad all the way to his hideaway in Arizona and left them at his door. He turned them over to social services the next day.
In April 1963, conflict between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad came to a head when X flew to Phoenix to confront his leader about all the women Muhammad had impregnated. While Malcolm was seeking to find solutions, his snooping around on this issue was perceived as an attack on Muhammad. Malcolm began preaching that it wasn't necessary for a messenger like Muhammad to be perfect, contradicting the official NOI doctrine that Elijah Muhammad was perfection. At this time, Louis X (later known as Louis Farrakhan) decided along with other leaders in NOI to turn against Malcolm, and started informing against him to Elijah Muhammad. Continuing to contradict the order to avoid politics, Malcolm kept getting drawn into political disputes. One of the worst was shortly after the Kennedy assassination, which Malcolm X described (only after being prompted by reporters) as "the chickens coming home to roost" as a payback for white violence against blacks. For this comment, Muhammad suspended Malcolm for 90 days from the NOI, which meant he would be shunned by all members. The real purpose of this may have been to create an indefinite suspension from the beginning, but even if it wasn't it certainly became indefinite when Malcolm kept engaging in NOI activities. At this time Malcolm endorsed the young Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali against Sonny Liston. Ali won, and Malcolm brought him into the NOI fold, but Ali quickly chose the side of Muhammad against Malcolm X. his life was spinning out of control, and on March 8, 1964, Malcolm X announced his decision to leave the Nation of Islam.
Leaving the Nation of Islam
It may be of some significance that as Malcolm X was leaving the Nation of Islam, the first major Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. It seems to symbolize to me the defeat of the idea that black people could succeed by staying away from politics. It vindicated Malcolm's statements to that effect, but proved the weakness of his behavior by staying in NOI. During the legislative process to pass the bill, Malcolm X visited Washington, D.C., and went to listen to a press conference that Martin Luther King was giving after his discussions on the Civil Rights Act with senators. They encountered each other accidentally in the hallway after leaving through separate doors, and a photographer took a snapshot of them shaking hands--it was the only time the two ever met. The next month, Malcolm X gave the speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," which was momentous not for the violence it called for (Malcolm was already doing that) but because he called for political action--voting--for the first time.
Already, Malcolm knew that NOI thugs were planning to kill him. These plots and attempts escaped scrutiny because their intended victim was Malcolm X, which left the police unsympathetic, and also because it was well-known that NOI members did not carry weapons. It was less well-known that they had enforcers who would regularly beat and intimidate members. One way to escape them was to leave the country, which he did in April of 1964, embarking for Mecca on the Hajj.
The Hajj was an awakening for Malcolm. Not only did it mean his embrace of orthodox Islam over NOI, but it also exposed him to Islam as a universal religion, with no distinction based on race. Famously, Malcolms declared that, "I have eaten from the same place, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God . . . with fellow Muslims whose skins was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue . . . [for] the first time in my life . . . I didn't see them as 'white' men." This reveals the huge change Malcolm was going through, but also how naive he had been. His world had been small while he was a NOI member, and it now became large enough to fit more complexity in it. Travel broadened his horizons.
But leaving NOI also left Malcolm in a legal struggle to keep his house, which was owned by NOI. Malcolm had put so much trust in NOI that he had few assets of his own, trusting Elijah Muhammad to always look out for him. But now the faithful swore loyalty to Muhammad in the temples, and were expected to denounce Malcolm for heresy. Meanwhile, Malcolm was attempting to set up the Muslim Mosques Incorporated (MMI) as a competitor with NOI for black Muslims while creating the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) as a secular, black nationalist organization. This structure was prone to turf struggles between the two organizations and only endured based on Malcolm's charisma. After returning to the United States from the Hajj in late May, Malcolm left again to spend nineteen weeks in Africa, leaving his organizations to flounder.
In Africa, Malcolm sought to convince African nations to condemn the United States for its treatment of African-Americans. This effort failed as narrowly interpreted, but Malcolm was still very successful in building diplomatic inroads across the continent. He was treated like a visiting dignitary everywhere he went. But when he returned, he was back in danger.
The Assassination
The assassination of Malcolm X was planned for a year, and attempted several times before it succeeded. Failures included trying to ram his car off the road, an ambush right in front of his house, and bombing his house. The plan that worked was a full-frontal assault during one of Malcolm's speeches. Very unfortunately, it was a rare occasion in which his wife, Betty, and their children attended. It took so long because Muhammad never exactly gave an order, but just a sort of Henry II vague desire, because Malcolm still had the respect of much of NOI, and because Malcolm had been outside the country so much.
But it was not possible for NOI to leave him alive. He threatened the legitimacy of NOI by creating another Muslim sect, and the defections of two of Elijah Muhammad's sons, Wallace and Akbar, made the situation even more dire. Muhammad must have felt he was fighting for his life. The murder itself involved four likely gunmen. Two started a fake fight, and while attention was turned away, a third approached with a shotgun. A fourth detonated a smoke bomb to cause even more havoc, and then they all turned their guns on Malcolm until he was dead.
Marable makes a convincing argument that justice was not done. Only one assailant was caught on the scene--the others escaped. The shotgun-wielder was caught, and two men claimed to be the other two were as well, but Marable gives good reasons to doubt that they were actually the shooters, even though they would have had the same motive. Most shocking, the police did not secure the crime scene, and the owner of the Audubon Ballroom had the entire space cleaned up, blood mopped off the floor, to host an event four hours later.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
There are so many interesting points of comparison between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. The two were contemporaries: Malcolm X lived from 1925-65 and MLK from 1929-1968. They were the two most famous leaders of Black thought in the 1960s, but completely divergent. King was a Christian preacher, X was a Nation of Islam preacher. King sought integration, X supported segregation. King was a Southerner, and X was a Northerner. Both were sexist, but in very divergent ways. King loved women, and he was a serial womanizer, but he felt there was a certain place for women as wives and mothers, and not as leaders. Malcolm really seemed to hate women. He wanted nothing to do with his wife, and didn't enjoy the company of women like King did. While King was known for tons of affairs, X didn't cheat on his wife, but he didn't spend much time with her either. Malcolm X was also financially abusive, withholding money from his wife, even saying himself that he put her "in jail financially." They also had short careers. Malcolm X only really became involved in Civil Rights in 1957, following an altercation between NOI members and police. MLK got involved during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956. The result is that their careers were eight and twelve years, each lasting until their assassinations. And both knew that they would be killed, making frequent comments about it before the end.
Ideologically, I found it interesting that both men were converging on the idea that the United States needed a more radical change. Malcolm X was feeling this way by 1964, and King was certainly thinking it by 1966. Both were tempted by socialism as the answer. But Malcolm had less than a year to live after leaving NOI and was never able to fully develop his ideas. He also carried far less sway with black Americans. Consider this- Malcolm X endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, but LBJ carried 96% of the black vote. And he would still say insane things, like that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a "device to deceive the African people." Today and then, it was King's influence who was the greater. Black nationalism remains a fringe movement, while integrationism brought about the first black president. Interestingly, Marable identifies hip-hop and film as bringing back interest in Malcolm X in the 90s, but Islamism as a source for a revival of Malcolm X's legacy in the future.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- While living in Harlem in the 1940s, X worked at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, where both he and another employee both had red hair. Malcolm had always been called Red, and to distinguish the two, they called Malcolm "Detroit Red" (no one had heard of Lansing) and the other one "Chicago Red." Chicago Red would change his name again later when he began a comedy career, going by Redd Foxx.
- Of the 15 million Africans taken hostage to the Americas as slaves, about 650,000, or 7-8%, were Muslims.
- NOI maintained connections with the American Nazi Party due to their shared belief in segregation and the NOI doctrine that all whites were racist, and therefore the Nazis were the only ones who were honest about it.
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