I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was a freshman in high school. It wasn’t an assignment. I can’t recall exactly what motivated me to read it. I’d been an insatiable reader since I’d learned how to read and that curiosity might have been enough.
I admired Mohammed Ali and might have wanted to learn more about Islam because of that, or my interest might have been a consequence of my interest in all religious traditions. Besides that, the civil rights movement was a constant feature of my childhood. But that movement was something I experienced mostly in the news, on TV, or in the papers. Race relations never had much visibility or heat in the small coastal town in North Carolina where I grew up.
My mother worked mornings, half days, so until I entered kindergarten a black woman took care of me during those hours. I remember her vividly (her name I’ll withhold in respect of her privacy) as a warm and kind woman. I was small, of course, and can recall her washing me in the stainless steel double sink (that my mother was very proud of) until I was too big for that and had to use the tub.
Her husband came around and helped my Dad with yard work and other things sometimes. They seemed like members of the extended family. Beyond the times when they were working we didn’t socialize or share any other activities.
The town was obviously segregated but I don’t remember any separate public facilities. Public schools were integrated by the time I entered first grade. It seems to me that blacks and whites shopped and ate in the same places. There just was no big tension about it in the local area.
The white people in the town, the adults and the kids, threw around the word, ‘nigger’, and similar words without much restraint or caution. If my younger brother or I used such words it was a guaranteed spanking, or even worse, stinging swipes with a switch torn from a weeping willow tree in the yard, punishment that left marks on the legs, the mind, and the heart..
My father and his father were believers and practitioners of corporal punishment. Fortunately, for my brother and me, that kind of punishment was rare and reserved for the worst offenses.
Nearby, further inland in tobacco and cotton country, it was a different story. When we drove to Raleigh for shopping we passed through Smithfield on the way. Entering that town there was a big billboard with a white robed Klansman on his white robed horse. The horse reared up and the Klansman held a lance extending above the billboard edge.
The billboard read, ‘Welcome to Ku Klux Klan Country’.
It made me ashamed and angry to see such things, to see the violence and discrimination on TV, and feel the prejudice and bigotry around me. I really didn’t understand that ignorance, that strength of emotion, and the senseless violence that people could inflict on one another.
When riots broke out in cities around the country, when the Black Panthers and others raised their voices, when Martin Luther King, Jr. marched and asked people to look in the mirror and ask themselves if it was right to treat people badly because of the color of their skin, and when there was resistance to the movements toward greater equality, fairness and justice, I wanted to understand it all better.
So maybe that was part of my motivation to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His story helped me to understand the culture and society he grew up in, so much different from my own. I grew to admire him for the commitment and discipline he exerted to turn his life around and to resist the dysfunctional society that surrounded him and eventually sent him to prison.
His story led me to further investigate and appreciate the religion of Islam. I was impressed with the way that Malcolm X resisted blind acceptance of the Nation of Islam. He saw the faults. He was willing to change his mind, and his heart, in the light of new information. The hajj changed him. No longer did he see all whites as devils. No longer did he believe that the only way that the races could flourish was by living separately.
In time, through life experience and focused study, he rose from a low and painful life with little prospect for a better future, and became an impressive, thoughtful, and courageous man.
In much the same way as Gordon Parks serves as a role model, as a person to aspire toward, so does Malcolm X.
The legacy of both of these men will endure and inspire positive change for a long time to come.