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By Root 1987 0

this book. There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it. Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be alive?ʺ He pleaded with his subject to consider Betty’s predicament if he should die—”and for the rest of her life, trying to explain to your and her four children what a man you were.” To Reynolds, Haley revealed an entirely different agenda. Reviewing the “wealth of material” in the still unfinished manuscript, he wrote that the book could benefit from “careful, successive rewritings, distilling, aligning, [and] balancing . . . to get it right.” Its conclusion, he now recognized, was “all important,” because it placed his subject “on the world stage.” He cited an article by Malcolm, “Why I Am for Goldwater,” and the existence of his recent tour diary, a “soupçon of even fissionable international religious and political concerns.” Haley said that he wanted to edit and expand both, asserting that the texts would “keep [Malcolm] on-stage, while providing him with more funds.” (These extraordinary materials would not be seen by scholars or the general public until 2008. Malcolm never had the time, or opportunity, to develop his travel diaries into a second book.) Within the severe limitations of his schedule, he read through Haley’s Autobiography drafts as they were produced. The final essay chapters that had been prepared earlier were cut, a decision that may have been Haley’s alone; these are what today are called the book’s “missing chapters.” Malcolm probably sensed that the Autobiography might become a crucial part of his political legacy, and he became more determined to complete the project. Ironically, his extended absence from the United States beginning in July gave Haley an excuse for not working vigorously on the manuscript. As the summer began, Haley moved his attention to more potentially lucrative writing projects. He was already pitching to Kenneth McCormick a book manuscript idea called Before This Anger, which a decade later would become the best seller Roots.

In the meantime, Malcolm was besieged—by writers, by other activists seeking favors and alliances, and by people who just wanted to have a piece of history. Most met him only once or twice but were changed by these encounters; some were transformed by his rhetoric or writings, still others by his message.

Robert Penn Warren, one of America’s most respected Southern writers in the sixties, met Malcolm at the Hotel Theresa on June 2, where they engaged in a mutually revealing conversation. Warren was at first surprised at how animated Malcolm was: “I discovered that the pale, dull yellowish face that had seemed so veiled, so stony, as though beyond all feeling, had flashed into its merciless, leering life—the sudden wolfish grin, the pale pink lips drawn hard back to show the strong teeth.” Both intimidated and fascinated, Warren presented Malcolm with a series of scenarios in which white liberals had provided assistance to blacks. When Warren mentioned that “the white man” had been willing to go to jail to oppose segregation, Malcolm retorted, “My personal attitude is that he has done nothing to solve the problem.” Malcolm went on to emphasize the necessity to transform institutional arrangements in the U.S. political economy, if blacks were ever to exercise power. Stunned, Warren asked for another chance for liberalism: “You don’t see in the American system the possibility of self-regeneration?” “No,” Malcolm replied.

Malcolm was clearly toying with Warren—it was several weeks later that he would affirm precisely Warren’s point, in his appeal to the country’s founding documents at the opening conference of the OAAU, a claim on democracy he could not have advanced had he judged U.S. political institutions incapable of reform. Warren nervously went on to inquire about the new movement’s political objectives. In practical terms, what Malcolm sought was not fundamentally different from what waves of European immigrants—the Irish, Italians, and Jews—fought to achieve: equitable representation of their ethnic groups