listening well," he told me. "I listen closely to the sound of a man's voice when he's speaking. I
can hear sincerity." The newspaper person whom he ultimately came to admire probably more
than any other was the New York Times' M. S. Handler. (I was veryhappy when I learned that
Handler had agreed to write this book's Introduction; I know that Malcolm X would have liked
that.) The first time I ever heard Malcolm X speak of Handler, whom he had recently met, he
began, "I was talking with this devil-" and abruptly he cut himself off in obvious embarrassment.
"It's a reporter named Handler, from the Times-" he resumed. Malcolm X's respect for the man
steadily increased, and Handler, for his part, was an influence upon the inner Malcolm X. "He's
the most genuinely unprejudiced white man I ever met," Malcolm X said to me, speaking of
Handler months later. "I have asked him things and tested him. I have listened to him talk,
closely."
I saw Malcolm X too many times exhilarated in after-lecture give-and-take with predominantly
white student bodies at colleges and universities to ever believe that he nurtured at his core any
blanket white-hatred. "The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has," he
said to me once. "The rest of us have always been living in a lie."
Several Negroes come to mind now who I know, in one way or another, had vastly impressed
Malcolm X. (Some others come to mind whom I know he has vastly abhorred, but these I will not
mention.) Particularly high in his esteem, I know, was the great photographer, usually associated
with Life magazine, Gordon Parks. It was Malcolm X's direct influence with Elijah Muhammad
which got Parks permitted to enter and photograph for publication in Life the highly secret selfdefense
training program of the Black Muslim Fruit of Islam, making Parks, as far as I know, the
only non-Muslim who ever has witnessed this, except for policemen and other agency
representatives who had feigned "joining" the Black Muslims to infiltrate them. "His success
among the white man never has made him lose touch with black reality," Malcolm X said of Parks
once.
Another person toward whom Malcolm X felt similarly was the actor OssieDavis. Once in the
middle of one of our interviews, when we had been talking about something else, Malcolm X
suddenly asked me, "Do you know Ossie Davis?" I said I didn't. He said, "I ought to introduce you
sometime, that's one of the finest black men." In Malcolm X's long dealings with the staff of the
Harlem weekly newspaper Amsterdam News, he had come to admire Executive Editor James
Hicks and the star feature writer James Booker. He said that Hicks had "an open mind, and he
never panics for the white man." He thought that Booker was an outstanding reporter; he also
was highly impressed with Mrs. Booker when he met her.
It was he who introduced me to two of my friends today, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln who was at the time
writing the book The Black Muslims in America, and Louis Lomax who was then writing various
articles about the Muslims. Malcolm X deeply respected the care and depth which Dr. Lincoln was
putting into his research. Lomax, he admired for his ferreting ear and eye for hot news. "If I see
that rascal Lomax running somewhere, I'll grab my hat and get behind him," Malcolm X said once,
"because I know he's onto something." Author James Baldwin Malcolm X also admired. "He's so
brilliant he confuses the white man with words on paper." And another time, "He's upset the white
man more than anybody except The Honorable Elijah Muhammad."
Malcolm X had very little good to say of Negro ministers, very possibly because most of them had
attacked the Black Muslims. Excepting reluctant admiration of Dr. Martin Luther
King, I heard him speak well of only one other, The Reverend Eugene L. Callender of Harlem's
large Presbyterian Church of the Master. "He's a preacher, but he's a fighter for the black man,"
said Malcolm X. I later learned that somewhere the direct, forthright Reverend Callender had
privately cornered Malcolm X and had read him the riot act about his general attacks upon the
Negro clergy. Malcolm X also admired The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, in hisCongressman
political role: "I'd think about retiring if the black man had ten like him in Washington." He had
similar feelings about the N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, now a New York State Assemblyman, Percy Sutton,
and later Sutton was retained as his personal attorney. Among Negro educators, of whom
Malcolm X met many in his college and university lecturing, I never heard him speak well of any
but one, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark. "There's a black man with brains gone to bed," Malcolm X told me
darsice
(darsice)
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