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-andjeaternity, frustrated—at home, on the Muslims he met, most of whorn he could not com- municate with because of the language barrier. Back im - America, he acknowledged that it would be a long time before | the Negro was ready to make common struggle with the A fri- cans and Arabs. In Mecca, Malcolm also dra- matically announced that he had changed his view on integration, because he had seen true brotherhood there between / black and white Muslims. In~ reality he had begun changing | his attitude on integration and the civil rights movement many morths before as the divisions ‘between him and Efffaty—Mn-' hammad widened. Part-way through the book his attacks on | the movement became muted, and in the epilogue Haley con- cludes that Malcolm “had a re- ! luctant admiration for Dr. Mar- , tin Luther King.” The roots of Malcoim’s am- bivalence were much more pro- found than personal opportun- ism. In a touching confession of dilemma he told Haley, “ ‘the so-called moderate’ civil rights organizations avoided him as ‘too militant’ and the ‘so-called militants’ avoided him as ‘too moderate.” “They won't let mie turn the corner!’ he once ex- claimed. ‘I'm caught in a trap!’ ” Malcolm was moving toward the mainstream of the civil rights movement when his life was cut short, but he still had quite a way to go. His anti- Semitic comments are a symp- tom of this malaise. Had he been able to “turn the ; corner,” he would have made an } enormous contribution to the struggle for equal rights. As it was, his contribution was sub- stantial He brought hope and a measure of dignity to thous- ands of despairing ghetto Ne- grocs. His “extremism” made | the “mainstream” civil rights — groups more respectable by | comparison and helped them wrest substantial copscgsions oa eS en ee a il ool 0 eum sete | <r eens from the power structure. Mal- coim himself clearly understood the complicated role he played At a Selma ratly, while Dr. King was in jail, Malcolm said, “Whites better be glad Martin . Luther King is rallying the : people because other forces are waiting to take over if he fails.” Of course, he never frightened the racists and the reactionaries as much as he made liberals feel uncomfortable, and moderates used his extremism as an ex- cuse for inaction. Behind the grim visage on television that upset so many white Americans there was a compassionate and often gentle man with a sense of humor. A testament to his personal hon- esty was that he died broke and money had to be raised for his funeral and family. Upset by the comments in the African and Asian press criti- _ cizing the United States gov- _ ernment for Malcolm's fate, ’ Carl T. Rowan, Director of the _ United States Information * Agency, held up some foreign ‘papers and told a Washington audience, according to Alex Haley, “. . . All this about an ex-convict, ex-dope peddler, ‘who became a racial fanatic.” Yes, all this and more, before ‘we can understand. Malcolm's ‘autobiography, reveaune ic OWT, seyects.of his life amb<chae- acter, makes that tortured jour- ney more understandable. One of the book's shortcom- ings is that M. S. Handler and Haley, in their sensitive and in- sightful supplementary ¢om- ments, make no comprehensive | estimate of Matcolm x as a ’ political leader. His often con- flicting roles in the civil Tights movement are described rather than analyzed. Perhaps this couldn't be helped, for Haley writes that Malcolm wanted a chronicter,- net an interpreter. Obviously, Malcolm was not ready to make a synthesis of his ideas and an evaluation of | hig.politiaal role. «—e—= Shoethe after Malcoln's. death Tom Kahn and I wrote in New America and Dissent: “Now that he is dead, we must resist the temptation to idealize Mal- colm X, to elevate charisma to greatness. History's judgment, of him will surely be ambiguous. His voice and words were cathartic, channeling into mili- tant verbiage emotions that otherwise might have run a violently destructive course. But having described the evil, he had no program for attacking it. With rare skill and feeling he articulated angry subter- ranean moods more widespread than any of us like to admit. But having blown the trumpet, he could summon, even at the very end, only a handful of follow- ers.” Of course we cannot judge political effectiveness by num- hers alone, hut we cannot ignore his inability to build a move- ment. As a spokesman for Ne- gro anger and frustration, he teft his mark on history, but as a militant political leader he failed—and the Negro com- munity needed both. Till the | end, his program was a maze of contradictions. He was a bril- 4 liant psychologist when it came to articulating the emotions and thoughts of ghetto Negroes, but he knew virtually nothing about economics, and more important, his program had no relevance to the needs of lower-class Ne- groes. His conception of the is reflected in such remarks as “it is because black men do not own and contro! their commu- nity retail establishments that they cannot stabilize their own communities.” And he advo- cates, as a solution, that Ne- groes who buy so many cars and so much expensive whiskey ! should own automobile fran- chises and distilleries. Malcolm was wrging Negroes to. poof their resources into small bosi- ness establishments at a time when small businesses were de- clining under the pressure of big business and when an un- planned technological revolution is creating massive unemploy- ment for unskilled .Nesrnes. | a economic roots of the problem ~