Who Was Malcolm X?

Few things are less predictable than the vagaries of reputation. The role of Malcolm X in the racial dramas of the sixties was comparatively minor and his influence while alive, negligible. To have suggested in 1964 that within ten years Lenox Avenue, where his street-corner audiences had regularly clashed with the police, would be renamed Malcolm X Boulevard, his autobiography incorporated into high school curricula, and Malcolm himself enshrined in the pantheon of twentieth-century African-American heroes would have seemed absurd. Yet this hardly begins to do justice to the extent of his posthumous fame. The canonization of Malcolm X was abetted by virtually every segment of black political opinion, from campus radicals to more cautiou...