Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [298]
Johnson was right. Hayer, Butler, and Johnson were all convicted of first-degree murder. On April 14, Judge Marks told each man that he would be incarcerated in a New York state prison for the remainder of his natural life. Peter L. F. Sabbatino, one of the defense attorneys, responded prophetically, “I don’t think that you have a solution here that history will support.”
The initial remaking of Malcolm’s posthumous image began, interestingly enough, with jazz musicians. John Coltrane, the most influential saxophone artist of the 1960s, was deeply influenced by Malcolm’s style of rhetoric and by his political philosophy of black nationalism. The new breed of musicians, emerging a generation after bebop, rejected political moderation and nonviolence; the anger and militancy identified with Malcolm captured their mood. For musician Archie Shepp, Malcolm inspired “innovations” in African-American music, making jazz an “extension of the black nationalist movement.” Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), recognizing the connections between black art and political protest, described Coltrane as the “Malcolm in the New Super Bop Fire.” Malcolm’s effective public presentations, his use of timing and the cadence of his speaking voice, were strikingly like jazz. As John Oliver Killens explained, “I have always thought of Malcolm X as an artist . . . but an artist of the spoken word.”
Malcolm’s popularity among millions of white Americans, however, began only with the publication, in late 1965, of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. After Doubleday’s cancellation of the book, Paul Reynolds had shopped the manuscript to other publishers, eventually securing a contract for Haley with the radical house Grove Press. The reviews of the narrative of Malcolm’s life were overwhelmingly positive. Eliot Fremont-Smith of the New York Times praised the Autobiography as a “brilliant, painful, important book. . . . As a document for our time, its insights may be crucial; its relevance cannot be doubted.” In the Nation, Truman Nelson declared, “its dead-level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose, even its manifold unsolved ambiguities will make it stand as a monument to the most painful of truths.” But the most insightful commentary on Malcolm’s memoir was written by his former debating partner, Bayard Rustin. In the Washington Post, Rustin powerfully characterized the book as “the odyssey of an American Negro in search of his identity and place in society.” Rustin sharply disputed the notion that Malcolm was simply the product of the “Harlem ghetto”; the book’s initial chapters on Malcolm’s Midwestern childhood “are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the plight of the American Negro.” There was much to criticize in Malcolm’s politics, and Rustin did not mince words. The black nationalism of groups like the Nation of Islam, he said, offers “an arena for struggle, for power and status-denied lower-class Negroes in the outside world.” It was here that Malcolm brought his intelligence and “his burning ambition to succeed.”
Rustin remained sharply critical of Malcolm’s “anti-Semitic comments” and former black nationalist views, but acknowledged that he was attempting to “turn a corner,” to assimilate into the civil rights mainstream. Had he been successful, Rustin observed, “he would have made an enormous contribution to the struggle for equal rights. As it was, his contribution was substantial. He brought hope and a measure of dignity to thousands of despairing ghetto Negroes.