The life of Malcolm X

The life of Malcolm X, as recounted in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), presents a picture of how one man responded to racism in the United States from the 1940s to the 1960s, but it also demonstrates how blacks in general responded to racism and socioeconomic conditions within the black community in those decades. This study will examine Malcolm X's life in a sociological context in order to understand why blacks responded as they did and to understand similar responses in the 1990s.

The key to understanding Malcolm X and his role as a black leader is contained in a brief description from Haley's Introduction. Haley writes that Malcolm was "a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society" (X x).

However, Malcolm was also a victim of the prevailing socioeconomic conditions which prevailed in the black culture in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was less concerned with liberation than with crime and greed and personal pleasure. Malcolm was first a member of the society of the United States, society being defined by Schaefer and Lamm as "the largest form of human group" which "consists of people who share a common heritage and culture" (33). However, because of the race-based divisions in American society, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, before the civil rights movement, Malcolm and other blacks were never included in the mainstream of that society. Black

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