Wick Welker's Reviews > The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The life journey of the martyr who holds the mirror to America.

This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Through these pages you take a journey through the life of one of the most prolific men in history: a poor country boy, an orphan of the state, a zoot suit hipster, drug dealer, violent criminal, prisoner, felon, reformist, Muslim, cultist, demagogue, preacher, brother, husband, father and a black man in America. You will get to know the inner thoughts of a self-educated, critically thinking, power-house of an intellectual. Above all, for me, I think I've read the words of one who has the highest degree of integrity and loyalty to what he believes to be true. These are the words of a true martyr whose conclusions about American society were and are deeply true.

Malcolm X was very human and very flawed. After cataloguing his life events, it takes no stretch of the imagination to understand his early life course. As an orphan of the state with seven other siblings, he found himself to be an 8th grade dropout despite having some of the highest marks in class. With his father killed by white violence and his mother in a hospital for the mentally ill, Malcolm Little moves from Lansing to Boston where he is truly exposed to "black culture" of the day. With a zoot suit and conk (which he sports for several years), he falls into the music scene of drugs, drinking and party which devolves into a lifestyle of total crime. After he moved to Harlem, Malcolm is a perpetrator of grave crimes including drug dealing, assault, prostitution, robbery and what came very close to murder. According to his own later words, he was the essence of a depraved criminal.

The back drop of his criminal life makes his conversion to Islam while incarcerated a powerful awakening to his past life. Truly, does Malcolm Little become Malcolm X, a man who never looks back to his stained life but only forward as a staunch believer in the Nation of Islam as lead by Elijah Muhammad. It is no wonder given the racial caste system to which he has been socialized, that Malcolm X becomes the loudest one decrying the "white devil." Even upon his own reflections at the end of this book, does he state that while his ideas during his time with Nation of Islam were hateful and racist, they were a natural conclusion for one such as him given his life experiences. Critical he is of the civil rights movements, claiming them to be a sanitized version of change-a white sanctioned token of superficial progress but without real change.

It is after 12 years with the Nation of Islam and gaining national notoriety as a powerful speaker and demagogue, that Malcolm X experiences the often inevitable fate of the faithful: cognitive dissonance with his own religion. After seeing the cracks in his leader Elijah Muhammad, he has a treacherous falling out with the NOI and starts his own Islamic institution. It is during this time he seeks spiritual communion by pilgrimage to Mecca. Once there, Malcolm X finally understands that harmony can exist across races because this is literally the first time in his life he has witnessed it. Nearing the end of his life he pivots away from staunch black supremacy and strict segregation to being more open to all people of all races reforming the racist fabric of American society.

So who is Malcolm X? In the beginning he is a victim of a racialized America who becomes a devout Muslim with a conversion that changes his life and the lives of many. His flaws are blatant: even at the end of his autobiography, it is clear he is quite sexist and definitely antisemitic (although he explicitly states that he is not). Indeed, he was a demagogue, a rebel, an agitator and a leader of a subjugated people. More than anything, to me, Malcolm X is the mouthpiece of truth. His conclusions about the racist fabric and history of America are 100% true. He is the clarifying lens of what America is. He is the mirror held up to America, showing us who we really are. His judgements still hold true today.