The Autobiography of Malcolm X: A Mythic ParadigmAuthor(s): Nancy ClasbySource: Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Sep., 1974), pp. 18-34Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2783620 .Accessed: 19/07/2011 19:59

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X

A Mythic Paradigm

NANCY CLASBY Department of English University of Miami

Alex Haley's Epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X concludes:

I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met, and I still can't quite conceive him dead. It feels to me as if he has just gone into some next chapter, to be written by historians.

Malcolm's place in history looms obscurely ahead of us. His autobiography, while universally acknowledged as a com- pelling and extraordinary work, shares in the obscurity of Malcolm's essential being. Efforts to understand it have been hampered by comparisons with such standard literary works as Franklin's Autobiography, or the personal narratives of religious leaders like Jonathan Edwards. The Autobiography does not involve the further delineation of such well-known paths of development. It is not like Franklin's Autobiography because the static concept of the individual and his progres- sive, predictable growth is absent from Malcolm X's book. It is about a spiritual experience, but does not share the

Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 5 No. 1, September 1974 ?1974 Sage Publications, Inc.

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essentially private nature of religious experience in the modern West.

The great fact of the era, which Malcolm in the end recognized and embodied, is the emergence of a new paradigm of human awareness among the nonwhite peoples of the world. These people, whom Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth," make up three-quarters of the world's population. They have little to do with Western concepts of the individual, since, for the most part, Western values were only very carelessly superimposed over the ruined native patterns. Deprived of an effective national myth, colonized man has had, in a sense, no biography which is not chartered and authorized by the oppressor. Today these people are emerging into history-politically, economically, and, of most importance, spiritually. They represent a new expression of human consciousness.

The most sensitive analysis of the development of this new consciousness is in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. In this book, based on his observations as a psychia- trist in the Algerian revolution, Fanon reveals a three-stage development in the psychology of the emerging people of Africa and Vietnam. The native's identity evolves from the numbing violence of the colonial situation into a deadly imitation of Western values, then passes into a new, organic formation. Malcolm X was the American prototype of this developing consciousness. It was his task first to discard the pattern of the old personal history and to fashion a matrix of consciousness in which what he was and what he might become took on dignity and fresh meaning. In Leroi Jones's words, "Malcolm has risen in a wide arc-circle to embrace a whole public consciousness." If we can comprehend the pattern of change expressed in the Autobiography we will see the lineage of post-modern man.

Historically, colonized people have formed little more than a backdrop for the white settlers, who have traced the pathways established by the hero myths of their society.

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Their path constitutes modem history and modern literature. "And all the while the native, bent double, more dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging dream" (Fanon, 1963: 51). As Richard Wright (1940: 360) pointed out, American Blacks, like the colonized natives, have endured injustice of such a magnitude that it has radically altered their development. Oppression, continued for a long time, involving millions of people, "blots out one form of life, but another grows in its place with its own rights, needs and aspirations." The Black man's sense of being "invisible," or "behind the veil," is linked to Western culture's congenital inability to recognize the mode of life which expresses itself not in terms of society's "good and bad, but in terms of its own fulfillment." The Black has thus been locked outside significance, "outside history."

When the native son seeks a place in history, seeks in fact to make it his story, certain patterns emerge. These involve the paradoxical rejection and imitation of the settler's values and the resolution of the paradox in the final adoption of a new and broader view of humanity. That is, the native, out of his anger, forges a Western "ego" as a weapon, then, under the pressures of struggle, this fragile identity grows into a highly developed group awareness. The shift is accompanied by a rejection of the static, segmented view of the modern, mechanical world for a vision of an organic, transformative reality. Fanon's analysis of the development from the dream-state of the native, through the period of resistance and imitation to the final development of the "new man" is reflected in the three major periods of Malcolm X's life.

He began as Malcolm Little, a child growing up in the tightly compartmentalized, Manichean world created by racism, a world cut in two by the dividing line between white and black. Those institutions (family, schools, and so on) which ordinarily mitigate society's drive toward isolating the individual were broken or corrupted. His earliest awareness was of difference and separation. One parent was black and

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favored him because he was light. The other was almost white and beat him to exorcise the hated whiteness. The pattern of compartmentalization which cut him off, eventually, from everyone and everything of value crystalized in the loss of his mother. Her desperate poverty and the unrelenting efforts of the state welfare department to separate her from her children drove her to madness. The children were scattered and when Malcolm visited her at the hospital, she did not recognize him. "All the people have gone," she said, and Malcolm experienced the isolation prepared for him by a society determined to contain him. He was invisible, reduced to an unintelligible, detached component of a system built upon rigid compartmentalization.

In his early teens, he was drawn into the great migration of the 1930s which took a people, ninety percent of whom had lived in the agrarian South, into the Northern cities. Malcolm had always lived in an atmosphere of explicit violence-his father was laid across the streetcar tracks and killed by whites, and their home was burned because of his father's allegiance to Marcus Garvey. But in the cities, the slow- motion violence of hunger, disease, and helplessness which had always been the underlying rhythm of life accelerated. He took the name Detroit Red to mark his full entry into ghetto existence and plunged into an experience of violence directed at himself and others.

Fanon (1963: 56) describes the violent rhythms ordering the colonial world, dehumanizing the natives and compelling them to cooperate in their own brutalization. "The emo- tional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches from the caustic agent." In the face of institutionalized violence, the psyche "shrinks back and obliterates itself," or finds expression in reactive violence. In this state of permanent tension, "the colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people." Drawn to Harlem where "everyone needed some kind of hustle to

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survive," Malcolm knew "this world was where I be- longed.... I was going to become one of the most depraved parasitical hustlers among New York's eight million people." He lived by exploiting the community through robbery, dope-peddling, and pimping. "When you become an animal, a vulture in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures."

Inevitably, the violence of the colonial situation is directed inward, toward the destruction of the self. This is evident in such details as Malcolm's efforts at conking his hair. "That was my first really big -step toward self degradation: when I endured all that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man's hair." This destructive introjection of white standards expressed itself also in such incidents as his rejection of the black woman, Laura, for the white, Sophia. Eventually the compulsive aggression which isolated him from himself and others destroyed him. "Even Shorty, whose apartment I now again shared, wasn't prepared for how I lived and thought-like a predatory animal. Sometimes I would catch him watching me." The culmination of this period in Malcolm's life found him isolated from himself, starving for self-realization, his relations with others hopeless- ly distorted, violence turned inward, and the system more firmly entrenched than ever. Malcolm was "in his place." Further, he had not permitted himself to see this clearly, but remained in an unconsciously cultivated dream-state, bol- stered by drugs and compulsive violence. "I simply did not feel the problem could be solved so I shut it out" (Malcolm X, 1964: 393).

The second phase of Malcolm's life began with his imprisonment. The collapse of his old life and the depersonal- izing routines of prison stripped him of everything. His anger, experienced very deeply for the first time, was the "last refuge of his humanity." Elijah Muhammed reached him and saved him with the formula, "The white man is the devil." This focused the anger outward, against the system, and the

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"True Knowledge" re-explained the past, giving Malcolm a starting point for his own plunge into history. This period marks the first personal ordering of Malcolm's vision. His prior view was so conditioned by society's limitations that it was scarcely his own. This new ordering, while consciously his, is also deeply affected, and, in fact, is modeled on the white man's way of perceiving reality. It is Manichean; it envisions a sharply divided world, black and white, good and bad. Only the racial roles are reversed. This is not to say that the "separation" Malcolm envisioned was the same as the repressive "segregation" that he hated. But the principle of exclusivity based on differences is the counterpart of the white world's insistence on a mechanical conformity to norms. Both are based on prohibitions, limitations, and the "self-control" (or in some cases, simply "control") of the citizens.

This first stage of rebellion is marked, as Fanon said, by a simple desire that "the last shall be first.... The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor." He wants to take the settler's place.

As violence permeated Malcolm's old experience, it was reflected, transformed, in his new synthesis. Though not literally responsible for violent resistance, he advocated self-defense and scoffed at "nonviolent protest." His rhetoric was violent and the press and police were quick to link him with the restless upheavals in the ghetto. White America, in fact, perceived that any resistance to the system would inevitably lead to violence. Fanon (1963: 68) points out that even the seemingly innocuous "nonviolent" leaders "make the people dream dreams. .. . In fact they introduce into their readers' or hearers' consciousness the terrible foment of subversion." Because "it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily" (King, 1963: 80), all efforts to institute fundamental changes in the power structure eventually partake of the violence at its core.

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Malcolm's efforts to create himself anew necessitated the breakdown of the old master-slave relationship which charac- terized the ties of the black minority to white society. In order to break the relationship and cleanse himself, overt resistance was essential. Angela Davis's (1973: 2) study of liberated slaves indicates: "The first condition of freedom is the open act of resistance-physical resistance, violent resist- ance.... It is refusal not only to submit to flogging, but refusal to accept the definitions of slave-master." Decoloni- zation, says Fanon, is always a violent phenomenon. Resist- ance breeds violence, violence breeds further resistance, and when the tensions within have reached a certain level, some men, like Malcolm X, come to prefer victory to survival (Sartre, 1963: 23). The evolutionary effects of struggle were fundamental to Malcolm's development. Struggle "influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them" (Fanon, 1963: 36). Malcolm's emergence into the stage of history is characterized by a fierce determination to say "no," to resist, to pay back in kind what he had suffered.

He entered prison a motiveless shell of a person, one of those Wright describes, who "glide through our complex civilization like wailing ghosts . . . spin like fiery planets lost from their orbits." He emerged as the cold, efficient builder of a movement. His first purchases were eyeglasses, a watch, and a briefcase, apt symbols of the rigidly patterned life he would lead for twelve years. Carol Ohman (1970: 131) describes Malcolm as locked in a calculating stance, in a world "composed, for him, merely of allies and opponents." His allegiance was to Elijah Muhammed's theory, and though he went back into Harlem, he was in the ghetto, but not of it.

Malcolm's personal relationships reflect the rigid divisions which govern his thinking at his phase. His brother Reginald fell away from Islam and was ordered ostracized. "In Islam we were taught that as long as one didn't know the truth, he

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lived in darkness. But once the truth was accepted, and recognized, he lived in light, and whoever would then go against it would be punished by Allah" (Malcolm X, 1964: 189). Reginald began to go mad. "I could see him on the way down. When he spoke, I heard him coldly. But I would listen. He was my blood brother." Malcolm's self-control evidenced itself as a capacity to dissociate himself from his brother's agony. In later years, he "came to believe it wasn't a divine chastisement upon Reginald, but the pain he felt when his own family totally rejected him for Elijah Muhammed."

Before his conversion Malcolm astonished even himself by his deep distrust of women, whom he regarded as "nothing but another commodity." This attitude came under control in Islam, as he accepted the "place" of women in the elaborately structured Muslim division of the sexes. His courtship of Sister Betty occurred almost apologetically, and their initial relationship was highly structured, formal, and marked by great restraint. In the last days before his break with Elijah Muhammed, he reached out for his wife:

I never would have dreamed that I would ever depend so much upon any woman for strength as I now leaned upon Betty. There was no exchange between us; Betty said nothing ... but I could feel the envelope of her comfort. I knew that she was as faithful a servant of Allah as I was, and I knew that whatever happened, she was with me [Malcolm X, 1964: 305] .

His attitudes toward whites were uncompromising. They may best be summed up in a minor incident involving a young woman from a New England college who had followed him to Harlem after one of his speeches. She asked him, emotionally, if he could not believe that there were some good whites. He had "never seen anyone. . . more affected than this little white college girl." He "didn't want to hurt her feelings," but when she asked, "What can I do," he replied, "Nothing." She burst into tears and ran away from him.

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Beneath the compartmentalized structure of opposites of this period, forces were at work unifying and binding the elements of Malcolm's consciousness. The most important was the experience of working with a people who were bound together in their common resistance. The isolation and the drive for personal survival of his early years gave place to a sense of identification with the Muslims. Fanon notes that new concepts of the self emerge in the struggle for liberation. The old power structure "had hammered into the native's mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought." The workings of the old structure are aimed at sharpening divisions and isolating the person in his own bitter struggle to survive. But the very forms or organization of the resistance demand cohesiveness. Malcolm's introduction into the Muslim home-life after his release from prison began the healing process. The quiet, prayerful order of the home, its rituals, and the respect of the Muslims for one another impressed themselves upon him.

I had never dreamed of anything like that atmosphere among black people who had learned to be proud they were black, who had learned to love other black people instead of being jealous and suspicious. I thrilled to how we Muslim men used both hands to grasp a black brother's both hands, voicing and smiling our happiness to meet him again. . . . "Brother" . .. "Sister" ... "ma'am" . . . "Sir." Even children speaking to other children used these terms. Beautiful!

The figure of Elijah Muhammed was central to Malcolm's imagination. He described him as "A lamb of a man . . . little, gentle, sweet" but possessed of terrible powers. "The small, sensitive gentle brown face . .. was fixed straight ahead as the Messenger strode, encircled by the marching, strapping Fruit of Islam guards. The Messenger, compared to them, seemed fragile, almost tiny" (Malcolm X, 1964: 146). Malcolm's response was to a vision of power incarnated in a vulnerable,

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accessible human form. "He was the first man whom I had ever feared-not fear such as that of a man with a gun, but the fear such as one has of the power of the sun." For people wholly caught in the repressive structure of society, power presents a blank, invulnerable face. The capacity to envision a sustaining counter-force is a religious capacity and is always subversive of the state's power. "We often ignore the fact that Karl Marx also said that religion is the wish-dream of an oppressed humanity" (Davis, 1973). Malcolm needed the dream, the hope, so that he could make it real. He was ready to "convert eternity into history." Elijah Muhammed's identity was bound to the struggling Muslim people, so the power of Allah was identified with the power of the people. The creative, transcendent energies were ranged, in Malcolm's vision, against the deforming powers of the state. Although Malcolm was later to break with Elijah Muhammed, this early vision of power 'humanized was crucial to his development.

Malcolm's final metamorphosis occurred during his trip to Mecca and his immersion in the ferment of the African struggle for independence. Because the structures of Elijah Muhammed's movement were simply reverse models of the old structures, and did not, in practice, reflect the creative energy of liberated men, the old patterns of jealousy, competition and the urge to control were bound to emerge. The many prohibitions sprang from an artificially conceived notion of discipline, rather than from the necessities of successful resistance and were certain to be broken. The Manichean design of good versus evil was simple and useful for a time, but it was not, in the long run, "true." The truth in a situation of struggle is "that which promotes the emergence of the nation: it is all that protects the natives," and destroys the "living lie" of the colonial situation (Fanon, 1963: 50).

The "truth" was occurring outside the Muslim movement in the streets. By 1962-1963, the demonstrations and sit-ins

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had become mass movements. Elijah Muhammed kept the Muslims separate, and Malcolm grew increasingly restive (Breitman, 1967: 12-21).

I thought privately that we should have amended, or relaxed, our general non-engagement policy. I felt that where black people committed themselves, in the Little Rocks and Birminghams and other places, militantly disciplined Muslims should also be there.... It could be heard increasingly in the Negro community: "Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything, unless somebody bothers Muslims" [Malcolm X, 1964: 289].

Elijah Muhammed's movement could not envision liberation, but only coexistence with the old structures-escape, along a parallel track.

Malcolm astonished the world in April 1964 by his letter from Mecca asserting "the Oneness of Man."

We were truly all the same (brothers)-because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their minds, the "white" from their behavior and the "white" from their attitude [Malcolm X, 1964: 340].

The dramatic change in attitude toward whites was sympto- matic of a profound transformation in which he shook off the pattern of "white" thought structures and assumed his final identity as a black man: El Hajj Malik el Shabazz. The old Muslim pattern, while breaking with the concept of the "white master," has retained the power patterns which presume some sort of master. The Muslims were in the situation of the "liberi," or sons, in the primitive society described by Norman 0. Jones. In this society, the sons of the father were distinguished from his slaves by the title, "liberi," which signified that they "owned themselves." The genuinely liberated man is the one for whom the very concept of being "owned" is unthinkable. The father-owner and the self-owner, with its implicit connotation of a divided

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self, must disappear before liberation is possible. Previously Malcolm had attempted to bend the power-flow to accom- modate himself and his people-to substitute a more likeable owner-but at this point he transcended the western power structure altogether. "Mankind's history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual. Men are attracted by spirit. By power, men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power, anxieties are created" (Malcolm X, 1964: 368).

Fanon's (1963: 139) analysis of the third-world revolu- tionaries describes the same emerging insight as the primitive Manicheism adopted at the beginning of the struggle.

Racial feeling, as opposed to racial prejudice, and that determi- nation to fight for one's life which characterizes the native's reply to oppression are obviously good enough reasons for joining in the fight. But you do not carry on a war, nor suffer brutal and widespread repression, nor look on while all other members of your family are wiped out in order to make racialism or hatred triumph. Racialism and hatred and resentment-"a legitimate desire for revenge"-cannot sustain a war of liberation.

The reason for this is the dawning recognition that some Blacks are "whiter than the Whites," that some profiteer and exploit the struggle, and that the system meant to replace oppression is itself "yet another system of exploitation." As the natives look around them in the -course of the struggle, they also notice that the monolithic fagade of the white populace is crumbling. Some whites do not join in the hysteria, others condemn the repression. "The scandal explodes when the prototypes of this division of the species go over to the enemy, become Negroes or Arabs, and accept suffering, torture and death" (Fanon, 1963: 145). Such a confusing turn of events will either thwart the revolutionary struggle, or metamorphose it into a quest for a totally new and organic society. Fanon (1963: 197) says that "in the

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end, everything depends on the education" of the people. "Political education means opening their minds, awakening them, allowing the birth of their intelligence; as Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' "

Malcolm's trip to Mecca brought him to the awareness that the enemy was an international power arrangement which grew out of a certain thought pattern: "It's the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man" (Malcolm X, 1964: 371). This alteration in view did not result in an unqualified acceptance of white allies, since the fact re- mained that American whites are, whether they wish to be or not, products of social patterns which make an organic or "spiritual" awareness very unlikely.

Nor did Malcolm's change of view suggest a lessened expectation of violent struggle. Violence remained endemic to the situation and affected all of its creatures. His detachment had given way to what Hannah Arendt (1963: 82) calls "compassion"-a fierce, radical goodness which "shares the elementary violence inherent in all strength." Such passion sweeps away the old forms and engenders new souls. In the political sphere, compassion addressed to changing conditions in order to ease human suffering "will shun the drawn out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation and compromise which are the processes of law and politics, and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of violence." Malcolm foresaw that violence would inevitably touch him: "It's a time for martyrs now. And if I'm to be one, it will be for the case of brotherhood. That's the only thing that can save this country. I've learned it the hard way-but I've learned it" (Malcolm X, 1964: 429).

The personal consequences of Malcolm's change were profound. For the first time in his life he "stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being." Cut off

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from his past, alone in a throng of identically dressed pilgrims of all races, he stood in the airport at Jedda and he had "never felt more alone and helpless, since (he) was a baby." Malcolm, reborn, was quickly and completely taken into the human family by the Orthodox Muslims. "Love, humility and true brotherhood was almost a physical feeling wherever I turned.... All ate as One, and slept as One. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God." He made himself vulnerable to others, and they sustained him. The others were "physically present for him. . . liberated from categories" (Ohman, 1970: 137). This special gift of unity lasted during his pilgrimage through a newly liberated Africa. Everywhere he went the African people embraced him and wept and cheered.

I reflected many, many times to myself upon how the American Negro has been entirely brainwashed from ever seeing ... himself as a part of the non-white peoples of the world. The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites' concern for him: he has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him [1964: 346].

The Nigerians named him Omowale, "the son who has come home." Patricia Robinson's (1969: 29) article speaks of him in the broadest sense as the son who rejects his role as imitator and successor of the great father and returns instead, "to us, the women, the girl children, the poor and the have-nots, who are still ruled in dumb suffering." For W. Keorapetse Kgositsile (1969: 44), "Malcolm was our sun, our son," who taught his people to love. "Words of love become acts of love recreating the powerful gods in us.... Malcolm underwent the internal revolution and internalized the Black Revolution, the world revolution."

He returned to America determined to forge a new brotherhood like that he had experienced in emerging Africa:

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Life is lived at an impossibly high temperature. There is a permanent outpouring in all the villages of spectacular generosity, of disarming kindness and willingness, which cannot ever be doubted, to die for the "cause". All this is evocative of a confraternity, a church, and a mystical body of belief at one and the same time" [Fanon, 1963: 133].

Malcolm went back into the ghetto to form the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a revolutionary brotherhood and a new model for a human and spiritual society. His ideal was pastoral, in the sense of the revolutionary described by A. M. Elmessire (1969: 69) who may not believe that the world of simplicity and spiritual purity "actually exists, yet believes in the possibility of vision and its superiority over fact and reality."

The machinelike efficiency of the old Malcolm was gone, lost along with "the sickness and madness of those days"; his "nerves where shot, his brain tired" (Malcolm X, 1964: 426). He seemed to falter in conducting the business of the new organization, often ignoring his lieutenants and falling more into the company of the numberless, nameless people who sought him out on the streets, in restaurants, wherever he went. He drew closer to his family, telling Sister Betty, "We'll all be together. I want my family with me.... I'll never leave you so long again." Though his forces appeared to be scattered, his influence was increasing, unseen and unrecog- nized, because of the powerful meaning of his change.

Eldridge Cleaver's (1968: 54) testimony as to the meaning Malcolm's development held for him reveals the effects on many desperate men.

We had watched Malcolm X as he sought frantically to reorient himself and establish a new platform. It was like watching a master do a dance with death on a highstrung tightrope. He pirouetted, twirled, turned somersaults in the air-but he landed firmly on his feet and was off and running.

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After the assassination, he wrote, "I have, so to speak, washed my hands in the blood of the martyr, Malcolm X, whose retreat from the precipice of madness created new room for others to turn about in." Because Malcolm X had "turned about," many others were able to accomplish the difficult maneuver of coming to birth.

He sought to educate by embodying the new myth, he "invented souls" by drawing others into participation in the emerging black identity. Malcolm's efforts to pass on what he had experienced sprang from his hunger to "fill men's minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein" (Fanon, 1963: 205). Such a dream could not survive in America in 1965. Malcolm was about to go from history into myth, and he knew it. "Anyone who wants to follow me and my movement has got to be ready to go to jail, to the hospital, and to the cemetery before he can be truly free."

His life ended on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom in a hail of assassin's bullets. But his significance was just beginning as the American incarnation of the desperate men who are plucking a new humanity from the global whirlwind of violence. It was, in Aime Cesaire's words, a "living and splendid death."

REFERENCES

ARENDT, H. (1963) On Revolution. New York: Viking. BREITMAN, G. (1967) The Last Year of Malcolm X. New York: Schocken. CLARKE, J. H. [ed.] (1969) Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. New York:

Macmillan. CLEAVER, E. (1968) Soul on Ice. New York: Delta. DAVIS, A. (1973) "Lectures on liberation." Los Angeles: Peace. ELMESSIRE, A. M. (1969) "Islam as a Pastoral in the Life of Malcolm X," in J.

H. Clarke (ed.) Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. New York: Macmillan. FANON, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove.

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KGOSITSILE, W. K. (1969) "Malcolm X and the Black revolution: the tragedy of a dream deferred," in J. H. Clarke (ed.) Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. New York: Macmillan.

KING, M. L. (1963) "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in Why We Can't Wait. New York: Signet.

OHMAN, C. (1970) "The autobiography of Malcolm X: a revolutionary use of the Franklin tradition." Amer. Q. 22: 123-135.

ROBINSON, P. (1969) "Malcolm X, our revolutionary son and brother," in J. H. Clarke (ed.) Malcolm X: His Life and Times. New York: Macmillan.

SARTRE, J. P. (1963) "Preface," in F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove.

WRIGHT, R. (1940) Native Son. New York: Perennial. X, Malcolm (1964) The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove.