Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [167]
By the end of October, the Autobiography appeared to be taking shape. On October 27, Haley informed Gibbs that the book would be somewhat larger than originally planned, at roughly 120,000 words. The text would include ten chapters, three essays, and an afterword. The initial ten chapters were designed to tell “the unfolding, snowballing drama of this man’s life.” The final essays—“The Negro,” “The End of Christianity,” and “Twenty Million Black Muslims”—were designed to be a summation of Malcolm’s religious and political point of view. In his afterword, Haley intended to write “as a Christian Negro,” describing “the demagogue as I see him.” Haley wanted to explain “what I critically feel about his life, and what he signifies, and represents, to Negroes, to white people, to America.” He also mentioned to Gibbs that Malcolm had given him thirty to forty photographs to use for the book, including one of a young Malcolm alongside singer Billie Holiday. Nearly three weeks later, Haley wrote to his agent, editors, and Malcolm. Contacting executive editor Kenneth McCormick, Gibbs, and Reynolds, Haley revealed he was at the point at which the process of writing the Autobiography was changing him: “when the material begins to direct you and command you into what must be done with it.” Writing separately to Malcolm the same day, Haley explained: “[I] am being careful, careful in developing the nuances as it unfolds, each stage, because viewed overall, your whole life is so incredible that no stage, especially in the early developing stages, may the reader be left with gaps, for if so it would strain the plausibility, believability of the truly fantastic ‘Detroit Red’—and, then, the galvanic, absolute conversion.”
As Haley worked to finish the manuscript, Malcolm made what would be his last tour of the West Coast as an NOI leader. He opened by holding a press conference in San Francisco on October 10, followed the next day by a panel discussion at the University of California at Berkeley. His speech took less than thirty minutes, but contained nearly twenty specific references to “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Yet in other respects its tone was profoundly secular and political. “It’s not my intention to discuss the Muslim religious group today nor the Muslim religion,” he explained. The nature of the crisis confronting America was “the increase of racial hostility, and the increase of outright racial hatred. We see masses of Black people who have lost all confidence in the false promises of the hypocritical white politicians.” The discrimination that blacks confronted in the liberal North “is even more cruel and more vicious” than Southern racism.
Even more sharply than before, Malcolm pitted the Negro elite against the interests of the struggling black masses. “The wealthy, educated black bourgeoisie, those uppity Negroes who do escape, never reach back and pull the rest of our people out with them. The blacks remain trapped in the slum.” The solution was not “token integration.” When blacks tried to desegregate housing, whites fled these residential areas. “After the 1954 Supreme Court decision,” Malcolm explained, “the same thing happened when our people tried to integrate the schools. All the white students disappeared into the suburbs.” Now black leaders “are demanding a certain quota, a percentage, of white people’s jobs.” Such a demand would cause “violence and bloodshed.” This was another instance in which Malcolm’s imagined future led him to the wrong conclusion: only six years later a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, with millions of whites sharply opposed, would implement