Ron Peters's Reviews > The Autobiography of Malcolm X

This is one of the best books I've read this year.

There is plenty to like and dislike about Malcolm, e.g., he was sexist his whole life. I see this mainly as a story of metamorphosis in a man who senses his potential to do big things, but whose life is a constant striving and grasping after the values, truths, and ways of life that will allow him to reach that potential. In the end, he says of himself, “I have fought the best that I knew how, and the best that I could, with the shortcomings that I knew I have had. I know that my shortcomings are many.”

He begins as a poor, ignorant countrified bumpkin raised in a chaotic home, who, smart as he knows himself to be, thinks he might become a lawyer, but has his hopes dashed by an unsympathetic education system. He moves to the city and becomes a street hustler who is eventually involved in every imaginable human degradation. This stage of his life ends with him serving a long prison sentence, where he reads voraciously.

One day a family member visits him in jail and tells him about Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. He is incredulous at first but comes around to a conversion. On his release, he is introduced to Elijah Muhammad, eventually becoming his right-hand man. He is instrumental in opening new mosques and expanding the membership and increasingly called on to be the media face for the Nation of Islam. Jealousy and hatred of Malcolm grow within the organization and, eventually, he is thrown out on various pretexts.

He makes a trip to Mecca on the Haj, wanting to learn about true Islam. While there, and on later visits to Africa, he is astounded by what he sees as the complete lack of racism among Moslems. “Packed in the plane were white, brown, black, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair – all together, brothers!”

During this time, his attitude to white people shifts. Elijah Muhammad made it abundantly clear that a central tenet of the Nation of Islam was that whites are “the enemy” and the “White devil.” The approach was one of meeting hate with hate. Now Malcolm X says, “in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had even been.”

What would have become of Malcolm and his Organization of Afro-American Unity, and what direction he might have taken with his new views on race is anyone’s guess. We’ll never know because he was murdered at age 39 by members of the Nation of Islam on 21 February 1965, some seven months before the autobiography was published.