A Work in Progress, Cut Down
It’s easy to overly romanticize Malcolm’s last period of his life, to misinterpret it as gentler, more amenable to white tastes then (and to some extent still now) so hostile to Malcolm. In reality, he returned to the United States as fiery as ever. His philosophy was taking a new direction. But his critique of liberalism went on unabated. He was willing to take the help of “sincere whites,” but he was under no illusion that the solution for black Americans would not begin with whites. It would begin and end with blacks. In that regard, whites were better off busying themselves with confronting their own pathological racism. “Let sincere whites go and teach non-violence to white people,” he said.
Malcolm never had the chance to evolve his new philosophy fully. “I never have felt that I would live to be an old man,” he told Alex Haley, his biographer. On Feb. 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, he was shot by three men as he was preparing to speak to an audience of several hundred.
