Rediscovering Malcolm's Life A Historian's Adventures in Living History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Immediately following Malcolm X's assassination, several individuals who had worked closely with the fallen leader sought to document his meaning to the larger Black freedom struggle. These early texts include: Leslie Alexander Lacy, “Malcolm X in Ghana,” in John Henrik Clarke, ed., Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 217–255; Ossie Davis, “Why I Eulogized Malcolm X,” Negro Digest, Vol. 15, no. 4 (February 1966): 64–66; Wyatt Tee Walker, “On Malcolm X: Nothing But A Man,” Negro Digest, Vol. 14, no. 10 (August 1965): 29–32; and Albert B. Cleage, Jr., “Brother Malcolm,” in Cleage, The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 186–200.

The advocates of Black Power subsequently placed Malcolm X firmly within the Black nationalist tradition of Martin R. Delany and Marcus Garvey, emphasizing his dedication to the use of armed self defense by Blacks. Amiri Baraka's essay, “The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation,” in LeRoi Jones, Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), pp. 238–250, became the template for this line of interpretation. Following Baraka's Black nationalist thesis were: Eldridge Cleaver, “Initial Reactions on the Assassination of Malcolm X,” in Cleaver, Soul On Ice (New York: Ramparts, 1968), pp. 50–61; James Boggs, “King, Malcolm, and the Future of the Black Revolution,” in Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 104–129; Cedrick Robinson, “Malcolm Little as a Charasmatic Leader,” Afro-American Studies, Vol. 2, no. 1 (September 1972): 81–96; and Robert Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1970), especially pages 30–40.

2. The best available studies of Malcolm X merit some consideration here. Although originally written more than three decades ago, Newsweek editor/journalist Peter Goldman's The Death and Life of Malcolm X (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), still remains an excellent introduction to the man and his times. Well-written and researched, Goldman based the text on his own interviews with the subject. Karl Evanzz's The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992), presents a persuasive argument explaining the FBI's near-blanket surveillance of the subject. Evanzz was the first author to suggest that NOI National Secretary John Ali may have been an FBI informant. Louis A. DeCaro has written two thoughtful studies on Malcolm X's spiritual growth and religious orientation: On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York: New York University Press, 1996); and Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X and Christianity (New York: New York University Press, 1998). DeCaro graciously agreed to be interviewed in 2001 for the Malcolm X Project at Columbia.

The field of religious studies has also produced other informative interpretations of Malcolm X. These works include: Lewis V. Baldwin, Between Cross and Crescent: Christian and Muslim Perspectives on Malcolm and Martin (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2002); a sound recording by Hamam Cross, Donna Scott, and Eugene Seals, “What's up with Malcolm? The real failure of Islam” (Southfield, Michigan: Readings for the Blind, 2001); Peter J. Paris, Black Religious Leaders: Conflict in Unity (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1991).

3. Philip Brian Harper, in his book Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), argues that the simplistic stereotypes of King and his courageous followers as being “non-masculine” and “effeminate” and leaders such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael as “super-masculine, Black males” became widely promulgated. “The Black power movement,” Harper observes, was “conceived in terms of accession to a masculine identity, the problematic quality of those terms notwithstanding” (p. 68).

4. In an extraordinary interview with writer Thomas Hauser, Alex Haley stated that he had “worked closedly with Malcolm X, and I also did a Playboy interview with Martin Luther King during the same period, so I knew one very closely and the other a little.” Based on his knowledge of both men, he had concluded that they had “both died tragically at about the right time in terms of posterity. Both men were … beginning to decline. They were under attack.” In Haley's opinion, Malcolm, in particular, “was having a rough time trying to keep things going. Both of them were killed just before it went really downhill for them, and as of their death, they were practically sainted.” See Thomas Hauser, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 508.

5. Alfred Balk had contacted the FBI in October 1962, seeking the Bureau's assistance in collecting information about the Nation of Islam for the proposed article he and Haley would write for the Saturday Evening Post. The Bureau gave Balk and Haley the data they requested, with the strict stipulation that the FBI's assistance not be mentioned. The Bureau was later quite pleased with the published article. See M.A. Jones to Mr. DeLoach, FBI Memorandum, October 9, 1963, in the Anne Romaine Papers, Series 1, Box 2, folder 16, University of Tennessee Library Special Collections. Also see Alfred Balk and Alex Haley, “Black Merchants of Hate,” Saturday Evening Post (January 26, 1963).

6. On January 9, 1964, Haley wrote to Doubleday Executive Editor Kenneth McCormick and his agent, Paul Reynolds, that “the most impact material of the book, some of it rather lava-like, is what I have from Malcolm for the three essay chapters, ‘The Negro,’ ‘The End of Christianity,’ and ‘Twenty Million Black Muslims.’” See Alex Haley to Kenneth McCormick, Wolcott Gibbs, Jr., and Paul Reynolds, January 19, 1964, in Annie Romaine Collection, the University of Tennessee Library Special Collection.