that he actually had a reluctant admiration for Dr. King.)
Malcolm X and I reached the point, ultimately, where we shared a mutual camaraderie that,
although it was never verbally expressed, was a warm one. He was for me unquestionably one of
the most engaging personalities I had ever met, and for his part, I gathered, I was someone he
had learned he could express himself to, with candor, without the likelihood of hearing it repeated,
and likeany person who lived amid tension, he enjoyed being around someone, another man,
with whom he could psychically relax. When I made trips now, he always asked me to telephone
him when I would be returning to New York, and generally, if he could squeeze it into his
schedule, he met me at the airport. I would see him coming along with his long, gangling strides,
and wearing the wide, toothy, good-natured grin, and as he drove me into New York City he would
bring me up to date on things of interest that had happened since I left. I remember one incident
within the airport that showed me how Malcolm X never lost his racial perspective. Waiting for my
baggage, we witnessed a touching family reunion scene as part of which several cherubic little
children romped and played, exclaiming in another language. "By tomorrow night, they'll know
how to say their first English word-nigger," observed Malcolm X.
When Malcolm X made long trips, such as to San Francisco or Los Angeles, I did not go along,
but frequently, usually very late at night, he would telephone me, and ask how the book was
coming along, and he might set up the time for our next interview upon his return. One call that I
never will forget came at close to four A.M., waking me; he must have just gotten up in Los
Angeles. His voice said, "Alex Haley?" I said, sleepily, "Yes? Oh, hey, Malcolm!" His voice said,
"I trust you seventy per cent"-and then he hung up. I lay a short time thinking about him and I
went back to sleep feeling warmed by that call, as I still am warmed to remember it. Neither of us
ever mentioned it.
Malcolm X's growing respect for individual whites seemed to be reserved for those who ignored
on a personal basis the things he said about whites and who jousted with him as a man. He,
moreover, was convinced that he could tell a lot about any person by listening. "There's an art to
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 self-
defense 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.