I first encountered the legend Malcolm X when I was in fifth grade. At my lily-white elementary school, my–a rarity in my hometown–black male teacher distributed a list of names to his predominantly white students and asked each to choose a name for a report. This was fifth grade and in the late 1980s; we were beginning to learn about black history, and it was February–Black History Month. The mimeographed list came to me, and I chose Malcolm X. I’d never before heard of him; at the time, I just wanted to find out why his last name was X. My teacher pulled me aside and said, “If you want to find out more about Malcolm when you’re older, he wrote an autobiography that was published after he died. You may want to read that.” I completed my report with the resources in our school library, learning about Malcolm X and his adoption of X as a last name. Not too long after that, I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X. And that’s the story of the most important book I’ve ever read; reading the Autobiography shook my worldview in a way that nothing else has. I, a middle-class white girl from the Midwest who could probably count on two hands the number of black people I had met at the point, had my life and worldview irrevocably shaped by this learning and reading experience. In the many years since first encountering the man with an X for a last name, I have seen Spike Lee’s film (I made my dad take me when it was released) and I have read and watched as much as I can about him.
In The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America, Mark Whitaker discusses the monumental impact that this leader has had in all facets of American culture, from the arts to politics. Whitaker covers the two most notable books about Malcolm X published in the last fifteen years, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention and Les and Tamara Payne’s The Dead Are Arising, and explains how both books demonstrate that Malcolm X and his movement are perennially ripe for interpretation and renewed understanding. Even Alex Haley’s shaping of Malcolm’s story in the Autobiography reveals the way that Malcolm X had meaning to different interpreters, a meaning that the later Marable and Payne books deconstructs and revises. Whitaker details Malcolm X’s impact on arts, not only Spike Lee’s film but also authors, poets, and hip hop artists. His discussions of the ways that Malcolm X influenced these movements are interesting and well-paced; he always brings these analyses back to the subject of his book.
Whitaker also spends time discussing Malcolm X’s impact on athletes. He details Muhammad Ali’s conversion to Islam, his close relationship with Malcolm X, and the disintegration of that relationship when Malcolm split with the Nation of Islam. The book nicely captures Ali’s remorse over humiliating Malcolm in the wake of that rupture. The book covers Lew Alcindor’s transformation into Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the way that reading the Autobiography catalyzed his conversion. And of course, three years after Malcolm X’s assassination, John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised the black power salute on the medal podium in the 1968 Summer Olympics. This seismic moment, Whitaker explains, is a direct result of Malcolm X’s exhortation to black people across the world that they should love and value themselves.
Of course Malcolm X influenced political movements. Whitaker contextualizes Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to the presidency in the young Obama’s reading and understanding of the Autobiography. He also analyzes Clarence Thomas’ (ugh) embrace of Malcolm X’s espousal of black self-reliance as a foundational part of his rejection of racial equality and equity for minorities. To be fair, Whitaker notes how tortured Thomas’ cherrypicking of Malcolm X’s legacy is, particularly in light of Thomas’ acceptance of gifts from wealthy white conservatives.
Malcolm X is often seen as in opposition to Martin Luther King Jr., the major civil rights icon of the 1960s. The two men met only once, and it was a cordial meeting as Whitaker tells it despite their many disagreements. Whitaker adeptly illustrates that in the short three-year period between the two men’s murders, MLK became more radical and more critical of social divide–likely due in part to the influence of Malcolm X.
Whitaker’s analysis of Malcolm X’s influence is bookended by the arrest and conviction of the activist’s assassins and the eventual exoneration of two of the convicted after decades behind bars. Whitaker illustrates how Malcolm X’s afterlife extends to the American justice system and its failings, both in the days leading to the assassination and in the pursuit of those responsible.
The most gratifying aspect of Whitaker’s analysis is the way that he describes, over and over, how white and Black readers alike have experienced reading the Autobiography–as a life-changing moment when their eyes were opened and (apologies to William Blake for my paraphrase) the doors of perception were wiped clean. The Autobiography, for them as well as for me, remains one of if not the most important book they’ll ever read. Whitaker’s book has earned a place next to Marable’s and Payne’s books as well as the Autobiography as insightful explorations of the man, the myth, and the legend.
