DANG CHICKENS:

Malcolm X the Thinker, Brought Into Focus (FELICIA R. LEE, 5/14/05, NY Times)

Since his death, Malcolm X has largely become an iconic figure, ending up on a postage stamp in 1999. But he was highly controversial during his lifetime and feared by some blacks and whites because of his calls for black separatism and his advocacy of wresting rights "by any means necessary." Toward the end of his life, Malcolm X parted with the Nation of Islam and denounced racism.

Ms. Shabazz said scrutiny of her father's letters and journals would show scholars that his thinking was rooted in experiences that predated his appearance on the political stage in his 20's. They also show the seeds of his conversion to Islam, around 1948. Ms. Shabazz pointed to a Dec. 12, 1949, letter that her father wrote from prison "to my dear brother" that reads in part: "We were taught Islam by Mom. Everything that happened to her happened because the devils knew she was not 'deadening' our minds."

Malcolm X was shot down at age 39 at the Audubon Ballroom on Broadway between 165th and 166th Streets on Feb. 21, 1965. Ilyasah Shabazz was in the audience with her family. The opening of the 250-item exhibition, "Malcolm X: A Search for Truth," coincides with the 80th anniversary of her father's birth in Omaha.

In addition to family-owned material, some of the property in the exhibition comes from a collection at Washington University in St. Louis and from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History in Detroit. The items in the exhibition represent only a tiny percentage of the cache of thousands of pages of documents donated by the family, a trove that will be available in its entirety at the Schomburg in the fall, Mr. Dodson said.

"It will give a much broader and deeper view of the man and his development as a thinker and as an activist," said Cheryll Y. Greene, the curatorial and research consultant for the exhibition. Ms. Greene is the former managing editor of the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University, a multimedia endeavor to develop a comprehensive biography and education Web site.

The exhibition touches on lighter moments in Malcolm X's life, too. There is an eighth-grade notebook belonging to Malcolm Little, who was called Harpy, in which his friends scrawled their opinions of him: "tall, dark, handsome" and "as a boxer, fooey, as a friend, swell."

There are also letters from 1941, when he worked as a railroad waiter; his handwritten, spiral-bound journals from a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and to West Africa in 1964; heavily annotated copies of the Koran and the Bible; his briefcase; and photographs from the Audubon crime scene.

One of the more chilling items is a business card, torn and burned, that reads "Hajj Malik El-Shabazz." The card was found in Malcolm X's left breast pocket after his assassination. The part of the exhibition focusing on evidence from the trial of his accused killers includes an autopsy report, courtroom sketches and an envelope of shotgun shells from the crime scene.

By the time Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered he'd become a counter-productive force, but we lost Brother Malcolm just as he was becoming most interesting and likely useful.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 17, 2005 4:02 PM