written by Ekundayo Igeleke and Jeremy Herte

an article from WARTIME 2025: 100 Years of Malcolm X

100 Years of Malcolm X: Transforming to Meet the Moment

Malcolm X’s life was one of profound transformation, a constant evolution to meet the moment. From Malcolm Little to Detroit Red, then Malcolm X, and finally El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (also known as Omowale), he engaged in deep reflection that reshaped his understanding of the world and his place within it.

Throughout this issue, we’ll explore various perspectives on Malcolm: analyzing his potential actions today, delving into his spirituality, and evaluating his patriarchal views. 

This piece, however, centers Malcolm’s voice directly. Using excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, we present his own words detailing these critical shifts. As relevant today as when he first spoke them, these passages offer insight into why each transformation was necessary and how he navigated the changes, beginning with his early life as Malcolm Little.

Malcolm Little

Somehow, I happened to be alone in the classroom with Mr. Ostrowski, my English teacher (in 8th grade)…I had gotten some of my best marks under him, and he had always made me feel that he liked me…He told me, “Malcolm, you ought to be thinking about a career. Have you been giving it thought?” 

The truth is, I hadn’t. I never have figured out why I told him, “Well yes, sir, I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a lawyer.”…He kind of half-smiled and said, “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person—you’d get all kinds of work. 

The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn’t, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be. It was then that I began to change—inside. 

Commentary: This country breaks young Black boys. We were all a young Malcolm, or we know one—a youngin whose fire this society is hell-bent on putting out. We’re forced to grow up too fast, or seen as men when we’re still just kids. Protect our boys. Let them be children, because that is what they are. Before he was a leader, Malcolm Little was a boy who loved to fish and garden. Forced into thinking about a “career,” by a racist and  forced to “grow up,” he began to lose himself. Our boys must dream on their own terms, not on capitalism’s timeline. There is honor in being a carpenter. The crime is forcing a youngin into a box. 

How can we change our language? Instead of asking a boy, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” what are three alternative questions we can ask to learn about his interests and character? (e.g., “What makes you feel alive?” “What problem do you enjoy solving?”)

Look at the spaces you control (home, classroom, community center). In what concrete ways can you redesign them to be more conducive to play and exploration rather than just achievement and discipline?

Detroit Red

This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are ‘inferior’ and white people ‘superior’—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards. (pg. 66)

I was a true hustler—uneducated, unskilled at anything honorable, and I considered myself nervy and cunning enough to live by my wits, exploiting any prey that presented itself. I would risk just about anything. Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school drop-outs are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did. And they inevitably move into more and more, worse and worse, illegality and immorality. Full-time hustlers never can relax to appraise what they are doing and where they are bound. As is the case in any jungle, the hustler’s every waking hour is lived with both the practical and the subconscious knowledge that if he ever relaxes, if he ever slows down, the other hungry, restless foxes, ferrets, wolves, and vultures out there with him won’t hesitate to make him their prey. (pgs. 109-110)

Through all of this time of my life, I really was dead—mentally dead. I just didn’t know that I was. (pg. 138)

Commentary: Amerikka is a cruel machine to African people. It systematically twists brothers and sisters into their worst selves. We know brothers like Detroit Red. Some of us have been Detroit Red. We are shaped by our traumas, fed misinformation, and ground down by the boot of white supremacy until we turn on our own. So, the critical question remains: How do we organize these lost brothers? How do we reach those who are actively aiding in the destruction of our communities—whether they are in the streets or sitting in a corporate office? How do we show a brother that the power he gets from tearing down his community is an illusion, and that real, lasting power is built with his community? What is the vivid, compelling vision of a liberated future we can offer that is more attractive than the hollow rewards the system or the street provides?

Malcolm X

Every instinct of the ghetto jungle streets, every hustling fox and criminal wolf instinct in me, which would have scoffed at and rejected anything else, was struck numb. It was as though all of that life merely was back there, without any remaining effect, or influence. I have since learned—helping me to understand what then began to happen within me—that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. (pg. 177)

The very enormity of my previous life’s guilt prepared me to accept the truth. I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you. (pg. 178) 

In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there—I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional. (pg. 185) 
My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. (pg. 193)

Elijah Muhammad spoke of how in this wilderness of North America, for centuries the “blue-eyed devil white man” had brainwashed the “so-called Negro.” He told us how, as one result, the Black man in America was “mentally, morally, and spiritually dead.” Elijah Muhammad spoke of how the Black man was the Original Man, who had been kidnapped from his homeland and stripped of his language, his culture, his family structure, his family name, until the Black man in America did not even realize who he was. (pg. 211)

Commentary: Detroit Red did not become Malcolm X on his own. He was organized—He was found, mentored, and given the tools—taught the buried history of his people, taught the truth behind his condition, and in that process, taught how to love a self the world had taught him to hate. That external structure, that brotherhood, was the essential catalyst. But that foundation, as crucial as it was, is only half the battle. No matter how well we organize a brother, the final, most difficult transformation is his alone. He must find the discipline and will to shed his former self; no one can do that for him. This is our central challenge: How do we help our brothers and sisters raise their consciousness? Beyond providing knowledge, how do we build the practical institutions (economic, educational, social) that support and sustain a conscious life?

el-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz / Omowale

Substantially, as I saw it, the organization I hoped to build would differ from the Nation of Islam in that it would embrace all faiths of Black men, and it would carry into practice what the Nation of Islam had only preached… (pg. 320)

…on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth. (pg. 359)

One of the major troubles that I was having in building the organization that I wanted–an all-Black organization whose ultimate objective was to help create a society in which there could exist honest white-Black brotherhood—-was that my earlier public image, my so-called “Black Muslim” image, kept blocking me. I was trying to gradually reshape that image. I was trying to turn a corner… I was no less angry than I had been, but at the same time the true brotherhood I had seen in the Holy World had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision… I said that the American black man needed to recognize that he had a strong, airtight case to take the United States before the United Nations on a formal accusation of “denial of human rights”… (pg. 381)

My pilgrimage broadened my scope. It blessed me with a new insight. In two weeks in the Holy Land, I saw what I never had seen in thirty-nine years here in America. I saw all races, all colors… in true brotherhood! In unity! Living as one! Worshiping as one! … (pg. 382)

Why Black Nationalism? Well, in the competitive American society, how can there ever be any white-black solidarity before there is first some black solidarity?… Even when I was a follower of Elijah Muhammad, I had been strongly aware of how the Black Nationalist political, economic and social philosophies had the ability to instill within black men the racial dignity, the incentive, and the confidence that the black race needs today to get up off its knees… (pg. 395)

“As long as we think that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out.” (1964 speech at Audubon Ballroom) 

… the solution for the Afro-American is two-fold — long-range and short-range. I believe that a psychological, cultural, and philosophical migration back to Africa will solve our problems. Not a physical migration, but a cultural, psychological, philosophical migration back to Africa — which means restoring our common bond — will give us the spiritual strength and the incentive to strengthen our political and social and economic position right here in America, and to fight for the things that are ours by right on this continent. (Malcolm X interviewed by Robert Penn Warren (1964)

Commentary: Malcolm X was Malcolm X for 12 years. And in those 12 years, he never stopped working on himself, never stopped challenging his own beliefs. That right there is the lesson: we can’t afford to stop evolving in our politics or our actions.

Now, Malcolm had his flaws. He held some values that limited him, especially when it came to women and non-Black people. He was committed to Black liberation, yes, but he was human like the rest of us, with his own contradictions.

That’s why his shift to el-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/Omowale matters. He chose to stay a student, to be open to being transformed. His spiritual practice got deeper. His view of solidarity, Black nationalism, and gender oppression got wider. To be clear, he did not do this alone. He had organization, comrades, and family that helped him evolve.

So, what are the contradictions inside you that you still need to face?
How are you pushing your politics and your spirit to the next level?
And how are you building with others, getting organized, to deepen your commitment to Black liberation?