Critical Lives: Malcolm X

Malcolm X lives on. And the legands are told over again. This one is the newest.Lorenzo Thomas reviews the book on Malcolm X--Critical Lives: Malcolm X -- by Kofi Natambu (Indianapolis: Alpha Books)The short but astonishingly eventful life of Malcolm X—to some, more properly andreverently, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—has, in the years since his assassination at thelectern in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, achieved mythic proportions. His Autobiographyis a classic American story that ranks with Benjamin Franklin’s and Booker T.Washington’s; Spike Lee produced an epic movie based on that life; the Postal Servicehas commemorated it with a stamp; and people are willing to bid hundreds of thousandsof dollars to purchase his memorabilia.We are long past the day of the apocryphal inner-city student who asked his teacher,“Just who was Malcolm the Tenth anyway?” Still, there are some who do not really knowwhy the man born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 is celebrated.Kofi Natambu’s marvelously lucid new biography will do much to solve that problem.Malcolm’s early life was troubled by events that started before his birth. In December1924, while pregnant with Malcolm, Louise Little--with her six children--was evicted fromtheir home in Omaha, Nebraska by armed members of the Ku Klux Klan because hisfather Rev. Earl Little was an active organizer for Marcus Garvey’s Universal NegroImprovement Association (UNIA). In the next few years the family moved frequently,dogged by racist harassment. After they had settled in Lansing, Michigan in 1931, EarlLittle died from injuries sustained in a suspicious street accident. The fatherless familywas brutally battered by the economic forces of the Depression. Louise Little, literallyat wit’s end, was confined to the state hospital, her children sent to foster homes.Bright but mischievous, Malcolm barely avoided reform school. Though he was anexcellent student, he was deeply hurt by the small town Midwestern racism heencountered. Even making the basketball team didn’t help.“As the team traveled to neighboring towns,” writes Natambu, “whenever Malcolmshowed his face on the court the opposing team’s fans would openly hoot and holler‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ from the stands. Or they called him the derogatory name of ‘Rastus.’Malcolm found very little support from his teammates or his coach when this behavioroccurred, which was all the time.”Predictably, says Natambu, “loneliness, fear, and alienation in a nearly all-whiteenvironment remained a major feature of Malcolm’s life as a student” Nevertheless,he was elected class president in the seventh grade. That year he also met his olderhalf sister Ella Little-Collins and, in 1940, went to Boston to live with her.Natambu vividly describes how Malcolm, always a quick study, transformed himself froma Li’l Abner country boy into a hipster. The black Roxbury section of Boston contained nolack of delights and temptations and Malcolm aspired to membership in the zoot-suitedfraternity of musicians, gambler, players, and hustlers who frequented the RoselandBallroom. Starting out as a shoeshine boy at the dancehall, he soon found a better joband a girlfriend from the middle-class “Sugar Hill” section of town. By the time he returnedto Lansing in 1942, Malcolm—now seventeen and worldly wise, at least in his own eyes—knew he needed broader horizons. A job as a dining car waiter on the New Haven Railroadeventually landed him in Harlem and there he took to the “fast track” like a natural.“Once he was in Harlem,” says Natambu, “Malcolm would spend nearly his entirepaycheck drinking liquor, smoking marijuana, and painting the town red with hisever-expanding entourage.” Somehow his rapid descent into the underworld of gamblersand corrupt cops was not entirely distracting and Natambu notes that Malcolm “stillharbored a desire for mainstream social acceptance and respectability.” But a threemonth suspended sentence for petty theft in November 1944 sent him on an acceleratingdownward spiral that soon allowed him to fully experience what Natambu terms “theblatant racism and double standards of the criminal justice system.” Eventually hereceived a long sentence for burglary that sent him to Massachusetts state prison.“In the spring of 1948,” writes Natambu, “Malcolm was introduced to the Nation of Islam(NOI). It would prove not only to be his ticket out of prison, but also the start of acompletely new life.”And what a life that would turn out to be!While Malcolm learned the ropes in the penitentiary, four of his brothers had convertedto Islam and, through imploring letters, worked at getting him to join them Theymanaged to convince him to at least quit smoking and give up eating pork. He acceptedthe challenge not as a step toward religious conversion but as a test of his will power.When he refused the meat platter in the prison messhall it created a stir among theinmates. “This attention,” Natambu says, “made him feel very proud. In refusing thepork he felt he was also attacking the racial stereotype that blacks could not do withoutpork in their diet. Malcolm was especially happy to see that his not eating it startled thewhite convicts.”He may have been making the right moves for the wrong reasons, but the incident wasimportant.“When Malcolm later studied and committed himself to Islam,” Natambu adds, “herecalled that the act of refusing the pork was his first experience of the ancient Muslimteaching in the Qur’an that ‘If you will take one step toward Allah—Allah will take twosteps toward you.’”Paroled in 1952, Malcolm joined his brothers in Detroit and became active in ElijahMuhammad’s Nation of Islam Temple #1. Having done a prodigious amount of readingin prison, Malcolm had grown intellectually and was a much different young man thatnthe restless youth of six years earlier. Natambu carefully outlines his progress underthe tutelage of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam ministers who responded tohis intelligence and eagerness.Before long Malcolm became the nation’s most effective organizer and spokesman. Whenthe then little known sect began to gain media attention in the later 1950s—first in thepages of black weeklies such as the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch and the PittsburghCourier, and later in the white mainstream press—it was Malcolm whose voice and wordswere spotlighted. Natambu is particularly good in recounting this period of Malcolm’s career.Malcolm had developed into a masterful public speaker able to “challenge and persuadehis audience to rethink their ingrained notions of the world and the value systems thatconstituted the ideological scaffolding of the reality they had been taught” Natambu stopsshort of saying it, but clearly suggests that he—like Malcolm—believes that words do, infact, have the power to change our reality. “Regardless of whether Malcolm’s commentswere considered by the general public to be unfair,” he notes, “Malcolm insisted thatstanding up for oneself and being completely honest in one’s appraisal of what wasnecessary or of value in any public discussion of the serious issues and concerns facingAfrican Americans was crucial.”Natambu also suggest that Malcolm’s most important work with the Nation of Islammight have been designing and launching the newspaper Muhammad Speaks. And whenlocal New York television newsman Mike Wallace—with the help of veteran blackjournalist Louis E. Lomax—produced a five-part “exposé” in 1959, it was MinisterMalcolm’s bold oratory that captivated viewers, myself included. Both he and Wallaceimmediately became figures of nationwide importance.All this time, of course, the State Department and the FBI were also watching the nationof Islam and Malcolm closely. This scrutiny would only increase during the rest ofMalcolm’s tragically short but influential career.In just a few years, as the Civil Rights struggle intensified, a gruesome season of deathdescended upon the United States. Assassins would claim the lives of Mississippi NAACPactivist Medgar Evers; four little black girls in a Birmingham, Alabama church; PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, all in 1963; Malcolm himself on February 20, 1965; and laterSen. Robert Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as well.Natambu brilliantly documents this period and all of Malcolm’s myriad activities. Anaccomplished poet and cultural critic, he offers useful detail and fresh insight on whatseems, in retrospect, an amazing rush of events. Alpha Books’ Critical Lives series is auseful addition to the publishing field and Kofi Natambu’s Malcolm X is a top-notch effortthat avoids hagiography in favor of a direct, informative assessment of an importanthistorical figure. Well selected illustrations add to the book’s value.Malcolm has not reached the point where right wing commentators and think-tankconservatives quote his words and distort his philosophy as they routinely do withDr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But there has been almost as much damage done to historyby writers who present Malcolm as a socialist or late-blooming integrationist as byothers who have tried to depict him as an opportunist or psychopath. You’ll not find anyof those con games here.Kofi Natambu’s Critical Lives: Malcolm X provides rich historical context—both nationaland international—and tells this story with clarity and accuracy. He carefully avoids thepolemics that have marred many books on various aspects of Malcolm’s impact on histimes. Next to the eloquent Autobiography of Malcolm X (co-written with Alex Haley in theyear before Malcolm’s death), this excellent and unbiased study by Kofi Natambu is thebest available introduction to a man whose life did, indeed, make a difference in the world.