the autobiography of malcolm x by malcolm x

Malcolm's last year of life should perhaps be viewed as primarily a period of transition. Moreover, it was difficult for Malcolm to consider acting on his own convictions, especially after so many years of blindly following Elijah Muhammad. Despite his faults, Muhammad had literally saved Malcolm's life. His anti-white rhetoric was founded basically upon the role of the white man as devil, and whatever he did or said during this period, he was acting 'according to the will of Elijah Muhammad.' Yet he did not revolt against Elijah Muhammad's authority until it became evident that he had no choice. In prison, Malcolm became a Black Muslim, and after his release, he quickly rose through the ranks to become a powerful man in the Nation of Islam, second only to Elijah Muhammad himself. He was merely acting according to white society's expectation of him he had descended to the lowest depths of white America, but he had not escaped it. Malcolm's change from a promising junior high student to a ghetto hustler was largely in reaction to whites who treated him as though he were a 'mascot.' Yet even in his career as a dope peddler, bootlegger, and robber in Harlem, he was not free of the white man.

He feels that, as a black criminal, he was a creation of white-dominated American society yet he takes personal responsibility for his actions because he allowed himself to be manipulated by whites. He makes no excuses for the first phase of his life. He is a man of uncompromising honesty to himself and to his reader, determined to tell the last degrading bit of truth about his life of crime so that his elevation above it might seem the more miraculous. The narrator of the novel is a combination of the last two personalities. A fiery, outspoken Black Muslim minister, Malcolm was a fierce racial separatist and an enemy of 'the white devil.' During the last year of his life, he became Malcolm the Pilgrim, still retaining the fiery oratory of the preceding period but desperately searching now for a means of reconciling the racial problems in America. As Malcolm X, he became a symbol of the black man's hatred of the white man. He was a child who fit the sociologists' stereotype - that is, he matured in a life of crime and depravity. First, he was Malcolm Little, the product of a Midwestern black home, a home torn apart by the death of the father and by the interference of welfare agents.

His three different names describe the three phases of Malcolm's career. The narrator and central character of the Autobiography, Malcolm came to be one of the most important political figures of his time, and because of this book, his importance has probably increased, rather than diminished, since his death.

The autobiography of malcolm x by malcolm x