The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  In Washington, D.C., Malcolm X slashed at the government’s reluctance to take positive steps in the Negro’s behalf. I gather that even the White House took notice, for not long afterward I left off interviewing Malcolm X for a few days and went to the White House to do a Playboy interview of the then White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who grimaced spontaneously when I said I was writing the life story of Malcolm X. Another time I left Malcolm X to interview the U.S. Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell, who frankly stated that he admired the courage of Malcolm X, and he felt that the two of them should speak together across the United States, and they could thus begin a real solution to the race problem—one of voluntary separation of the white and black races, with Negroes returning to Africa. I reported this to Malcolm X, who snorted, “He must think I’m nuts! What am I going to look like going speaking with a devil!” Yet another time, I went off to Atlanta and interviewed for Playboy Dr. Martin Luther King. He was privately intrigued to hear little-known things about Malcolm X that I told him; for publication, he discussed him with reserve, and he did say that he would sometime like to have an opportunity to talk with him. Hearing this, Malcolm X said drily, “You think I ought to send him a telegram with my telephone number?” (But from other things that Malcolm X said to me at various times, I deduced that he actually had a reluctant admiration for Dr. King.)

  Malcolm X and I reached the point, ultimately, where we shared a mutual camaraderie that, although it was never verbally expressed, was a warm one. He was for me unquestionably one of the most engaging personalities I had ever met, and for his part, I gathered, I was someone he had learned he could express himself to, with candor, without the likelihood of hearing it repeated, and like any person who lived amid tension, he enjoyed being around someone, another man, with whom he could psychically relax. When I made trips now, he always asked me to telephone him when I would be returning to New York, and generally, if he could squeeze it into his schedule, he met me at the airport. I would see him coming along with his long, gangling strides, and wearing the wide, toothy, good-natured grin, and as he drove me into New York City he would bring me up to date on things of interest that had happened since I left. I remember one incident within the airport that showed me how Malcolm X never lost his racial perspective. Waiting for my baggage, we witnessed a touching family reunion scene as part of which several cherubic little children romped and played, exclaiming in another language. “By tomorrow night, they’ll know how to say their first English word—nigger,” observed Malcolm X.

  When Malcolm X made long trips, such as to San Francisco or Los Angeles, I did not go along, but frequently, usually very late at night, he would telephone me, and ask how the book was coming along, and he might set up the time for our next interview upon his return. One call that I never will forget came at close to four A.M., waking me; he must have just gotten up in Los Angeles. His voice said, “Alex Haley?” I said, sleepily, “Yes? Oh, hey, Malcolm!” His voice said, “I trust you seventy percent”—and then he hung up. I lay a short time thinking about him and I went back to sleep feeling warmed by that call, as I still am warmed to remember it. Neither of us ever mentioned it.

  Malcolm X’s growing respect for individual whites seemed to be reserved for those who ignored on a personal basis the things he said about whites and who jousted with him as a man. He, moreover, was convinced that he could tell a lot about any person by listening. “There’s an art to listening well,” he told me. “I listen closely to the sound of a man’s voice when he’s speaking. I can hear sincerity.” The newspaper person whom he ultimately came to admire probably more than any other was the New York Times’ M. S. Handler. (I was very happy when I learned that Handler had agreed to write this book’s Introduction; I know that Malcolm X would have liked that.) The first time I ever heard Malcolm X speak of Handler, whom he had recently met, he began, “I was talking with this devil—” and abruptly he cut himself off in obvious embarrassment. “It’s a reporter named Handler, from the Times—” he resumed. Malcolm X’s respect for the man steadily increased, and Handler, for his part, was an influence upon the inner Malcolm X. “He’s the most genuinely unprejudiced white man I ever met,” Malcolm X said to me, speaking of Handler months later. “I have asked him things and tested him. I have listened to him talk, closely.”

  I saw Malcolm X too many times exhilarated in after-lecture give-and-take with predominantly white student bodies at colleges and universities to ever believe that he nurtured at his core any blanket white-hatred. “The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has,” he said to me once. “The rest of us have always been living in a lie.”

  Several Negroes come to mind now who I know, in one way or another, had vastly impressed Malcolm X. (Some others come to mind whom I know he has vastly abhorred, but these I will not mention.) Particularly high in his esteem, I know, was the great photographer, usually associated with Life magazine, Gordon Parks. It was Malcolm X’s direct influence with Elijah Muhammad which got Parks permitted to enter and photograph for publication in Life the highly secret self-defense training program of the Black Muslim Fruit of Islam, making Parks, as far as I know, the only non-Muslim who ever has witnessed this, except for policemen and other agency representatives who had feigned “joining” the Black Muslims to infiltrate them. “His success among the white man never has made him lose touch with black reality,” Malcolm X said of Parks once.

  Another person toward whom Malcolm X felt similarly was the actor Ossie Davis. Once in the middle of one of our interviews, when we had been talking about something else, Malcolm X suddenly asked me, “Do you know Ossie Davis?” I said I didn’t. He said, “I ought to introduce you sometime, that’s one of the finest black men.” In Malcolm X’s long dealings with the staff of the Harlem weekly newspaper Amsterdam News, he had come to admire Executive Editor James Hicks and the star feature writer James Booker. He said that Hicks had “an open mind, and he never panics for the white man.” He thought that Booker was an outstanding reporter; he also was highly impressed with Mrs. Booker when he met her.

  It was he who introduced me to two of my friends today, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln who was at the time writing the book The Black Muslims in America, and Louis Lomax who was then writing various articles about the Muslims. Malcolm X deeply respected the care and depth which Dr. Lincoln was putting into his research. Lomax, he admired for his ferreting ear and eye for hot news. “If I see that rascal Lomax running somewhere, I’ll grab my hat and get behind him,” Malcolm X said once, “because I know he’s onto something.” Author James Baldwin Malcolm X also admired. “He’s so brilliant he confuses the white man with words on paper.” And another time, “He’s upset the white man more than anybody except The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”

  Malcolm X had very little good to say of Negro ministers, very possibly because most of them had attacked the Black Muslims. Excepting reluctant admiration of Dr. Martin Luther King, I heard him speak well of only one other, The Reverend Eugene L. Callender of Harlem’s large Presbyterian Church of the Master. “He’s a preacher, but he’s a fighter for the black man,” said Malcolm X. I later learned that somewhere the direct, forthright Reverend Callender had privately cornered Malcolm X and had read him the riot act about his general attacks upon the Negro clergy. Malcolm X also admired The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, in his Congressman political role: “I’d think about retiring if the black man had ten like him in Washington.” He had similar feelings about the N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, now a New York State Assemblyman, Percy Sutton, and later Sutton was retained as his personal attorney. Among Negro educators, of whom Malcolm X met many in his college and university lecturing, I never heard him speak well of any but one, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark. “There’s a black man with brains gone to bed,” Malcolm X told me once, briefly lapsing into his old vernacular. He had very distinct reservations about Negro professional intelligentsia as a category. They were the source from which most of the Black Muslims’
attackers came. It was for this reason that some of his most bristling counterattacks against “these so-called educated Uncle Thomases, Ph.D.” were flung out at his audiences at Negro institutions of higher learning.

  Where I witnessed the Malcolm X who was happiest and most at ease among members of our own race was when sometimes I chanced to accompany him on what he liked to call “my little daily rounds” around the streets of Harlem, among the Negroes that he said the “so-called black leaders” spoke of “as black masses statistics.” On these tours, Malcolm X generally avoided the arterial 125th Street in Harlem; he plied the side streets, especially in those areas which were thickest with what he described as “the black man down in the gutter where I came from,” the poverty-ridden with a high incidence of dope addicts and winos.

  Malcolm X here indeed was a hero. Striding along the sidewalks, he bathed all whom he met in the boyish grin, and his conversation with any who came up was quiet and pleasant. “It’s just what the white devil wants you to do, brother,” he might tell a wino, “he wants you to get drunk so he will have an excuse to put a club up beside your head.” Or I remember once he halted at a stoop to greet several older women: “Sisters, let me ask you something,” he said conversationally, “have you ever known one white man who either didn’t do something to you, or take something from you?” One among that audience exclaimed after a moment, “I sure ain’t!” whereupon all of them joined in laughter and we walked on with Malcolm X waving back to cries of “He’s right!”

  I remember that once in the early evening we rounded a corner to hear a man, shabbily dressed, haranguing a small crowd around his speaking platform of an upturned oblong wooden box with an American flag alongside. “I don’t respect or believe in this damn flag, it’s there because I can’t hold a public meeting without it unless I want the white man to put me in jail. And that’s what I’m up here to talk about—these crackers getting rich off the blood and bones of your and my people!” Said Malcolm X, grinning, “He’s working!”

  Malcolm X rarely exchanged any words with those Negro men with shiny, “processed” hair without giving them a nudge. Very genially: “Ahhhh, brother, the white devil has taught you to hate yourself so much that you put hot lye in your hair to make it look more like his hair.”

  I remember another stoopful of women alongside the door of a small grocery store where I had gone for something, leaving Malcolm X talking across the street. As I came out of the store, one woman was excitedly describing for the rest a Malcolm X lecture she had heard in Mosque Number 7 one Sunday. “Oooooh, he burnt that white man, burnt him up, chile…

  chile, he told us we descendin’ from black kings an’ queens—Lawd, I didn’t know it!” Another woman asked, “You believe that?” and the first vehemently responded, “Yes, I do!”

  And I remember a lone, almost ragged guitarist huddled on a side street playing and singing just for himself when he glanced up and instantly recognized the oncoming, striding figure. “Huh-ho!” the guitarist exclaimed, and jumping up, he snapped into a mock salute. “My man!”

  Malcolm X loved it. And they loved him. There was no question about it: whether he was standing tall beside a street lamp chatting with winos, or whether he was firing his radio and television broadsides to unseen millions of people, or whether he was titillating small audiences of sophisticated whites with his small-talk such as, “My hobby is stirring up Negroes, that’s spelled knee-grows the way you liberals pronounce it”—the man had charisma, and he had power. And I was not the only one who at various times marveled at how he could continue to receive such an awesome amount of international personal publicity and still season liberally practically everything he said, both in public and privately, with credit and hosannas to “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Often I made side notes to myself about this. I kept, in effect, a double-entry set of notebooks. Once, noting me switching from one to the other, Malcolm X curiously asked me what for? I told him some reason, but not that one notebook was things he said for his book and the other was for my various personal observations about him; very likely he would have become self-conscious. “You must have written a million words by now,” said Malcolm X. “Probably,” I said. “This white man’s crazy,” he mused. “I’ll prove it to you. Do you think I’d publicize somebody knocking me like I do him?”

  —

  “Look, tell me the truth,” Malcolm X said to me one evening, “you travel around. Have you heard anything?”

  Truthfully, I told him I didn’t know what he had reference to. He dropped it and talked of something else.

  From Malcolm X himself, I had seen, or heard, a few unusual things which had caused me some little private wonder and speculation, and then, with nothing to hang them onto, I had dismissed them. One day in his car, we had stopped for the red light at an intersection; another car with a white man driving had stopped alongside, and when this white man saw Malcolm X, he instantly called across to him, “I don’t blame your people for turning to you. If I were a Negro I’d follow you, too. Keep up the fight!” Malcolm X said to the man very sincerely, “I wish I could have a white chapter of the people I meet like you.” The light changed, and as both cars drove on, Malcolm X quickly said to me, firmly, “Not only don’t write that, never repeat it. Mr. Muhammad would have a fit.” The significant thing about the incident, I later reflected, was that it was the first time I had ever heard him speak of Elijah Muhammad with anything less than reverence.

  About the same time, one of the scribblings of Malcolm X’s that I had retrieved had read, enigmatically, “My life has always been one of changes.” Another time, this was in September, 1963, Malcolm X had been highly upset about something during an entire session, and when I read the Amsterdam News for that week, I guessed that he had been upset about an item in Jimmy Booker’s column that Booker had heard that Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were feuding. (Booker was later to reveal that after his column was written, he had gone on vacation, and on his return he learned that Malcolm X “stormed into the Amsterdam News with three followers…‘I want to see Jimmy Booker. I don’t like what he wrote. There is no fight between me and Elijah Muhammad. I believe in Mr. Muhammad and will lay down my life for him.’ ”)

  Also, now and then, when I chanced to meet a few other key Muslims, mainly when I was with Malcolm X, but when he was not immediately present, I thought I detected either in subtle phrasing, or in manner, something less than total admiration of their famous colleague—and then I would tell myself I had misinterpreted. And during these days, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln and I would talk on the phone fairly often. We rarely would fail to mention how it seemed almost certain that seeds of trouble lay in the fact that however much Malcolm X praised Elijah Muhammad, it was upon dramatic, articulate Malcolm X that the communications media and hence the general public focused the great bulk of their attention. I never dreamed, though, what Malcolm X was actually going through. He never breathed a word, at least not to me, until the actual rift became public.

  When Malcolm X left me at around two A.M. on that occasion, he asked me to call him at nine A.M. The telephone in the home in East Elmhurst rang considerably longer than usual, and Sister Betty, when she answered, sounded strained, choked up. When Malcolm X came on, he, too, sounded different. He asked me, “Have you heard the radio or seen the newspapers?” I said I hadn’t. He said, “Well, do!” and that he would call me later.

  I went and got the papers. I read with astonishment that Malcolm X had been suspended by Elijah Muhammad—the stated reason being the “chickens coming home to roost” remark that Malcolm X recently had made as a comment upon the assassination of President Kennedy.

  Malcolm X did telephone, after about an hour, and I met him at the Black Muslims’ newspaper office in Harlem, a couple of blocks further up Lenox Avenue from their mosque and restaurant. He was seated behind his light-brown metal desk and his brown hat lay before him on the green blotter. He wore a dark suit with a vest, a white shirt, the inevitable leapin
g-sailfish clip held his narrow tie, and the big feet in the shined black shoes pushed the swivel chair pendulously back and forth as he talked into the telephone.

  “I’m always hurt over any act of disobedience on my part concerning Mr. Muhammad….Yes, sir—anything The Honorable Elijah Muhammad does is all right with me. I believe absolutely in his wisdom and authority.” The telephone would ring again instantly every time he put it down. “Mr. Peter Goldman! I haven’t heard your voice in a good while! Well, sir, I just should have kept my big mouth shut.” To the New York Times: “Sir? Yes—he suspended me from making public appearances for the time being, which I fully understand. I say the same thing to you that I have told others, I’m in complete submission to Mr. Muhammad’s judgment, because I have always found his judgment to be based on sound thinking.” To C.B.S.: “I think that anybody who is in a position to discipline others should first learn to accept discipline himself.”

  He brought it off, the image of con triteness, the best he could—throughout the harshly trying next several weeks. But the back of his neck was reddish every time I saw him. He did not yet put into words his obvious fury at the public humiliation. We did very little interviewing now, he was so busy on telephones elsewhere; but it did not matter too much because by now I had the bulk of the needed life story material in hand. When he did find some time to visit me, he was very preoccupied, and I could feel him rankling with anger and with inactivity, but he tried hard to hide it.

  He scribbled one night, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. John Viscount Morley.” And the same night, almost illegibly, “I was going downhill until he picked me up, but the more I think of it, we picked each other up.”