The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Penguin £6.99. Reviewed by Kathy Lowe
The best reason for reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X is offered in its pages by the author himself.
'Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth must be reviewed. All our experiences fuse into our personality.
'Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.'
With frankness and flashes of gentle, self-deprecating humour, Malcolm X tells his story to Alex Haley as a series of recollections and anecdotes intercut with his beliefs and political thought at different stages of his life.
He takes the reader through his 'nightmare' childhood... the racist murder of his father... his mother's mental collapse... the break up of the family, and on to his days as a Harlem hustler which ended in a prison cell.
Behind bars, he tell us, 'I had never, up to then, been so truly free'.
With time on his hands and frustrated by his semi-literacy, he set about painstakingly copying out each page of the dictionary by hand.
He devoured books from the prison library, discovering the worlds of philosophy and literature. Above all he discovered history, in particular the horrors of the slave trade and the early struggles against colonialism.
'Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world's black, brown, red and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation.'
He tells of his conversion in prison to the puritanical black separatist sect, The Nation Of Islam, and, on his release, of his ardent ministry in the service of its leader Elijah Muhammad.
'I was a zombie then', he was to say to a journalist just before his death, '...it cost me twelve years'.
Even before his transition from separatism to nationalism and his final break with the Black Muslims, his emergence as a national figure championing the poorest black people was already making Elijah Muhammad nervous.
He would publicly pour scorn, not only on the racist white society but on what he termed the 'fancy bourgeois negros' who wanted to be part of it at any price.
In the last year of his life, after the formation of his own group, the Organisation of Afro-American Unity, and his visits to Africa, he was rapidly moving in a socialist direction.
His shadow writer, Alex Haley, who did not publish the book until after Malcolm X's assassination and who added his own lengthy foreword, has rightly been criticised for skating over this evolution.
Even so, the accounts of some of Malcolm X's last mass meetings, his speeches, and his public statements on a whole range of issues show something of the changes and intense questioning he was going through right up to the time of his death.
Most harrowing to read is Haley's description, in the foreword, of the weeks leading up to his brutal assassination in 1965.
Malcolm X had made clear to the press and to friends that he believed his life was in danger. In fact he expected to be killed at any time and was desperately trying to make financial provision for his wife and four daughters.
Harassment and death threats had become a daily occurrence. He was followed everywhere. His family narrowly escaped in a firebomb attack on their home.
His ideas and his stature as a black leader had made him too dangerous, not only to the Black Muslims, but to the state.
Haley describes how Malcolm X, just before his death, told him he no longer believed it was the Black Muslims who were out to murder him. Certainly, when he was gunned down that February afternoon in Harlem, the 20 police who had been supposedly assigned to his meeting to protect him were nowhere to be seen.
The Autobiography may be inadequate on its own as a tool for understanding the immense contribution of Malcolm X to the cause of black liberation and socialism. It does, however, provide an indispensable insight into his life and into the deeply rooted racism of American society.