Never too Late to Read Classics discussion

Our 2024 year of nonfiction reads starts off with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X is an important figure in USA history who promoted Islam and black nationalism. Information on him and his life can be found in numerous places across the internet including from PBS's American Experience (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...) and Stanford University (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ma...), among others. Feel free to find further information from elsewhere and share it here as you read his autobiography. It sits at about 466 pages. Any takers? If you have read the book before, feel free to share your thoughts also.

I read this many years ago and it still remains with me. It's very readable and interesting as well.

This has been on my shelf for a while, so I'm looking forward to the group read next month.

I work at a university library and this is one of the only books we deliberately have multiple circulating copies of (and one of the very few where we keep backup copies on hand in tech services, just in case we need to replace one in a hurry).

Rosemarie and Vince- interesting and cool info.
I’m looking forward to this one. And a recent visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis has helped get me in the mood for this even more :)

I got started early and am through chapter 4 now. I find the writing wonderful and the story riveting so far.
Early childhood (born in 1925) is rather heartbreaking with much devastating trauma linked to racism and domestic unrest but there is humor and warmth linked to family and community as well. Then teen years in Boston and he’s (view spoiler)[evolved into a zoot-suited star lindyhopper spotlit on the dance floor at the Roseland Ballroom while the greatest jazz musicians and bands perform (hide spoiler)]?! I did not know this about him! His Boston days are quite entertaining although I’ve just paused on a sad note about a friend he made in the neighborhood and also Pearl Harbor has just been hit.

I'm up to Chapter 7 (Hustler) now. Some of this is familiar to me from a YA biography about him I read in high school, which ended with him meeting Elijah Muhammed (well, maybe there was an epilogue afterwards) - though that was very sanitized compared to this. I wonder how this book was received originally - I imagine a lot of it (the Harlem zoot-suiter days, etc) would have seemed unbelievable to anyone who knew him just as a fiery, militant orator associated with Nation of Islam.

I have a question about this sentence in Chapter 8:

"I have since learned -- helping me to understand what then began to happen within me -- that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much."

I grew up in a religion that's an offshoot of Shia Islam, and this immediately struck me as a very Christian perspective. Sunni and Shia Islam do have a concept of sin (and pretty similar eschatology to Protestantism when it comes down to it), but the idea that salvation and knowledge are tied to admitting guilt and being forgiven - that one must be "saved" from their natural state of sin - is not present. (At least, it isn't the foundational belief, practically a required practice, that it is in mainstream Christianity.)

However, I know that Nation of Islam diverges widely from the kind of Islam that I grew up learning about. My question is - does Nation of Islam as a whole have this relationship to sin, guilt, and salvation, or is it an independent belief of X's that isn't found in the broader milieu of NoI religious belief?

Vince wrote: "I have a question about this sentence in Chapter 8:

"I have since learned -- helping me to understand what then began to happen within me -- that the truth can be quickly received, or received at ..."

Oh that's interesting, so you come with some understanding of Islam, unlike me. I can't speak to NOI, and I forget the context specific to this line, but I would guess it's X sharing personal philosophy. This would be my guess given his stories of the NOI banning people for breaking certain rules, as well as his way of thinking revealed throughout the book.

By the way, I finished this about a week ago... I loved Alex Haley's epilogue told from his own POV and the "chapter" after this which is actor Ossie Davis responding to being questioned why he would eulogize Malcolm X.