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- For a quarter-century, they have been the stuff of myth among scholars: three missing chapters from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” reputedly cut from the manuscript after his assassination in 1965 because they were deemed too incendiary. Their possible existence was first teased at in 1992, when a private collector at an estate sale scooped up material belonging to Alex Haley, Malcolm X’s collaborator on the book, who died that year.
- But now the some unpublished material, has suddenly emerged and is being offered for sale at a Manhattan auction house, along with another artifact that scholars have never seen: the manuscript for the published book, which bears dense traces of Mr. Haley’s and Malcolm X’s complex negotiations over the finished text.
- But it was the sale, with little notice, of the Malcolm X material that caused a stir among scholars, some of whom expressed alarm that manuscripts that had been locked away by one private collector might now just disappear into the hands of another. “If we’re trying to figure out where Malcolm would have taken us, some of those papers have clues to that puzzle,” Komozi Woodard, a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College who is writing a book about the final year of Malcolm X’s life said. “Scholars are holding their breath trying to figure out when we can look at them.”
- Since Malcolm X’s assassination, there have been battles over the meaning of his life, in particular during the tumultuous last year, when he broke with the Nation of Islam, traveled to the Middle East and renounced racial separatism.
- It remains to be seen what scholars will make of the material.
Missing Malcolm X Writings, Long a Mystery, Are Sold
