Autobiography of Malcolm X By Alex Haley

¶ … Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his assassination in February 1965, is a collaborative effort by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Containing as it does the entire life history of Malcolm X, the book is a virtual kaleidoscope of the man's various philosophies, be it on African-American unity and integration; racism; religion; non-violence; or human rights. But the singular fact that stands out while reading the book is the many transformations that Malcolm X went through during his lifetime. The drastic shifts in circumstances, ideologies and life paths chosen make it extremely difficult to identify any one consistent philosophy that characterizes the man. Yet, it is precisely for that very reason that there is an identifiable underlying philosophy that shines through almost his entire life span. And that is, Malcolm X was a man who believed in the virtue of self-realization and self-actualization. This inherent personal philosophy is evident in the acute self-awareness of the same that he displays when he tells Haley "Anything I do today I regard as urgent. No man is given but so much time to accomplish whatever is his life's work." (Haley, p.378)

Personally, I am in complete agreement with Malcolm X that only self-realization and self-actualization can help an individual optimize the time available in a given lifetime. More important, it is only the awareness of the importance of such a philosophy that will enable the fostering of the necessary courage to overcome perceived psychological, cultural and economic barriers that come in the way of an individual's self-development process. Admittedly, the philosophy of self-awareness, realization, and actualization is an age-old one espoused by philosophers as long ago as Socrates. But the fact remains that there are very few individuals who have the intelligence and the strength of character to actually live out such a philosophy, sometimes despite the best of efforts by philosophers, psychologists and sociologists. Haley's autobiography of Malcolm X succeeds in chronicling the history of a man who not only believed in the personal benefits of self-actualization but also lived it!

One characteristic of self-actualized people is the ability to form one's own opinions and beliefs (Velasquez, p.34, para 2). Right through Malcolm X's life one sees the evidence of just this trait, starting from his early childhood. In Chapter Two of his autobiography, Malcolm describes his years at Mason Junior High where he turns out to be one of the school's top students. However, post his teacher, Mr. Ostrowski advising him to tailor his ambitions in keeping with the status of his race, he quickly realizes that the system would never allow him to succeed in his aspirations: "Yet nearly none of them had earned marks equal to mine. It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn't, I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes...." (Haley, p. 44) With this realization, Malcolm turns his back on a formal education for the life experience of the street. The point is not whether Malcolm took a right or wrong decision, but that the child Malcolm was not afraid to form and act on an opinion which went against the grain of convention. Most people would have reacted by striving even harder to get accepted by the system. Later in life, the same Malcolm forms quite a different opinion on the value of education. In Chapter Ten, he describes the transformation of his views on education through his interactions with his prison inmate, John Eltron Bembry: "...I wasn't the first inmate who had never heard of Thoreau until Bimbi expounded on him...." (Haley, p. 178) With this, Malcolm undergoes an intellectual and spiritual realization and evolution, which he narrates in Chapter Eleven. Abandoning his life as a wastrel, Malcolm turns to devouring everything he can find to enrich his knowledge: "...from then until I left prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk...I had never been so truly free in my life." (Haley, p. 199) Again, one sees here that Malcolm had the strength of character to form his own beliefs and reform and that too in a prison environment, which could have easily drawn him down further into a life of squalor and disgrace.

Another characteristic of a self-actualized person in that he or she constantly draw from his life's experiences to develop clear value systems, which help find a meaning to life (Velasquez, p.34, para 5). While the aforesaid statement is a self-evident truth given the path Malcolm X treaded from innocent childhood to a nation's spiritual and political leader, even given his in-between lapse into crime and degradation, it is best reflected by his own words: "But people are always speculating - why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All our experiences fuse into our personality." (Haley, 150) And Malcolm X truly did introspect and value each and every experience thus enabling him to constantly review, refine and evolve his value system. Only such a philosophy could have enabled him to reject his earlier separatism rhetoric, break away from the Nation of Islam, and move to an ideology that embodied new convictions about race, religion and an awareness that allowed him to extend his hand to the white man at the traffic signal: "I don't mind shaking hands with human beings. Are you one?" (Haley, 363)