Malcolm X (with Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

This was thrilling for me to read, for both personal and intellectual reasons. My son, Sammy, is entering 9th grade next week at Bard High School Early College, Manhattan, the first of the BHSECs established and the sister school to my own BHSEC in Queens. At Bard Manhattan, they ask each class, including freshmen, to read a book over the summer, and the ninth-graders are reading The Autobiography. Stacy and I decided to read the book, so we could accompany Sammy and discuss it with him ahead of time. Talk about "concerted cultivation" among the Bildungsbuergertum! The book itself was gripping and fascinating. Previously I'd only read a couple of short excerpts. I knew the outlines of Malcolm X's conversion to Islam (or, really, the Nation of Islam) in prison and his subsequent conversion to true Islam, and to a less hostile and somewhat more cosmopolitan outlook, upon his hajj to Mecca in 1964, one year before his assassination by Nation of Islam gunmen. But I hadn't known the details and I hadn't known much about his life before the Nation of Islam, which itself had involved a primary metamorphosis into a hustler in Boston and Harlem. Intellectually, what was most interesting was to learn how different the Nation of Islam was from Islam proper. In addition to its Manichean view of originally Black (and good) Man and the "white devils" spawned by an evil mad scientist some 4,000 years ago, two radical deviations from Islam proper stood out: 1) the NoI elevated its leader Elijah Muhammad to the role of Messenger of God, replacing the original Muhammad, who appears to have played no role whatsoever in the NoI and 2) the NoI denied the existence of heaven and hell, describing these concepts as a ruse to anesthetize the downtrodden. The Nation of Islam seems to have been both a cult dedicated to Elijah Muhammad and also a creative, briefly somewhat successful, effort at nation building.