Alex Haley

by Robert J. Norrell

  Haley took a room at a hotel in the city in order to finish his interviews with Malcolm. They had little time alone. The room turned into a communications center for Malcolm to take calls from Africa and the Middle East, American and British newspapers and television, and his allies among American Muslims. Reporters and Muslim supporters often showed up, and Haley sometimes had to vacate the room for Malcolm to deal with sensitive matters.

  Malcolm offered thoughts that he had earlier kept to himself. When he read a passage of the manuscript that described how he had intimidated his burglary ring by aiming a gun at his own head in a game of Russian roulette, he admitted to Haley that he “palmed the bullet.” When Haley offered to change the manuscript, Malcolm decided to leave it as it was written. “Too many people would be so quick to say that’s what I’m doing today, bluffing.” Malcolm revealed guilt about how he had treated the middle-class black woman called Laura, who adored him despite his frequent callousness. “That was a smart girl, a good girl,” he said. “She tried her best to make something out of me, and look what I started her into—dope and prostitution. I wrecked that girl.” Malcolm objected to Haley’s portrayal of his relationship with Elijah Muhammad as being like that between a father and son. When Haley reminded Malcolm of their earlier agreement not to change the already-written chapters, Malcolm replied, “Whose book is this?” He soon called Haley, apologized, and said that the chapters should stand as they were originally written. At this point, in mid-1964, Malcolm may have decided that he would have to trust Haley to finish the book on his own terms, because he already believed that he would not live to see its completion. The book continued to evolve. By June 1964 Haley had decided to scrap the three essay chapters in which Malcolm laid out his black nationalist views. The essays included Malcolm’s harsh judgments about the March on Washington and his accusations of corruption among the main civil rights organizations. These sections came to be known as the “missing chapters” of the autobiography.3

  Haley left out some events that were now embarrassing to Malcolm. In January 1961 Malcolm had met in Atlanta with Ku Klux Klan representatives. At that time FBI informants reported that Malcolm told the Klansmen that “his people wanted complete segregation from the white race.” He also said that “the Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool.” Later, at a Nation of Islam rally in Washington, D.C., Malcolm received American Nazi Party visitors and introduced their leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, to the audience. Perhaps these connections were so unsavory that he chose not to remember them. Haley had gained access to FBI sources through Alfred Balk and surely knew of the meetings with the Klan and the Nazis. But he also understood that nearly all Americans would have disapproved if they knew of it, and thus the knowledge would undermine Malcolm’s critique of white America.4

  The Autobiography of Malcolm X must then be understood as the creation of its subject’s life, not a factual recounting of it. That can be said of all autobiographies. Malcolm, Haley, and his editors collaborated on an interesting narrative, but also one that would not repel readers.

  Malcolm’s life moved rapidly into new chapters. In June 1964 he created the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a name he borrowed from the Organization of African Unity, just created among postcolonial states in Africa. It was to be his vehicle for civil rights activism—at last an answer to critics who said he only talked and did not act. (“I’m going to join in the fight wherever Negroes ask for my help.”) The new organization intended to send “armed guerrillas” to Mississippi and anywhere else white bigots threatened black people’s lives.

  Despite all the interruptions, Haley made progress on the book. In mid-May he assured McCormick that, with little more than half the book written, he was doing what was “needed for me to do to get this book headed for the presses at last, thence to the Best-Seller lists for, by golly, I predict, months: (I was born an optimist.)” On June 14 Haley assured McCormick that the final chapter would be in his hands by the end of the week. It was not.5

  As Haley wrote feverishly, Malcolm sent him notes. His life was changing so quickly that he feared that today’s views would soon be out of date. “So I would advise you to rush it on out as soon as possible,” he wrote. Malcolm continued to receive threats from the NOI, and he confessed to Haley that he felt like a “marked man.” In late June Haley wrote Malcolm a long letter begging him to be careful, to think of his children, his wife, and his sister Ella, all of whom loved him deeply. “Think of those followers ready to lay down their lives if you are harmed,” Haley wrote. “Think of the millions of black people in America who respect and heed you. Think of the influence of your image and utterances among even more millions of white people, to make them see, many for the first time, the condition of the black people.” Haley exhorted him, “Hell, think of me! . . . I never have had a close friend die.” Was it not time, Haley asked, for Malcolm to undertake his hegira, referring to the prophet Muhammad’s departure from Mecca in 622 CE, an exodus prompted by threats to his life from religious opponents? When Malcolm returned, his autobiography would be published, and it would give him “a greater voice as a single man than the entire Nation of Islam ever had collectively.” Malcolm took his friend’s advice. In early July he returned to Africa for what would be a four-month trip. For the most part, he was out of touch with Haley.6

  * * *

  Haley’s work on the book mostly stopped then. Though far from finished with the autobiography, he turned to other writing projects out of financial need. Both Nan and Julie constantly required money. The Internal Revenue Service had billed him for unpaid taxes regularly since 1961, and the interest and penalties mounted constantly. He had spent $1,500 living at a Manhattan hotel as he worked on the book in the spring of 1964. His finances improved when Reynolds got a $20,000 advance on the serial rights for the autobiography from the Saturday Evening Post. Once that was shared with Doubleday and Malcolm, Haley still had far less money than he needed, but he believed that his financial difficulties were only a temporary situation, which would end when the autobiography made him wealthy. “It’s sweltering here—but no matter,” he told Reynolds from upstate New York in late June, “it won’t be when, a year hence, I’ll have myself some cool beach summer workplace.”7

  For Haley, the easiest way to address his financial woes was to get more publishing contracts. He now suggested to Reynolds a self-help book for white Americans: “If we could presume to divine white America’s mass subconscious concerns, I think we would emerge with something approximating ‘How to Co-Exist with Negroes.’” Whites would find in it “a non-challenging, palatable, at times even pleasant menu of things they hadn’t known concerning Negroes. Many little things, that can make such difference to Negroes.” Haley’s hopeful assumption was that with the current racial tensions, whites were ready to be educated. Reynolds was dismissive. He could not see whites rushing to buy the book. Undaunted, Haley had an idea for a musical about black life, which he called “The Way.” In 1961 Haley had gotten to know Lena Horne, who had starred in Cabin in the Sky, and Haley’s musical bore some similarities to that film. Haley’s musical would be set in a cosmetics factory run by a black executive who was surrounded by several stereotyped characters, including a hipster, a white racist, and a black racist. Alternating black and white choruses would sing “Camptown Races,” with the black group performing spirituals in black dialect. Reynolds called the idea “very, very interesting.”8

  Without Reynolds’s knowledge, Haley had proposed articles for Life and the Saturday Evening Post. When he found out, Reynolds warned Haley that he might hurt his relationship with Reader’s Digest, which was still paying him a $300-a-month retainer. Reynolds wanted all queries to magazines to come to him first, even if Haley had a prior relationship with an editor. With regard to Reader’s Digest, Reynolds wrote,”I always thought these regular monthly payments, even though they were small, were helpful. We are fairly close to
the Digest. DeWitt Wallace [publisher of Reader’s Digest] came to dinner at our house last Saturday evening.” Haley replied that he believed he should dissolve the Reader’s Digest arrangement. He had researched and written a lot of articles that the magazine did not, in the end, decide to publish. Charles Ferguson at the Digest was always complimentary of Haley’s work, and Wallace noted how high Haley’s stories rated on their reader-interest polls. But of every four articles he wrote, three were rejected somewhere in the editorial pipeline. Articles were returned with comments he did not understand. “A couple of re-writes were successful, but most weren’t,” Haley noted. “Each represented, at the least, a lost month of work.”

  Haley appreciated how much the Digest staff had helped him: “I enjoyed the Digest people, the camaraderie of the organization, the warmth of everyone, the niceness one wouldn’t expect (such as Mr. Wallace and Mrs. Wallace sent a $100 check to Julie and me as a wedding present).” He enjoyed the perks of working for the Digest: “The flying around the country first-class on Digest assignments, expenses paid, being wined and dined by subjects of pieces.” But gossip going around New York had gotten back to him: “I attended one function where a friend introduced me to a personage, somewhat in his cups, who amiably chuckled, ‘Oh, yes, you’re the Reader’s Digest fellow who flies around interviewing people and nothing ever happens.’ That got to me.”9

  Haley had greater ambitions now. “Another factor, extraneous to the Digest, yet affecting the feeling that I have,” he told Reynolds, was that “now I have tasted books.” He reminded Reynolds of the inscription under Irving Wallace’s portrait in the agent’s office: “To Paul, who said ‘Write books.’” The book he was thinking about was the one he now called “Before This Anger” about black-white relations in the South of the 1930s. He felt “the strength of my position as a Negro,” one not given to violent protest, but who “can say powerful things of a nature that people will think about.” In this spirit, Haley wrote an article for the New York Times on the stereotype of “Uncle Tom.” A well-informed and sophisticated analysis, it explained how the image of Uncle Tom had become detached from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s conception of her character.10

  But his real specialty as a writer now lay in examining the black anger embodied in Malcolm. The summer of 1964 brought a release of some of that anger, even as the most far-reaching civil rights bill in American history was passed. As before, blacks’ anger was fueled in part by violence against them, most notably that arising from the Mississippi Summer project, the effort of civil rights organizations to send hundreds of mostly white workers to the Magnolia State. Three of them—a young black man, James Chaney, and two whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—were murdered there. The summer also brought the first season of the 1960s’ urban race riots, the most prominent of which occurred in Harlem in mid-July after a policeman shot and killed an unarmed fifteen-year-old black boy. Six days of looting shook New York City, and disorder soon spread to Rochester, Philadelphia, and several New Jersey cities. The 1964 riots seemed to confirm that black anger was rising. White opposition to the civil rights movement was also growing. In September the New York Times reported poll findings that most white New Yorkers believed the civil rights movement “had gone too far,” that blacks wanted “everything on a silver platter.” The Times concluded that a white “backlash” was underway.11

  The Times asked Haley to do a piece on the aftermath of the Harlem riot. “They wanted a piece wherein Harlem’s ‘responsible’ citizens would condemn the riots,” he told Reynolds. He had asked many “such citizenry, who didn’t condemn them as the Times desired.” The Times turned down the article he submitted and assigned the piece to another writer, whose interviews in Harlem got the same undesirable answers.12

  In August Haley met with McCormick and his young assistant Lisa Drew to talk about “Before This Anger.” The book was similar to the project he had previously named “Henning, U.S.A.” It would be about the South in the 1930s, when blacks and whites enjoyed friendly, peaceful relations. He discussed it in the context of the riots that had been dominating newspaper headlines the past few weeks, especially in New York. McCormick liked the idea because of the contrast with the present day. He took extensive notes at the meeting: “A book Southerners will read with appreciation. Told in terms of people . . . A book that exposes the warmth and love of the south.” Doubleday offered a modest $5,000 advance, which hardly solved his financial problems, but it gave focus to what he would write next.13

  Playboy assigned him to interview Martin Luther King Jr., which proved more difficult than any interview he had undertaken. King was reluctant to appear in a publication considered salacious and immoral. Even when he was persuaded that Playboy would reach an audience that could help his cause, his busy schedule made it extremely difficult to meet with Haley. During September 1964 Haley hung around Atlanta for a week before he got his first few minutes with King. Haley’s approach was respectful and unchallenging. When asked about the Black Muslims, King suggested that the black man in Harlem embraced black nationalism because he had seen so little racial progress in his environment, whereas black southerners by 1964 believed that they were moving toward racial justice. King asked Haley off the record, “Well, what’s Brother Malcolm saying about me these days?” King told others that when Malcolm “starts talking about all that’s been done to us, I get a twinge of hate, of identification with him.” When Haley next saw Malcolm, he asked Haley about his interview with King, “What did he say about me?”14

  * * *

  While Haley was in Atlanta pursuing King, the Saturday Evening Post ran excerpts of the autobiography under the title “I’m Talking to You, White Man.” The magazine sent a photographer to Cairo to take color pictures of Malcolm, and the photography on both the cover and inside the magazine made the long excerpt almost as compelling visually as it was narratively. Though Malcolm had left the United States before the riots began in mid-July, he knew about them. “More and worse riots will erupt,” Malcolm predicted. He accepted the reality of violence with near complacency. The followers of Elijah Muhammad would “consider it a first-rank honor to kill me,” he said, adding that “any day, any night, I could die at the hands of some white devil racists.” Malcolm insisted that he had rejected racism and was working to purge America and the world of it. “I dream that one day history will look upon me as having been one of the voices that perhaps helped to save America from a grave, even possibly fatal catastrophe.” The Post carried a harsh editorial that read in part, “If Malcolm X were not a Negro, his autobiography would be little more than a journal of abnormal psychology, the story of a burglar, dope pusher, addict and jailbird—with a family history of insanity—who acquires messianic delusions and sets forth to preach an upside-down religion of ‘brotherly’ hatred.” Malcolm, in the editors’ view, preached hatred that “unquestionably . . . was behind some of the violence of the summer riots in the North.” His followers, the Black Muslims, according to the editorial, represented a “sort of Negro Ku Klux Klan.” Malcolm was incensed at the Post’s characterization and furious that there was no recognition of how he had changed.15

  He had not changed in every way. Malcolm sent word that he favored Barry Goldwater in the presidential race, because the Republican nominee “flatly tells the black man he’s not for the black man.” If Goldwater was elected, blacks would protest more aggressively, whereas if the “liberal fox” Lyndon Johnson won the White House, blacks would “keep on sitting around, begging and passive-resisting for another 100 years, waiting for ‘time’ and for ‘good-will’ to solve his problems.”16

  By the fall of 1964, Reynolds and McCormick were nervous because the autobiography was not finished. Haley blamed the delay on Malcolm’s long absence and promised that it would finally be submitted by the end of January 1965. Then he took off in mid-October to begin research on “Before This Anger.” George Haley was campaigning for the Kansas stat
e senate as a Republican, and Alex went to Kansas City to write speeches for George and orchestrate last-minute politicking to secure him votes from overwhelmingly Democratic black voters. Haley’s travel began just days after Julie gave birth to their daughter, Cynthia, his third child; he left mother and child in an upstate New York hospital. He was a proud father—from afar. He returned to his new family on Election Day, just in time to vote for Lyndon Johnson.

  Contrary to what Haley had hoped, the hostility to Malcolm inside the Nation of Islam escalated in his absence. The sect took legal action to remove him from the house that it had provided him. Elijah Muhammad’s representatives in New York publicly called Malcolm a “self-serving hypocrite consumed by a passion for personal power.” Malcolm wrote from Mecca that he now rejected the Nation as a pseudoreligion and that he would not rest “until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes who through my own evangelistic zeal” had embraced the Nation “even more fanatically and more blindly than I did.”17

  On November 24, 1964, on Malcolm’s return from Africa and the Middle East, Haley met him at Kennedy Airport. There, in addition to supporters holding a banner that read “Welcome Home, Malcolm,” were black plainclothes policemen taking photographs of everyone in the crowd to identify both Malcolm’s followers and potential attackers. Malcolm and Haley met privately to talk about the Muslim leader’s experiences abroad. “I was trying to internationalize our problem,” he said, “to make the Africans feel their kinship with us Afro-Americans. I made them think about it, that they are our blood brothers, and we all came from the same foreparents.” Malcolm now embodied the black nationalist desire for connection among all peoples of African heritage.18