The Reverend Earl Little - Characters, The Autobiography Of Malcolm X | The Autobiography of Malcolm X -Summary, Themes & Characters - Novels PDF Download

Malcolm X's dad wins the award for most gruesome life story told in a few paragraphs. We hardly know anything about him because Malcolm hardly knows anything about him, but it would be wrong to say that he did not have an impact on his son's life. Actually, you could say that apple didn't fall very far from the tree.

An Uppity Negro

Malcolm's dad was a follower of Marcus Garvey, a proponent of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League a.k.a. they UNIA-ACL. He was part of the Back to Africa movement, which encouraged African Americans to leave the United States and return to Africa in order to find true freedom. So considering all of this, it's not surprising that the KKK wasn't the biggest fan of Malcolm's dad.

They called him an "uppity nigger" who was causing trouble among "the good niggers." (1.8) But on the other hand, the black people around him seemed to like his message. Malcolm remembers: "I remember an old lady, grinning and saying to my father, 'You're scaring these white folks to death!'"(1.17) Hmm sounds like a certain person we know, doesn't it?

Unlike the rest of his siblings, Malcolm got to go with his father to Garvey U.N.I.A. meetings. Even though he spent the beginning of his life more concerned about hustling than racism, we're pretty sure that such an early exposure to the teachings of Marcus Garvey must have made an impact. Malcolm X protests that he knew anything before the Nation of Islam entered his life, but it seems like more than a coincidence that the son of a man who was killed for his racial beliefs became a racial activist himself.

A Death Foretold

Did you notice that Malcolm X talks about death a whole lot? We mean, the whole book is full of it, and it all starts with the death of his father. Malcolm writes:

Among the reasons my father had decided to risk and dedicate his life to help disseminate this philosophy among his people was that he had seen four of his six brothers die by violence, three of them killed by white men, including one by lynching. What my father could not know then was that of the remaining three, including himself, only one, my Uncle Jim, would die in bed, of natural causes. Northern white police were later to shoot my Uncle Oscar. And my father was finally himself to die by the white man's hands.(1.2)

Now take a moment to let that sink in. Almost all of Malcolm's male relatives were killed by white people or other violence. That's crazy.

This history of death hovers over the entire autobiography, and might be his father's second great legacy. Nearly every other page Malcolm X tells us that he expects to die for his beliefs. If you were wondering why, you don't have to look very much further than the story of his father. Unfortunately, Malcolm was right. Even in death—like father, like son.