The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  Anyway, now, 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.”

  He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of “hatred”—and that will help him to escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race.

  You watch. I will be labeled as, at best, an “irresponsible” black man. I have always felt about this accusation that the black “leader” whom white men consider to be “responsible” is invariably the black “leader” who never gets any results. You only get action as a black man if you are regarded by the white man as “irresponsible.” In fact, this much I had learned when I was just a little boy. And since I have been some kind of a “leader” of black people here in the racist society of America, I have been more reassured each time the white man resisted me, or attacked me harder—because each time made me more certain that I was on the right track in the American black man’s best interests. The racist white man’s opposition automatically made me know that I did offer the black man something worthwhile.

  Yes, I have cherished my “demagogue” role. I know that societies often have killed the people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America—then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.

  ALEX HALEY

  EPILOGUE

  During nineteen fifty-nine, when the public was becoming aware of the Muslims after the New York telecast “The Hate That Hate Produced,” I was in San Francisco, about to retire after twenty years in the U.S. Coast Guard. A friend returned from a visit to her Detroit home and told me of a startling “black man’s” religion, “The Nation of Islam,” to which, to her surprise, her entire family was converted. I listened with incredulity to how a “mad scientist Mr. Yacub” had genetically “grafted” the white race from an original black people. The organization’s leader was described as “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad” and a “Minister Malcolm X” was apparently chief of staff.

  When I entered a civilian writing career in New York City, I collected, around Harlem, a good deal of provocative material and then proposed an article about the cult to the Reader’s Digest. Visiting the Muslim restaurant in Harlem, I asked how I could meet Minister Malcolm X, who was pointed out talking in a telephone booth right behind me. Soon he came out, a gangling, tall, reddish-brownskinned fellow, at that time thirty-five years old; when my purpose was made known, he bristled, his eyes skewering me from behind the horn-rimmed glasses. “You’re another one of the white man’s tools sent to spy!” he accused me sharply. I said I had a legitimate writing assignment and showed him my letter from the magazine stating that an objective article was wanted, one that would balance what the Muslims said of themselves and what their attackers said about them. Malcolm X snorted that no white man’s promise was worth the paper it was on; he would need time to decide if he would cooperate or not. Meanwhile, he suggested that I could attend some of the Harlem Temple Number 7 meetings (“temples” have since been renamed “mosques”) which were open to non-Muslim Negroes.

  Around the Muslim’s restaurant, I met some of the converts, all of them neatly dressed and almost embarrassingly polite. Their manners and miens reflected the Spartan personal discipline the organization demanded, and none of them would utter anything but Nation of Islam clichés. Even excellent weather was viewed as a blessing from Allah, with corollary credit due to “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”

  Finally, Minister Malcolm X told me that he would not take personal responsibility. He said that I should talk about an article with Mr. Muhammad personally. I expressed willingness, an appointment was made, and I flew to Chicago. The slightly built, shy-acting, soft-voiced Mr. Muhammad invited me to dinner with his immediate family in his mansion. I was aware that I was being carefully sized up while he talked primarily of F.B.I. and Internal Revenue Service close surveillance of his organization, and of a rumored forthcoming Congressional probe. “But I have no fear of any of them; I have all that I need—the truth,” Mr. Muhammad said. The subject of my writing an article somehow never got raised, but Malcolm X proved far more cooperative when I returned.

  He would sit with me at a white-topped table in the Muslim restaurant and answer guardedly any questions I asked between constant interruptions by calls from the New York press in the telephone booth. When I asked if I could see Muslim activities in some other cities, he arranged with other ministers for me to attend meetings at temples in Detroit, Washington, and Philadelphia.

  My article entitled “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” appeared in early 1960, and it was the first featured magazine notice of the phenomenon. A letter quickly came from Mr. Muhammad appreciating that the article kept my promise to be objective, and Malcolm X telephoned similar compliments. About this time, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln’s book The Black Muslims in America was published and the Black Muslims became a subject of growing interest. During 1961 and 1962, the Saturday Evening Post teamed me with a white writer, Al Balk, to do an article; next I did a personal interview of Malcolm X for Playboy magazine, which had promised to print verbatim whatever response he made to my questions. During that interview of several days’ duration, Malcolm X repeatedly exclaimed, after particularly blistering anti-Christian or anti-white statements: “You know that devil’s not going to print that!” He was very much taken aback when Playboy kept its word.

  Malcolm X began to warm up to me somewhat. He was most aware of the national periodicals’ power, and he had come to regard me, if still suspiciously, as one avenue of access. Occasionally now he began to telephone me advising me of some radio, television, or personal speaking appearance he was about to make, or he would invite me to attend some Black Muslim bazaar or other public affair.

  I was in this stage of relationship with the Malcolm X who often described himself on the air as “the angriest black man in America” when in early 1963 my agent brought me together with a publisher whom the Playboy interview had given the idea of the autobiography of Malcolm X. I was asked if I felt I could get the now nationally known firebrand to consent to telling the intimate details of his entire life. I said I didn’t know, but I would ask him. The editor asked me if I could sketch the likely highlights of such a book, and as I commenced talking, I realized how little I knew about the man personally, despite all my interviews. I said that the question had made me aware of how careful Malcolm X had always been to play himself down and to play up his leader Elijah Muhammad.

  All that I knew, really, I said, was that I had heard Malcolm X refer in passing to his life of crime and prison before he became a Black Muslim; that several times he had told me: “You wouldn’t believe my past,” and that I had heard others say that at one time he had peddled dope and women and committed armed robberies.

  I knew that Malcolm X had an almost fanatical obsession about time. “I have less patience with someone who doesn’t wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious,” he had once told me. “In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.” I knew how the Black Muslim membership was said to increase wherever Malcolm X lectured, and I knew his pride that Negro prisoners in most prisons were discovering the Muslim religion as he had when he was a convict. I knew he professed to eat only what a Black Muslim (preferably his wife Betty) had cooked and he drank innumerable cups of coffee which he lightened with cream, commenting wryly, “Coffee is the only thing I like integrated.” Over our luncheon table, I told the editor and my agent how Malcolm X coul
d unsettle non-Muslims—as, for instance, once when he offered to drive me to a subway, I began to light a cigarette and he drily observed, “That would make you the first person ever to smoke in this automobile.”

  —

  Malcolm X gave me a startled look when I asked him if he would tell his life story for publication. It was one of the few times I have ever seen him uncertain. “I will have to give a book a lot of thought,” he finally said. Two days later, he telephoned me to meet him again at the Black Muslim restaurant. He said, “I’ll agree. I think my life story may help people to appreciate better how Mr. Muhammad salvages black people. But I don’t want my motives for this misinterpreted by anybody—the Nation of Islam must get every penny that might come to me.” Of course, Mr. Muhammad’s agreement would be necessary, and I would have to ask Mr. Muhammad myself.

  So I flew again to see Mr. Muhammad, but this time to Phoenix, Arizona, where the Nation of Islam had bought him the house in the hot, dry climate that relieved his severe bronchial condition. He and I talked alone this time. He told me how his organization had come far with largely uneducated Muslims and that truly giant strides for the black man could be made if his organization were aided by some of the talents which were available in the black race. He said, “And one of our worst needs is writers”—but he did not press me to answer. He suddenly began coughing, and rapidly grew worse and worse until I rose from my seat and went to him, alarmed, but he waved me away, gasping that he would be all right. Between gasps, he told me he felt that “Allah approves” the book. He said, “Malcolm is one of my most outstanding ministers.” After arranging for his chauffeur to return me to the Phoenix airport, Mr. Muhammad quickly bade me good-bye and rushed from the room coughing.

  Back East, Malcolm X carefully read and then signed the publication contract, and he withdrew from his wallet a piece of paper filled with his sprawling longhand. “This is this book’s dedication,” he said. I read: “This book I dedicate to The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who found me here in America in the muck and mire of the filthiest civilization and society on this earth, and pulled me out, cleaned me up, and stood me on my feet, and made me the man that I am today.”

  The contract provided that all monies accruing to Malcolm X “shall be made payable by the agent to ‘Muhammad’s Mosque No. 2,’ ” but Malcolm X felt this was insufficient. He dictated to me a letter to type for his signature, which I did: “Any and all monies representing my contracted share of the financial returns should be made payable by the literary agent to Muhammad’s Mosque No. 2. These payments should be mailed to the following address: Mr. Raymond Sharrieff, 4847 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago 15, Illinois.”

  Another letter was dictated, this one an agreement between him and me: “Nothing can be in this book’s manuscript that I didn’t say, and nothing can be left out that I want in it.”

  In turn, I asked Malcolm X to sign for me a personal pledge that however busy he was, he would give me a priority quota of his time for the planned 100,000-word “as told to” book which would detail his entire life. And months later, in a time of strain between us, I asked for—and he gave—his permission that at the end of the book I could write comments of my own about him which would not be subject to his review.

  Malcolm X promptly did begin to pay me two- and three-hour visits, parking his blue Oldsmobile outside the working studio I then had in Greenwich Village. He always arrived around nine or ten at night carrying his flat tan leather briefcase which along with his scholarly look gave him a resemblance to a hardworking lawyer. Inevitably, he was tired after his long busy day, and sometimes he was clearly exhausted.

  We got off to a very poor start. To use a word he liked, I think both of us were a bit “spooky.” Sitting right there and staring at me was the fiery Malcolm X who could be as acid toward Negroes who angered him as he was against whites in general. On television, in press conferences, and at Muslim rallies, I had heard him bitterly attack other Negro writers as “Uncle Toms,” “yard Negroes,” “black men in white clothes.” And there I sat staring at him, proposing to spend a year plumbing his innermost secrets when he had developed a near phobia for secrecy during his years of crime and his years in the Muslim hierarchy. My twenty years in military service and my Christian religious persuasion didn’t help, either; he often jeered publicly at these affiliations for Negroes. And although he now would indirectly urge me to write for national magazines about the Muslims, he had told me several times, in various ways, that “you blacks with professional abilities of any kind will one of these days wake up and find out that you must unite under the leadership of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad for your own salvation.” Malcolm X was also convinced that the F.B.I. had “bugged” my studio; he probably suspected that it may even have been done with my cooperation. For the first several weeks, he never entered the room where we worked without exclaiming, “Testing, testing—one, two, three….”

  Tense incidents occurred. One night a white friend was in the studio when Malcolm X arrived a little earlier than anticipated, and they passed each other in the corridor. Malcolm X’s manner during all of that session suggested that his worst doubts had been confirmed. Another time when Malcolm X sat haranguing me about the glories of the Muslim organization, he was gesturing with his passport in his hand; he saw that I was trying to read its perforated number and suddenly he thrust the passport toward me, his neck flushed reddish: “Get the number straight, but it won’t be anything the white devil doesn’t already know. He issued me the passport.”

  For perhaps a month I was afraid we weren’t going to get any book. Malcolm X was still stiffly addressing me as “Sir!” and my notebook contained almost nothing but Black Muslim philosophy, praise of Mr. Muhammad, and the “evils” of “the white devil.” He would bristle when I tried to urge him that the proposed book was his life. I was thinking that I might have to advise the publisher that I simply couldn’t seem to get through to my subject when the first note of hope occurred. I had noticed that while Malcolm X was talking, he often simultaneously scribbled with his red-ink ball-point pen on any handy paper. Sometimes it was the margin of a newspaper he brought in, sometimes it was on index cards that he carried in the back of a small, red-backed appointment book. I began leaving two white paper napkins by him every time I served him more coffee, and the ruse worked when he sometimes scribbled on the napkins, which I retrieved when he left. Some examples are these:

  “Here lies a YM, killed by a BM, fighting for the WM, who killed all the RM.” (Decoding that wasn’t difficult knowing Malcolm X. “YM” was for yellow man, “BM” for black man, “WM” for white man, and “RM” was for red man.)

  “Nothing ever happened without cause. Cause BM condition WM won’t face. WM obsessed with hiding his guilt.”

  “If Christianity had asserted itself in Germany, six million Jews would have lived.”

  “WM so quick to tell BM ‘Look what I have done for you!’ No! Look what you have done to us!”

  “BM dealing with WM who put our eyes out, now he condemns us because we cannot see.”

  “Only persons really changed history those who changed men’s thinking about themselves. Hitler as well as Jesus, Stalin as well as Buddha…Hon. Elijah Muhammad….”

  It was through a clue from one of the scribblings that finally I cast a bait that Malcolm X took. “Woman who cries all the time is only because she knows she can get away with it,” he had scribbled. I somehow raised the subject of women. Suddenly, between sips of coffee and further scribbling and doodling, he vented his criticisms and skepticisms of women. “You never can fully trust any woman,” he said. “I’ve got the only one I ever met whom I would trust seventy-five percent. I’ve told her that,” he said. “I’ve told her like I tell you I’ve seen too many men destroyed by their wives, or their women.

  “I don’t completely trust anyone,” he went on, “not even myself. I have seen too many men destroy themselves. Other people I trust from not at all to highly, like The H
onorable Elijah Muhammad.” Malcolm X looked squarely at me. “You I trust about twenty-five percent.”

  Trying to keep Malcolm X talking, I mined the woman theme for all it was worth. Triumphantly, he exclaimed, “Do you know why Benedict Arnold turned traitor—a woman!” He said, “Whatever else a woman is, I don’t care who the woman is, it starts with her being vain. I’ll prove it, something you can do anytime you want, and I know what I’m talking about, I’ve done it. You think of the hardest-looking, meanest-acting woman you know, one of those women who never smiles. Well, every day you see that woman you look her right in the eyes and tell her ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ and you watch what happens. The first day she may curse you out, the second day, too—but you watch, you keep on, after a while one day she’s going to start smiling just as soon as you come in sight.”

  When Malcolm X left that night, I retrieved napkin scribblings that further documented how he could be talking about one thing and thinking of something else:

  “Negroes have too much righteousness. WM says, ‘I want this piece of land, how do I get those couple of thousand BM on it off?’ ”

  “I have wife who understands, or even if she doesn’t she at least pretends.”

  “BM struggle never gets open support from abroad it needs unless BM first forms own united front.”

  “Sit down, talk with people with brains I respect, all of us want same thing, do some brainstorming.”

  “Would be shocking to reveal names of the BM leaders who have secretly met with THEM.” (The capitalized letters stood for The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.)

  Then one night, Malcolm X arrived nearly out on his feet from fatigue. For two hours, he paced the floor delivering a tirade against Negro leaders who were attacking Elijah Muhammad and himself. I don’t know what gave me the inspiration to say once when he paused for breath, “I wonder if you’d tell me something about your mother?”