Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [6]
The renaissance of Malcolm’s popularity in the early 1990s was largely due to the rise of the “hip-hop nation.” In the group Public Enemy’s video “Shut ’Em Down,” for example, the image of Malcolm is imposed over the face of George Washington on the U.S. dollar bill; another hip-hop group, Gang Starr, placed a portrait of Malcolm on the cover of one of its CDs. Political conservatives also continued their attempts to assimilate him into their pantheon. In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, for instance, vice president Dan Quayle declared that he had acquired important insights into the reasons for such unrest by reading Malcolm’s autobiography—an epiphany most African Americans viewed as absurd, with filmmaker Spike Lee quipping, “Every time Malcolm X talked about ‘blue-eyed devils’ Quayle should think he’s talking about him.”
With the release of Lee’s three-hour biographical film X that same year, Malcolm reached a new generation. In a 1992 poll, 84 percent of African Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four described him as “a hero for black Americans today.” After years of relegating him to the periphery of modern black history, historians now began to see him as a central figure. He had become “an integral part of the scaffolding that supports a contemporary African-American identity,” historian Gerald Horne wrote. “His fascination with music and dance and night clubs undergirded his bond with blacks.” For many whites, however, his appeal was located in his conversion from militant black separatism to what might be described as multicultural universalism. His assimilation into the American mainstream occurred—ironically—at Harlem’s Apollo Theater on January 20, 1999, when the United States Postal Service celebrated the release of a Malcolm X stamp there. In a press statement accompanying the stamp’s issuance, the U.S. Postal Service claimed that, in the year prior to his assassination, Malcolm X had become an advocate of “a more integrationist solution to racial problems.”
A closer reading of the Autobiography as well as the actual details of Malcolm’s life reveals a more complicated history. Few of the book’s reviewers appreciated that it was actually a joint endeavor—and particularly that Alex Haley, a retired twenty-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, had an agenda of his own. A liberal Republican, Haley held the Nation of Islam’s racial separatism and religious extremism in contempt, but he was fascinated by the tortured tale of Malcolm’s personal life. In 1963, the beginning of the collaboration of these two very different men, Malcolm had labored to present a tale of moral uplift, to praise the power of the Nation’s leader, Elijah Muhammad. After Malcolm’s departure from the sect, he used his autobiography to explain his break from black separatism. Haley’s purpose was quite different; for him, the autobiography was a cautionary tale about human waste and the tragedies produced by racial segregation. In many ways, the published book is more Haley’s than its authorʹs: because Malcolm died in February 1965, he had no opportunity to revise major elements of what would become known as his political testament.
My own curiosity about the Autobiography began more than two decades ago, when I was teaching it as part of a seminar on African-American political thought at Ohio State University. Among African-American leaders throughout history, Malcolm was unquestionably the most consummately “political” activist, a man who emphasized grassroots and participatory politics led by working-class and poor blacks. Yet the autobiography is virtually silent about his primary organization, the OAAU. Nowhere in the text does its agenda or its objectives appear. After years of research, I discovered that several chapters had been deleted prior to