More on Malcolm

As with Saul Bellow’s letters, there was much more to say about Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X than I was able to fit in a 750-word review. Below are some observations that didn’t make the final cut.

I meant to say something, too, about the strange fate that caused Malcolm’s life to be bracketed by the firebombing of his home by white supremacists when he was a child, and a second firebombing, apparently by the Nation of Islam, a few days before he was killed.

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Anyone seeking to retell the life story of Malcolm X must reckon with the Autobiography. The book was a true collaboration, based on about fifty in-depth interviews and completed before its subject’s death. In itself, and as the basis for Spike Lee’s 1992 movie, it has shaped the public image of Malcolm X, an image that has inspired generations of activists and people of color.

As it turns out, the prolific scholar and author Manning Marable has few bones to pick with the Autobiography. The Autobiography was a story of transformation and redemption, and Marable notes the way in which Malcolm X and Haley heightened the drama of the transformation by exaggerating Malcolm’s criminal career in the years when he was known as Detroit Red. But at the same time that Malcolm was making himself look worse than he was in ways that reinforced his myth, he was skipping or disguising matters that wouldn’t serve him as well. Marable shows, for instance, how Malcolm transferred his relationship with a wealthy and somewhat kinky white man in Boston onto another character in his story.

Malcolm’s sexist attitudes also come through more clearly in Marable’s book than in the Autobiography. “You gave that message to a woman!” he shouted to his right-hand man, James 67X, on the last day of his life. “You should know better than that!” The woman he was referring to was his wife Betty....

One scene that seemed sheer Hollywood when dramatized in Spike Lee’s movie turns out to be perfectly true: Malcolm had summoned Fruit of Islam enforcers to stand vigil at a Harlem police station where a Nation member had been taken after a brutal beating by police. Watching Malcolm dismiss his troops, soon followed by a crowd of four thousand Harlemites, a police officer said, ‘No one man should have that much power.” ...

In the epilogue to his biography, Marable contrasts Malcolm X to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man he met only once, for about a minute, in the halls of Congress. King, according to Marable, “wanted to convince white Americans that ‘race doesn’t matter’ — in other words, the physical and color differences that appear to distinguish blacks from whites should be meaningless in the application of justice and equal rights.”

In striking contrast, Malcolm perceived himself first and foremost as a black man, a person of African descent who happened to be a United States citizen. This was a crucial difference from King and other civil rights leaders. When he was a member of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm saw himself as a member of the tribe of Shabazz, the fictive Asian black clan invented by W.D. Fard. But by the final phases of his career, and especially in 1964-65, Malcolm linked his black consciousness to the ideological imperative of self-determination, the concept that all people have a natural right to decide for themselves their own destiny.