JUST FINISHED THE MOST MOVING, TROUBLING, AND INSIGHTFUL BOOK MYeyes have pierced in a decade: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X was a Black Muslim; I’m a Jewish believer in Jesus. Little of his theology, attitudes, and conclusions resonate with me (no doubt, little of mine would have with him, either). I’m not here to praise the man; I’m here to praise his book, which powerfully reinforced for me Jesus’ words “Judge not” (Matt. 7:1, KJV). Sure, actions need to be judged, but The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which put me into another man’s skin (the skin of a different color), showed me the world through another man’s eyes and made me tremble at the thought of judging another man’s soul.
“When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night,” telling the family to get out of town. That’s the opening line to his life. By page 8 he wrote that his family was so poor “we would eat the hole out of a doughnut.” When Malcolm was 6, his father was killed by White racists. Though the insurance company ruled it suicide, Malcolm asked: “How could my father bash himself in the head, then get down across the streetcar tracks to be run over?” All that by page 14.
By page 200, after doing jail time, Malcolm joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name: “For me, my ‘X’ replaced the white slavemaster name of ‘Little’ which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.” Malcolm X, whose brilliance was undeniable, became the most famous voice for the Nation of Islam as he railed, openly, controversially, and sometimes with frightening logic, against Black integration with the “White devils.” His most infamous line was when, after the JFK assassination, he said it was the “chickens coming home to roost.” So used to inflicting violence on others, particularly on its Blacks, America, he said, just “reaped what it had been sowing.” No wonder he made everyone, whatever their color, nervous.
Malcolm’s rage wasn’t fueled in Lester Maddox’s Georgia or the like, but, in fact, in the North. “I know nothing about the South,” he wrote. “I am a creation of the Northern white man . . .” He spoke not only against the civil rights movement but against the church as well. “Sunday mornings in this year of grace 1965, imagine the ‘Christian conscience’ of congregations guarded by deacons barring the door to black would-be worshipers, telling them ‘You can’t enter this House of God!’”
Painful words, but who can argue with them?
Over time, Malcolm X started to mellow, conceding even that “not all white people are racists.” However much his life was dominated by anger against White European “Christians” (to that I can relate), that anger blinded him to the injustices in Islam. Muslim Arabs had been trading in Black slaves long before the White European “Christians” followed suit. For some reason, too, he believed that in Islam racism was nonexistent (anger can distort even the keenest eyes).
There’s an Adventist connection in the Malcolm X story. After his father was murdered, his mother attended a Seventh-day Adventist church. The Adventists were, he wrote, “the friendliest white people I had ever seen.” Too bad the contact didn’t bear longer-lasting fruit because, the more I read, the more I could see the change, the progress, the maturity of a man who had passionately felt the injustice and hypocrisy of America in relationship to its Black citizens.
Had he not been gunned down before he turned 40, murdered by rival Black Muslims, who knows where he would have ended? Even through the rage that blistered from the pages of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I could see the journey Mr. X was on and wondered, What would he think about the America of today, the America of Barack Obama?
No matter how uncomfortable it makes us, his story is an American one, one that every American—White or Black—ought to read. Each one can then judge Malcolm X for themselves.
On second thought, better leave that judging to God.
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