Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1993
Abstract
For manY'African Americans, Malcolm is a shining black prince, a charismatic leader, and the ideological founder of the movement toward a black awakening. He is a cultural and political icon, and as such, belongs to all of us. For Bruce Perry, Malcolm is a chameleon and a man in conflict. His Malcolm is a political opportunist, who yearned for happiness and love but courted failure, longed for freedom but shunned it until it was too late, hungered for the approval of the very authority figures he defied. Rather than view Malcolm as an individual thinker who could publicly change his mind when new information warranted a different direction, Perry argues that we cannot begin to understand "the adult, political Malcolm," as well as his ambivalence and ambiguity, "without [first] thoroughly understanding [Malcolm's childhood] and the legacy that was bequeathed him by the people who raised him and by America's race problem." Consequently, what we have here is a psycho-historical biography of an important African American political figure and an historical overview of the African American's political awakening. Malcolm's Omaha birth, while significant to Great Plains Quarterly readers, plays little part in the book.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 13:1 (Winter 1993). Copyright © 1993 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.