An X-Purgated Classic?
Scholar Charges Alex Haley With Omitting Vital Chapters From Malcolm X Autobiography
Revolutionary. Pan-Africanist. American Muslim leader. Brilliant organizer
and orator. Expelled second-in-command from the Nation of Islam. Martyr.
International icon. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Malcolm X.
On May 19, Malcolm would have been 80; last February 21 marked the 40th
anniversary of his assassination. Yet charges by a prominent scholar have
spilled kerosene upon the memory of the already controversial activist,
claiming that Autobiography co-author Alex Haley may have been an FBI
informant who collaborated in suppressing three critical chapters from the
definitive Malcolm X classic. Locked in a lawyer’s safe to this day,
these legendary “missing” chapters are the pan-Africanist
equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In a February 21 interview on Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, Manning
Marable, a major leftist American scholar and former head of Columbia
University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies,
alleged that Haley’s goal was to shape the Autobiography in a way that
painted Malcolm X in an unflattering light. “Haley was a republican. He
was an integrationist... opposed to Black Nationalism,” Marable said.
“Haley felt he could make a solid case in favour of racial integration
by showing what was, to white America, the consequence of their support for
racial separatism that would end up producing a kind of hate.”
Marable’s claims stem from Haley’s connection with journalist
Alfred Balk, who allegedly approached the FBI regarding an article he and
Haley were jointly composing for the Saturday Evening Post. The FBI, whose
often-lethal role in suppressing American labour and ethnic liberation
movements is detailed in Jim Vander Wall’s and Ward Churchill’s
Agents of Repression, targeted the Nation of Islam for surveillance,
infiltration and “neutralization,” especially to prevent the
final project of Malcolm’s life, a coalition between Black Nationalists
and integrationist civil rights groups.
“A deal was struck between Balk, Haley and the FBI,” Marable
says, “that the FBI provided information to Balk and Haley in the
construction of their article.... One can assume that Haley did because Haley
and Balk co-authored the piece, traveled throughout the United States
together and collected material together to form an article that they
co-authored. It would be highly unlikely that Haley did not
know.”
A. Peter Bailey, the former editor of Ebony and a founding member of
Malcolm’s secular, united-front Organization of Afro-American Unity,
doesn’t take Marable’s word for it. “Marable is going to
have show me the basis for his claim,” he says.
Karl Evanzz, a leading Malcolm X scholar and the author of The Judas Factor:
The Plot to Kill Malcolm X and The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah
Muhammad, is far less forgiving than Bailey. Speaking from his office at the
Washington Post, where he’s an online editor, he said,
“It’s the old guilt-by-association attack. He’s basically
saying that if one writer had been compromised, then both had been, which I
think is pretty far-fetched. It reminds me of McCarthyism.... It’s a
really cheap shot to say that Alex Haley was an informant based upon the fact
that a co-writer was feeding information to the FBI, even if that’s
true.... [Marable] found nothing to say that Haley was freely exchanging
information about Malcolm with the FBI.”
To this day, almost no one has seen the missing chapters, which according to
Marable formed Malcolm’s final political plan for a national and global
African liberation movement. But Malcolm’s murder in 1965 meant he
didn’t live long enough to approve the final manuscript, and so
chapters excised by Haley stayed in the co-author’s possession until
his death in 1992, when Detroit attorney Greg Reed purchased them at auction
for $100,000. According to Bailey and Evanzz, Reed has no political interest
in the content of the 90-odd pages. “When you talk to [Gregory]
Reed,” says Evanzz, “he will tell you from the outset that his
name is ‘G. R-E-E-D.’ He makes no qualms about what he’s
been trying to do with those chapters: sell them.”
While Malcolm was never elected to any public office, his national and
international standing during the “golden age” of pan-Africanism
and anti-colonial struggle saw him rise to the level of de facto ambassador
for African America; he addressed the Second African Summit Conference
Organization in Cairo in 1964, and was granted observer status at the
Organization of African Unity. This revolutionary vector likely caused panic
in Washington, since Malcolm was planning to connect the struggle of Africans
in America to their struggle overseas by taking the United States government
before the World Court on charges of crimes against humanity.
“I’d be willing to bet you,” Bailey says, “that
whatever is missing probably dealt with whatever he was trying to accomplish
on an international level.... I think the United States government would be
interested in suppressing that information.”
Evanzz disagrees. “Haley was being paid to write an autobiography on
Malcolm X, not a hagiography,” he says. “I’ve seen parts of
those chapters that [Marable] talks about, and these chapters had nothing to
do with biographical material; they were basically Malcolm’s political
thought, so they belonged properly [in a book] of his political
thought.”
Attempts to exploit Malcolm X for monetary reasons become even more ghoulish.
In 1999, the Butterfield & Butterfield auction house listed a Malcolm X
notebook—stolen by a court clerk from evidence lockup sometime before
1991—for $30,000 to $50,000. This same notebook, bloodstained and
perforated by buckshot, was in Malcolm’s pocket the day of his
assassination, and allegedly contained a list penned in Malcolm’s hand
naming five men who would assassinate him. News of the auction caused
outrage, and after a protracted protest, the auction house finally turned
over the notepad to Malcolm’s daughters. “It’s an
outrage—the idea that Butterfield would even consider selling something
that precious, with the man’s blood on it, it boggles the mind.
It’s something you’d read in a really bad farcical novel.”
V
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