The Autobiography of Malcolm X

"Yes, Laurence Fishburne reads this and I really feel like he should read more audiobooks. He probably is not going to find a ton of time in his schedule to do this, but I think we saw with the pandemic some performers who normally do television, film and stage had some extra time and in his case he read a couple of audiobooks. This is one of them. For me, this text was so important when I was growing up. I read it and got a sense of a political stance which, growing up in New Hampshire, was not something that I was exposed to. So the text was really powerful on its own and then to have his powerful voice, not imitating Malcolm X but giving you a sense of him, it really made an impactful listen. It did win two Audies because, again, it’s taking something that’s really strong in the written word and adding a really strong layer of performance. That’s almost impossible to beat. Not at all. He really gets it. He really gives you the emotional sense of anger in there without it being over the top. He gives you the background of what it was like for Malcolm X growing up and where all of these things were coming from. I really felt like it filled out the history. I remembered reading it with my eyes, I remembered seeing the movie, but this was somehow a more complete experience than either of those things. I got into the text a bit more. I find generally, with nonfiction, when I read with my eyes, I might speed it up and skip over some things, but here you hear the words pronounced and really focus in. There were some moments I rewound and listened to a few paragraphs again because I was like, ‘I’m not sure I got that. Let me really dig into this.’ So it’s hats off to Laurence Fishburne and whoever directed him because they did a nice job of finding the beats. Malcolm X didn’t have a smooth upbringing. He was involved in things that were less than legal and it was only slightly later in his life that he became involved in Islam and became a political figure. He wasn’t starting from a privileged position with a background in politics. He really came from a tough upbringing and used that fire and that experience to lead people and inspire them to make changes in their own life. It really does."

"So the story is that Malcolm X was in a very busy period of his life. He would turn up in the evenings and tell Alex Haley the story of his life, and Haley would write it down. But Haley was a wonderful journalist, so he turned it into a great narrative. As with all great biographers, there’s clearly a sympathy between them but not necessarily a fawning sycophancy. People think Boswell was an idiot who simply loved Johnson, but clearly he was very, very attentive, and he wanted to show us the totality of a person. I think Haley too does a good job of giving that to us. The voice is very well controlled, very well handled. It might be strange to think of it as an intellectual biography, but the heart of the book—to me—is how, when Malcolm X was at school as a teenager, he was asked by a teacher what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said: A lawyer. And the teacher responded: Don’t be silly, you’re black. You can’t be a lawyer. Suddenly he realised he was living in a racist world, the whole thing became clear to him. He went on a terrible trajectory of not paying attention in school. There were drugs and crime, all these things. He ended up in prison, aged 20. In prison, he found religion, was drawn into a religious organisation, and became one of the great autodidacts in history. That episode in the book is just absolutely phenomenal: it’s an electrifying account of someone transforming themselves through self-teaching, which has to be one of the most important parts of intellectual life. That’s why I put this book on the list. It’s also one of the great books of American self-invention, and a great coming of age book. It’s a page-turner in every sense. You might view him solely as an activist. But clearly he was also a kind of public intellectual. He was a very different sort of character, and the Autobiography is excellent at bringing that out. I decided to keep ‘straight’ autobiographies out of this list. You could make a separate list of intellectual autobiographies. But, as you say, this qualifies because Alex Haley had such a big hand in it. But he, as a third party, did not bring full objectivity. There’s a more recent biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable that is very good at pointing out where he was self-inventing earlier on, how much of this ‘autobiography’ is actually true. Haley was somewhere between an editor and ghost-writer; he anchored the book in a sense of who Malcolm X was as a person, what his personality was, what his temperament was. If you take the view that all philosophy is temperament, all art is personality, then while The Autobiography of Malcolm X is as biased as any other auto-biography, it’s a very good record of the temperament behind Malcolm X’s philosophy (which was unsettled even in the weeks before his death). I think that’s just as valuable to capture, because people in the real world are often more persuaded by temperament than they are by ideas."

"This is a text that you’ve got to read for yourself. It allows you to see how faith shapes Malcolm’s worldview and his understanding of racism and the solution to racism. It also allows you to see a historical figure who changes over time. Malcolm’s beliefs change—especially as they relate to white brothers and sisters and the origins of racism and inequality—while, at the same time, maintaining a commitment to Black nationalism. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The text is important because it shows an individual who is so important and so influential in Black nationalist thought specifically, and Black freedom struggles more broadly. I love how the text shows how his faith is so central to him. I think oftentimes, we study the civil rights movement, and we think about Black nationalism as a purely secular movement or ideology. This text does a great job of not just showing Malcolm’s ideas through his life, but also how his faith undergirds his understanding of Black nationalism as well as his understanding of how to fight against America’s virus of racism."

"The reason it’s got to be there is because the many people who enter American society from the margins need a story that helps them understand how they can change and effect change. Malcolm X began life as a poor black kid from Nebraska. His father died early in his life. His mother had a bunch of kids and was relegated to the state mental health system. Malcolm ended up in foster care and went to prison for robbery. Then he became a member of the African-American religious movement, Nation of Islam, which still had some very reactionary ideas about race. Yet Malcolm evolved to accept others without regard to race, and to call for justice for all people. He became a leading anti-colonial figure. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Malcolm X is somebody that everybody in America’s prisons today could look at and say, ‘You know what, I can emerge, I can evolve.’ A lot of people who are politicised today, they may have done or said some things in the past, when they were developing, that they’re not proud of. Malcolm X is an example of how human beings are constantly in a state of evolution and he stands for the idea that you are not the worst thing you ever did. That does not describe you. If you are fighting to get rid of drug sentencing disparities, or for inmate enfranchisement so that people getting out of the criminal justice system can vote again, or if you’re promoting re-entry so that when people get out of prison they actually have some skills so that they don’t return, then Malcolm X’s story shows the possibility for human evolution. “Economic justice is at the heart of the progressive movement.” They’re two separate things. I think the Nation of Islam was a way station for Malcolm X. A lot of people who become committed progressives, fighting for human equality, will have gone through a phase from which they’ve evolved. As for black nationalism, I don’t think it is a healthy political position from which to build a multicultural America. But if you’re from a group that has been historically suppressed, your entry to the progressive movement may be through fighting for racial justice."

"Malcolm X is foundational in so many ways. He dictated his autobiography to Alex Haley, who also wrote Roots . When he came into prison in the 1950s, he was a common street hustler. Like so many (as they then said) ‘poor negroes,’ he had very few options in life. This was before the civil rights movement. It was a segregated society. We forget that. It was still the era of ‘rehabilitation.’ There were so-called rehabilitative prisons in liberal parts of the country, parts of California. Malcolm X was imprisoned in Massachusetts and went to the Norfolk State Prison Colony. They had books, they had instructors from Harvard, they had classes. He had the opportunity to change and to better himself. He learned how to read. As the same time as his so-called rehabilitation, he was also in correspondence with Elijah Mohammed from the Nation of Islam. I say so-called because he wasn’t the beneficiary of a benevolent state that said, ‘We will give you books.’ He resisted the Harvard instructors who tried to teach him Christianity and their version of a white, blue-eyed, blond-haired Jesus. “It’s a very difficult and touching place to be as a reader, to follow along everything that they’re experiencing” He listened to Muslim prisoners who were, at that time, activists in the prison system. They argued that black prisoners were being oppressed in terms of freedom of religion and gave them legal and defence money so that they could practise Islam. Nation of Islam helped them get things—like dietary restrictions or classes or correspondence—and to be free so they could resist the Thirteenth Amendment, which would enslave them with labour. Nation of Islam radicalized Malcolm X. His memoir describes that process of transformation from a common narrative of street hustler and limited opportunities, struggling in a racist society, to this radicalization in part through literacy, in part through literature and religion. Then, the last third of the book is him coming into his own as a Muslim leader. The rest is history. The larger history is that after the Civil War, the southern model was more or less re-enslavement through convict leasing and work programmes. So you would either work in the prison, or you’d be lent out to different industries—like iron, coal or agriculture—to do slave work, basically for no real wages. The Northeast had something called the penitentiary model, and that was complete silence, except the Bible. You could read the Bible or be silent. That was supposed to be rehabilitative because you could confront your sins. In the West, you had a work camp or containment model. You had native Americans and indigenous people that needed to be contained so prisons were built around that model. The Quakers were involved and the first to develop this model of labour as rehabilitative. The idea of rehabilitation has its origins in Christianity and working. But then there was this movement in corrections in the 40s and 50s to extend the full resources of the state into the prisons. So psychologists got involved and librarians, there were work programmes, there was counseling. At places like where Malcolm X was (and he writes about this in the book) a millionaire dedicated his library. The problem was that it was a paternalistic model. It would rehabilitate you to be a citizen, to be a worker, to follow patriotic, more or less Christian, white values. It was thought that you could control the prisoner’s mind and you could make him a better citizen. In his case, that’s what happened. The other part of this is that before the 1990s, and the Criminal Justice Reform Act, higher education had a bigger presence in the prisons. So prisoners could take correspondence courses. Again, not all parts of the country were keen on prisoners getting anything. It wasn’t a unified system. There were whole parts of the country that never had rehabilitation. But liberal parts of the country tended to be around university towns. So the Bay Area in San Francisco has a lot of well-known universities and they also have a very famous prison, San Quentin. So you had a lot of liberal-oriented volunteers and programmes. They still do. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But it was always a bit tinged with that paternalism and conservatism. We want you to be rehabilitated into the society we want. For example, they didn’t think that some black prisoners even could be rehabilitated. It was thought to be a white thing. They didn’t think women could do anything except become homemakers. The counselors also thought that gay people were, by nature, predestined to crime, because homosexuality was considered a deviancy by the American Psychological Association until 1973. That means that all through the 50s and 60s, if you were thought to be homosexual (it didn’t matter if you were or not) you could be trapped in a rehabilitative programme that said, ‘We’re going to cure you of your homosexuality! You’re welcome, you’re welcome. Now you can be cured of your deviancy and you can be free of crime!’"