The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X - Part 2

Autobiography of Malcolm X -
Malcolm X

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 161

June 10, 2017 

Book 48 - The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
Malcolm X (1965)
 Part 2 - 47-97
Reading Time - 1 hour

We learn quite a bit about Malcolm's time in Boston. He was only 15-16 years old but looked much older. He managed to get a variety of jobs, made some older friends and very quickly started associating with some of the big music names from the 1940s (Duke Ellington, etc). All because he was the shoe-shine boy at one of the big dance halls in Boston! I gather that Malcolm was quite driven... he wasn't going to just take whatever life threw at him, he was going to go out and seize it and make the most of it.

The book reads a bit like a Who's Who of that time - he drops a lot of names which are mostly meaningless to me. Musicians, hustlers, etc. So it's a bit hard to really get into the story sometimes. At one point, he was working as a sandwich boy on the Boston-New York railway run and discovered Harlem in New York. He was entranced and resolved to move there. One does get a very strong sense that Malcolm really has no time for white people... and that he regrets the many ways in which he, and other African Americans, tried to integrate into white society.