In June 1963, Malcolm X and Alex Haley began working on the book that would define both their lives. The arrangement was simple. Malcolm usually arrived at Haley’s New York apartment at nine in the evening, exhausted after a day’s work. The two men then talked late into the night, discussing politics, religion and race over an endless stream of cheap coffee. The next morning, a bleary-eyed Haley would adapt his notes into a rough manuscript, trying to recreate Malcolm’s distinctive voice. This draft would eventually become The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) – a landmark of American literature and one of the best-selling biographies of all time.
This success gave the Autobiography a lasting cultural impact. Malcolm’s words have inspired protests and political campaigns across the world, and been incorporated into music and artworks from New York to Nairobi. In recent years, however, historians have begun to criticise his ghostwriter’s influence over the text. Haley claimed to be a ‘dispassionate chronicler’ but, they point out, he exaggerated parts of Malcolm’s life and ignored others. As Malcolm’s career began to move in unexpected directions, Haley even turned to plagiarism and invention to fill gaps in the narrative. The result is a memoir that is neither entirely Malcolm’s, nor entirely Haley’s, a testament to their difficult relationship and the complicated circumstances of the book’s creation.
The Autobiography emerged from one of the most dramatic moments of the civil rights struggle. In June 1963, as Malcolm and Haley sat down in New York, Congress was debating the first draft of the Civil Rights Act – a historic piece of legislation that promised to end segregation and outlaw racial discrimination. Activists and campaigners across the country were busy preparing for the March on Washington, an unprecedented rally in support of civil and economic rights. White supremacists, in response, escalated their own campaigns of intimidation and violence. In Alabama, the state’s governor George Wallace protested in front of a state university in an attempt to prevent Black students from attending the first day of classes. In Mississippi, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered at his home by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Malcolm X was keenly aware of this violence. He had grown up in poverty in the American Midwest, where Black communities lived in fear of racist militias. He learned to navigate the segregated neighbourhoods of Boston and New York, dodging the draft and making money as a petty criminal before spending time in prison. He eventually found solace in the Nation of Islam, a religious group that urged Black Americans to return to the Muslim faith of their ancestors. From a pulpit in Harlem, he called on his congregation to reject assimilation and suggested that Black communities could defend themselves only by separating entirely from white society. Coffee and cream, he joked, were the only things he liked better integrated.
Haley disagreed completely. Born to a Black family in upstate New York, he was a liberal integrationist who supported the mainstream civil rights movement. He had served in the US Coast Guard during the Second World War, writing stories in the breaks between long shifts in the kitchens, and worked as a publicist for the US military for more than a decade. By 1963, he had made a name for himself as a magazine journalist, specialising in candid interviews with outspoken celebrities. He also began putting together plans for a new project – an ambitious history of his family through the generations, which would eventually be published as the novel Roots (1976).
Haley promised that nothing could appear in the manuscript without Malcolm’s personal approval
Haley first interviewed Malcolm X for a 1960 Reader’s Digest article on the Nation of Islam. At first, the relationship between the two men was marked by suspicion. Haley accused Malcolm of being a violent agitator, and Malcolm suspected that Haley was a government informant. These were fair concerns: in his 2011 biography of Malcolm, the historian Manning Marable reveals that one of Haley’s articles on the Nation of Islam incorporated material from FBI surveillance files that the Bureau had shared with Haley’s co-author Alfred Balk. Over time, however, Haley earned Malcolm’s begrudging trust. As the historian Robert J Norrell pointed out in 2015, Haley was one of the first mainstream journalists to take the so-called Black Muslim movement seriously. As Haley explained in Reader’s Digest, the Nation’s militant rhetoric was a powerful warning of the dangers to come if the US government failed to assimilate Black Americans.
In May 1963, Haley interviewed Malcolm X for another platform – Playboy magazine – and asked if he would be willing to collaborate on an autobiography. Malcolm was reluctant at first, concerned that the project could draw attention away from the Nation of Islam’s autocratic leader Elijah Muhammad. Haley responded by travelling to Muhammad’s home in Arizona to secure his personal support for the autobiography. Having been given the leader’s personal blessing, the two men then signed a $20,000 deal with Doubleday. At Malcolm’s insistence, Haley also drew up a contract promising that nothing could appear in the manuscript – ‘whether a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter’ – without Malcolm’s personal approval. In return, Haley reserved the right to write an epilogue that would allow him to put his views in context.
Early interview sessions were tense. According to Haley, Malcolm often entered his New York apartment with the words ‘Testing – one, two, three!’ as if speaking to a hidden microphone. Malcolm was reluctant to reveal details about his personal life, and Haley resorted to leaving scrap paper around Malcolm’s chair in the hope he would scribble rough notes. Over time, however, the two developed a stable working relationship. Malcolm opened up about his childhood in Michigan, and his experiences of poverty after the death of his father. He started talking about his youth in Boston and New York, rising from his chair to snap his fingers and demonstrate dance moves. He also went into detail about his criminal past, and his conversion to the Nation of Islam in prison. Haley was delighted, pressing Malcolm for more detail to fill gaps in the narrative. ‘I know exactly what I need,’ he wrote to Malcolm in August 1963. ‘And will be able to move directly from one to the next thing [so] that you can make spontaneous supply.’ The two began editing the text together, with Malcolm’s suggestions in red ink and Haley’s in green.
This arrangement allowed Malcolm and Haley to shape the narrative of the Autobiography according to their own interests. This is particularly clear in the first two chapters, which were completed in September 1963. The narrative, which covers Malcolm’s childhood and teenage years, makes no mention of his mother’s political work and only briefly mentions his father’s. Both had been activists on behalf of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, a Black nationalist organisation that advocated for the diaspora to return to Africa and build self-sufficient communities. Malcolm was strongly influenced by Garvey’s ideas about race, history and community development, and spoke about them throughout his life. According to acquaintances in New York, he also read communist literature as a young man and occasionally attended party meetings. The Autobiography, by contrast, attributes his political awakening to a single source: the Nation of Islam. In his biography, Marable suggests that Haley encouraged these omissions to simplify the narrative. To Malcolm, meanwhile, they ensured that all credit for his political work went to his mentor Elijah Muhammad.
Haley had run through his book advance, and planned to complete it quickly and move on to other projects
Marable also suggests that Malcolm exaggerated the extent of his criminal activity in the third through ninth chapters of the Autobiography. This may be an overstatement. By interviewing Malcolm’s friends in Boston and New York, the historians Les and Tamara Payne have proven that he worked as a marijuana dealer, a racketeer and an armed robber before his eventual conviction for larceny. By late 1963, however, Haley had begun to press Malcolm for anecdotes about his life of crime to provide contrast with his ‘galvanic, absolute conversion’ in prison. At times, these stories wilfully stretched the truth. Chapter 9, for example, depicts Malcolm playing a game of Russian Roulette to intimidate his fellow gang members. In reality, he had hidden the bullet in his hand before firing. He asked Haley to leave this detail out of the manuscript, claiming that ‘[too] many people would be so quick to say that’s what I’m doing today – bluffing.’
This collaborative relationship began to fall apart as Malcolm’s life began moving in unexpected directions. The book’s original deadline was October 1963, less than five months after the deal with Doubleday was signed. In December 1963, however, Malcolm was silenced by the Nation of Islam after making a speech that implied that the recently assassinated John F Kennedy had deserved his fate. ‘Being an old farm boy myself,’ he had told the crowd, ‘chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad.’ The silencing also reflected the growing tensions between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, which had escalated after Malcolm discovered that his mentor was having affairs with the secretaries at his Arizona home. Haley took the news of the rift poorly. By this point, Marable reveals, Haley had run through his share of the book’s advance and planned to complete it quickly and move on to other projects. In secret, he flew to Arizona, meeting with Elijah Muhammad and begging him to end the punishment. Muhammad promised that it was temporary, but Malcolm would never return to the Nation of Islam.
Instead, Malcolm began to broaden his philosophy. In letters to friends, he confided that he had grown to distrust his former mentor. Through conversations with his half-sister Ella Collins, he also began to doubt the teachings of the Nation of Islam. He began to develop plans for ambitious political work, aiming to combine moderate and radical activists into a united front against racism. For Haley, this conversion was a mixed blessing. Malcolm’s new political outlook brought the two closer together, but it meant that he was often too busy thinking about his future to reflect on his past. ‘How it is possible to write one’s autobiography,’ he complained to Haley in March 1964, ‘in a world so fast-changing as this?’ Haley’s problems deepened when Malcolm decided to go on a tour of Africa and Asia between April and May 1964. In Saudi Arabia, Malcolm further distanced himself from the Nation of Islam and embraced Sunni Islam. He also rejected his Black supremacist ideas, praying alongside European Muslims and advocating for a religious universalism. ‘For the past week,’ he wrote from Mecca, ‘I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed around me by people of all colors.’ He also expanded his political world, spending time with activists in Egypt, Nigeria and Ghana. As the continent moved toward independence, successful campaigns against empire seemed more and more like a model for activism in the US.
Haley received updates on these travels from Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz, and was briefly given access to Malcolm’s personal papers. Some sections of Chapters 17 to 19, including Malcolm’s first impressions of Mecca and the humbling experience of learning how to pray, are lifted directly from his travel diary. In other places, however, Haley seems to have re-used material from his previous writing. Malcolm’s comments on the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in Chapter 15, notes the historian Garrett Felber, were lifted directly from Haley’s article on Jackson for Reader’s Digest. Haley also turned to more unusual methods to fill gaps in the narrative. In June 1964, for example, he sent one of Malcolm’s postcards to a graphologist, who declared that the handwriting revealed that Malcolm had a ‘definite feeling of purpose’, but was ‘not a deep thinker’. Haley announced that he intended to publish these results in his epilogue – but not before asking Malcolm for the hour of his birth so he could determine his astrological pattern.
The descriptions of his speeches, the people he met and events he attended were likely lifted directly from this letter
Desperate for material, Haley also plagiarised the work another writer. Alice Windom was a 28-year-old social worker from St Louis, Missouri. In 1962, inspired by African nationalist ideals, she had abandoned her life in the US to move to newly independent Ghana. By 1964, she had become close with a diverse group of Black American radicals, renting an apartment with the trade unionist Vicki Garvin and the writer Maya Angelou. When Malcolm visited Accra in May 1964, Windom joined Garvin and Angelou to form an unofficial welcome committee, introducing their guest to diplomats and politicians and helping him to navigate the city. She then wrote a six-page letter about the visit for friends back home, hoping to counteract any negative coverage of Malcolm’s tour in the US press. ‘It is not for publication,’ Windom insisted, ‘but use it any other way you wish.’
Fifty-six sentences from Windom’s letter appear verbatim in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The descriptions of Malcolm’s speeches in Ghana, the people he met and the events he attended, as the historians Erik McDuffie and Komozi Woodard point out, were likely lifted directly from Windom’s writing. In some places, Haley simply changed Windom’s third person to the first person, passing off her observations as Malcolm’s own. In others, he edited Windom’s text to disguise its origins, changing phrases like ‘since I’ve been in Ghana’ to ‘since Dr W E B Du Bois had come to Ghana’. At one point, Haley cites four stories from ‘the African press’ about his time in Accra. In reality, all four are direct quotes from different sections of Windom’s letter. None of this writing was reproduced with Windom’s permission, or even her knowledge. Speaking to McDuffie and Woodard decades later, she admitted that she was not even sure how the letter got into Haley’s hands.
Malcolm returned to the US on 21 May, and Haley met him later that day. The two briefly continued their work on the Autobiography together – but it soon became clear that Malcolm had his mind on other things. Inspired by his experiences in Mecca, he now wanted to convert other Nation of Islam members to Sunnism and put them in touch with their ‘brothers and sisters’ in the Muslim world. He also wanted to strengthen the links between Black Americans and anticolonial groups, creating a new Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) which would allow civil rights groups to make ‘direct contact with African governments’. At the same time, however, Malcolm also had to deal with death threats from Elijah Muhammad’s supporters. Recognising that his life was in danger, friends and family encouraged him to return abroad to safety. Haley was among them. ‘Think of the millions of black people in America who respect and heed you,’ he wrote to Malcolm in June 1964. ‘Hell, think of me! I never have had a close friend die.’
Malcolm took Haley’s advice, leaving the US in July and returning to Egypt. This would prove a benefit to his political work. In Cairo, he attended a summit of the Organization of African Unity, the forum of postcolonial states that had helped to inspire Malcolm’s own OAAU. In backrooms and corridors, he presented himself as an unofficial representative of Black America, lobbying heads of state to support the human rights of activists across the Atlantic. In Ghana, he recruited Windom and her friends to represent the OAAU in Africa. In Tanzania, he rubbed shoulders with revolutionaries who had rejected US aid to make calculated alliances across the world. Back in New York, OAAU pamphlets made ambitious promises that the movement would bring together all those ‘who suffer from a system of oppression … all over the world’.
Time away from the US also sharpened Malcolm’s religious vision. ‘I declare emphatically that I am no longer in Elijah Muhammad’s “straight jacket”,’ reads one letter from 22 September 1964, ‘and I don’t intend to replace his with one woven by someone else.’ In Egypt, he was given a certificate of authority ‘to propagate Islam’ by the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. He also spent time with their rivals, the Muslim World League in Saudi Arabia, which the historian Edward E Curtis IV interprets as an attempt to unite the Sunni world in support of Black Americans. Both organisations would eventually offer scholarships for Black Americans to study at Islamic universities, which Malcolm hoped would undermine the Nation of Islam. ‘Elijah Muhammad could have gotten world support for the Negro struggle,’ he reflected in a letter to the journalist Art Peters, ‘but he was never really interested in the Negroes. He was interested only in himself.’ As he explained to the journalist M S Handler that September, Malcolm hoped he would soon be able ‘project the true image of Islam, to the point that it will soon be impossible for religious fakers to misuse it to exploit our people.’
Haley explored Malcolm’s rejection of Black nationalism because it reflected his own liberal politics
Malcolm clearly intended for this work to feature in the Autobiography. He sent accounts of his religious work to friends across the US, ending each with the instructions to pass copies on to Haley to ‘keep a record’ of his thoughts. This material, however, would never make it into the finished text. By the fall of 1964, Haley was in a poor financial situation and Doubleday had grown frustrated that the book was still incomplete. ‘I am a little put out,’ Haley explained to his agent in October. ‘[Malcolm] has rather crossed up the project by, one, staying away so long and, two, his new conversion.’ The published version of the Autobiography ends up condensing the second half of 1964 into a few pages of the book’s final chapter, and completely omits his religious organising. These omissions likely reflect Haley’s own biases. Determined to finish the book, he was willing to leave out important material even when Malcolm insisted upon it. The result is an incomplete account of Malcolm’s conversion – a personal and internal journey that ignores the rich international context in which it took place.
Haley was also selective in his presentation of Malcolm’s political beliefs. The published Autobiography goes to great lengths to present its subject as a universalist. Quoting from diary entries and his letters to friends, it details Malcolm’s belief in the ‘color-blindness’ of Islam. Malcolm’s claims to be for ‘the truth, no matter who tells it’ and ‘justice, no matter who it is for or against’ are taken directly from a letter to Handler from September 1964. The Autobiography says much less about his continuing radicalism. The penultimate chapter briefly appeals to Black American leaders to ‘think internationally’, but ignores the organisations Malcolm designed to facilitate these connections. The OAAU is barely mentioned, and his work for the Organization of African Unity summit do not appear at all. Haley briefly considered publishing Malcolm’s travel diary as a separate book, and it is possible he planned these omissions to save material for that project. At the same time, argues the historian Moshik Temkin, the Autobiography’s lack of detail on anticolonial politics is a clear example of Haley’s political influence over the text. Haley took the time to explore Malcolm’s rejection of Black nationalism because it reflected his own liberal politics. He had much less interest in the Black internationalism that followed.
Haley also influenced the text in other ways. The two men had originally planned to end the manuscript with a series of essays explaining Malcolm’s political philosophy. They eventually settled on three, provocatively titled ‘The Negro’, ‘Twenty Million Black Muslims’ and ‘The End of Christianity’, but none appear in the final text. Haley claimed that this was at Malcolm’s request, but this seems at best to be a half-truth. In 2018, the New York Public Library acquired a draft of ‘The Negro’ from the private collector Gregory Reed, releasing it to the public for the first time. The text, explains Garrett Felber, explores Malcolm’s insights into the psychological function of racism and his distrust of the mainstream civil rights movement, a ‘black body with white heads’. It is possible that Malcolm requested that this essay be removed after his departure from the Nation of Islam, as he began to adopt a more conciliatory strategy. Malcolm’s ambitious plans for a united front, however, rarely prevented him from speaking out against Black moderates. In Cairo, for example, he had spared no efforts to denounce civil rights leaders who urged Black communities to ‘restrain themselves’ in the face of racist degradation. Malcolm’s detailed letters to the journalists Peters and Handler, meanwhile, strongly support the idea that he intended for Haley to end on a discussion of his expanded religious and political outlook.
As he waited for Malcolm to return from Africa, Haley distorted his friend’s public image in another significant way. In October 1964, Haley returned to Playboy to interview Martin Luther King Jr. Over the course of the interview, he asked a series of questions about King’s faith, his family, his long career of campaigning and, inevitably, his opinions on Malcolm. However, as the historian Johnathan Eig demonstrates in his 2023 biography of King, Haley manipulated the answers. In the interview, King is reported as saying that ‘Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice’ – but no such quote appears in the original tape recordings. In the published interview, King also appears to accuse Malcolm of ‘fiery, demagogic oratory’ – but the tapes reveal that King had been talking about Black extremists in general, and not Malcolm specifically. Malcolm had in fact reached out to King four months earlier, offering to send supporters to defend King on his nonviolent campaign in Florida. The same summer, reveal the biographers Les and Tamara Payne, Malcolm also attended a secret meeting with King’s allies and proposed a coordinated campaign against racial discrimination. In this context, Haley’s decision to fabricate these details is particularly egregious. It seems most likely that he misrepresented King’s words for the sake of a provocative article, hoping to boost sales of Playboy and, eventually, the Autobiography.
Haley finished a complete draft of the manuscript in February 1965. Malcolm was enthusiastic about the text, especially as it offered a potential source of income for his family in the event of his death. By this point, however, the threats on his life had escalated to a dangerous degree. On 14 February, his home was firebombed by unknown assailants. ‘It’s a time for martyrs now,’ he explained to the Life photographer Gordon Parks in the wake of the attack. ‘And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood.’ A few days later, on 21 February, Malcolm was assassinated on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. He was 39 years old.
The wake of the assassination was chaotic. Haley was distraught about the death of his friend, but his desperate financial situation meant that he could not afford to lose the Autobiography. Two hours after Malcolm’s assassination, notes Manning Marable, Haley wrote to his agent for assurance that the book would still be published. Five days later, Doubleday announced that they had dropped the book, fearing violent reprisals at their bookstores and offices. The manuscript would remain in limbo for several months before being picked up by Grove Press, a small radical publisher. At its new home, however, The Autobiography of Malcolm X would exceed all expectations. In 1963, Doubleday had estimated that it could sell around 20,000 copies. In fact, it sold 2 million copies between 1965 and 1969, and more than 6 million by 1977. Haley built on this success to secure a book deal for Roots, his passion project. The finished book and its accompanying television adaptation would go on to provide Haley with lasting fame. Accusations of plagiarism and inaccuracy, however, would follow Haley for the rest of his life. In 1978, he chose to settle a lawsuit by acknowledging that several passages of material from a novel called The African (1967) by Harold Courlander had ‘found their way’ into Haley’s work.
Haley always denied that he had played a significant role in shaping the narrative of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm certainly played an active role in composing and editing the first sections of the manuscript, working with Haley to shape his life story into a compelling autobiographical form. This broke down, however, after Malcolm’s departure from the Nation of Islam and his tours of Africa and the Middle East. Haley was left to finish the rest of the book alone, scraping together material from letters, diary entries and the work of other writers in a desperate attempt to finish the manuscript. The result is a narrative that remains rooted in Haley’s liberal vision of US politics, even as Malcolm began to conduct more radical work in Africa and Asia. The book’s early discussions of racism, radicalism and faith remain as moving and timely as ever. Its final chapters, by contrast, give an impression of Malcolm X that is compelling but fundamentally incomplete.
‘Malcolm certainly could have personally written his autobiography,’ Haley explained in one 1971 article. ‘Indeed, he could have been a most powerful author in general … The only ingredient that he lacked – and lamented often – was any time to write.’ Sixty years on, historians can only speculate about what he would have created.
