This was the side of Malcolm X that has been largely overlooked or contemptously dismissed. The new edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and the collection, Malcolm X Speaks, are valuable because they both provide information on these crucial last months of Malcolm's life.

While it is not meant to be a completely objective account, the Autobiography is much more than a partisan diatribe. Written with the cooperation of Alex Haley, the book contains its share of excerpts from Malcolm's speeches and glosses over a few unflattering situations (such as Malcolm's "chickens coming home to roost" statement, which is not even reproduced in its embarrassing entirely), but for the most part it is a surprisingly detached chronicle.

One should have no suspicions of Haley. He was neither a black nationalist (he had written for such "white" periodicals as The Reader's Digest and Playboy) nor what Malcolm called a "house Negro" who identified entirely with his white master. The two men developed a warm personal friendship, and the book benefits from the gifts each man brought to it.

To Malcolm X must go the credit for the incisive arguments and the colorful and conversational style which (although the Autobiography was written in its final form by Haley) bears a remarkable resemblance to his statements and speeches in Malcolm X Speaks. Malcolm was a public speaker, not a writer, and it is a tribute to Haley that he preserved this quality in the book. Haley must also be given credit for giving Malcolm's life story a degree of objectivity and coherence it might otherwise have lacked.

In his epilogue, Haley claims that in the later stages of the book Malcolm tried to delete many of the earlier passages praising Elijah Muhammed and depicting Malcolm's extremely close relationship with him. Haley finally prevailed upon Malcolm to leave the passages intact to preserve the dramatic development of the story. As a result, Malcolm's life is presented not from one perspective in time, but many. As the story moves, Malcolm literally grows up. Not only is the dramatic quality of the chronicle enhanced, but Malcolm's story is made more credible.

Having followed Malcolm through Michigan, Harlem, prison and in and out of the Black Muslims, the reader understands immediately the sincerity of Malcolms change of heart at Mecca. "There was precedent in my life for this [change]," Malcolm himself said. "My whole life had been a chronology of changes."

In this perspective, the significance of Malcolm's death emerges. If his shifts of attitude were not the power plays of an irresponsible Negro leader desiring a personal following--and these books say they were not--then what Malcolm was groping for when he died might have helped the Negro cause. If he was a demagogue ("I have cherished my demagogue role") and a fanatic Black Muslim Minister was a zombic then."), he was surprisingly open-minded, idealistic, and deeply committed to bettering lot of the Negro American. His assassin may have killed the fanatic, he also killed the promise of a new kind of dynamic Negro leadership