I received the following from Paul Lee and I pass it on to this list. my
best, roz
Subj: Why Malcolm X’s Papers Shouldn’t Be Auctioned
Date: 2/28/2002 10:54:39 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: besteffortsinc@yahoo.com (Paul Lee)
To: besteffortsinc@yahoo.com
Why Malcolm X’s Papers Shouldn’t Be Auctioned
By Paul Lee, Director
Best Efforts, Inc.
On Feb. 20, 2002--only a day shy of the 37th
anniversary of Malcolm X’s tragic
assassination--educator and political activist Abdul
Alkalimat, editor of the Web page “Malcolm X: A
Research Site,” issued the following announcement:
“eBay, the online auction house, has archives from
Malcolm X.
“This is a case for Black Studies professionals to
swing into action to make sure this material is not
lost from history.
“[Columbia University professor Dr. Manning] Marable
made an announcement about he is doing the [Malcolm X]
archive project - now is the time to step up and make
sure the people can have access and not let [it]
become ‘private property.’…
“What library can step up and keep the whole
collection intact and available for all time?”
The “archives” consists of 21 lots (nos. 2160-2180)
that are being sold on eBay by Butterfield &
Butterfield of California. Descriptions and rather
poor quality photos can be viewed at:
http://search-desc.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&
categoryid=&ht=3&st=0&maxRecordsPerPage=100&SortProperty=MetaEndSort&
query=malcolm+x&srchdesc=y
They are scheduled to be previewed in Los Angeles on
Mar. 8-10 and San Francisco on Mar. 15-17, and offered
for public auction on Mar. 20. The minimum bids
range from $1,000.00-$40,000.00 U. S.
Unlike the Malcolm X manuscripts that have
sporadically appeared for sale since the build-up to
Spike Lee’s 1992 motion picture “Malcolm X,” which
were clearly from the personal papers of Malcolm’s
leader-turned-enemy Elijah Muhammad (even though the
seller/s preferred to remain anonymous), these
documents seem to be from Malcolm X’s personal papers.
They include one of his address books (2171); the
journals of his two 1964 trips to Africa, the Middle
East, and Europe (2177); letters to his wife (2163)
and brother Philbert (2160, 2162); a news statement
written upon his return from his pilgrimage to Mecca
(2170); photo collections (“inscribed,” “press” and
“snapshot”) (2172, 2174, 2173); one of his Qur-ans
(2161); speech note cards (2169), outlines (2166), and
texts (2165, 2168), including his famous “The Ballot
of the Bullet” talk (2178); and radio addresses (2164,
2167).
Of these lots, only one appears NOT to be from
Malcolm’s personal papers--namely, his letters to his
brother. It’s also possible that the contracts and
correspondence with Alex Haley re “The Autobiography
of Malcolm X” are from the Haley estate auction of a
decade ago, but it’s equally possible that these are
Malcolm X’s copies.
To date, Butterfields has declined to identify the
seller or sellers, though it seems evident from the
nature of the documents that they were at one time the
personal property of Malcolm X.
For what it’s worth, I’d like to suggest five reasons
that these papers should not be put at public auction:
1) The seller did NOT need to auction them to be
compensated. It would have been a simple matter to
arrange for a competent Malcolm X scholar (biographer
Peter Goldman, for example) to properly establish
their historical value and assess their physical
condition. This appraisal could have formed the
basis to solicit bids from libraries and archives to
purchase and preserve the ENTIRE collection, or raise
funds to do so.
In this way, the seller could be compensated and, more
importantly, the documents could be properly
conserved, catalogued, and made available for study.
2) Offering the documents for public auction tends to
trivialize their historical significance. The inept,
amateurish descriptions provided by Butterfields
strongly suggest that neither the seller nor
auctioneer understood the nature or importance of the
documents--if, indeed, they understood the man that
created them.
Even from these feeble characterizations and fuzzy
photos, I was able to discern clues and connections
that could rewrite our understanding of aspects of
Malcolm X’s public and private life, and I haven’t
been actively engaged in researching his life for
several years.
Malcolm X was not merely a contemporary of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. He offered a compelling alternative
vision for black freedom, one rooted in the black
nationalism and pan-Africanism of his Garveyite
parents, buttressed by the ethics of his evolving
understanding of Islam, informed by his remarkable
insightfulness, insatiable thirst for knowledge and
commitment to growth, and communicated with liberating
clarity by his superb abilities as an orator and (as
these document could attest) writer.
His protean political and religious thought was so
rich that interpretations of ASPECTS of it helped give
rise to entire movements, including the black power
and black studies movements of the latter 1960s, the
“Nation Time” and pan-Africanist movements of the
1970s, the independent black political movement of the
1980s, the Afro-centric and Afrikan-centered movements
of the 1990s, and the concurrent embrace by
tens-of-thousands of black people in the West of a
variety of forms of sectarian and traditional Islam.
Public action of such key documents of his
intellectual legacy and personal history is tantamount
to selling the Liberty Bell. As actor Ossie Davis
said in his eulogy to Malcolm X, “In honoring him, we
honor the best in ourselves.” In respecting and
preserving his material legacy, we not only honor his
(ultimate) sacrifice and inspiring example, but also
immeasurably deepen our understanding of his
intellectual inheritance, one that can still help
produce “constructive” changes, as he used to put it.
Finally, doing so can cheat his assassins, and those
that ordered and benefited from this crime, of the
victory that they imagined they achieved by physically
eliminating him. This can be done by making it
possible for him to again challenge and prod,
enlighten and embolden; to resume his role as the
attorney of the dispossessed--indicting the oppressors
and defending and liberating the oppressed.
3) Breaking up the collection thru public auction will
further confound our understanding of his life and
thought. Conversely, making it available thru a
library or archive intact will greatly facilitate our
appreciation of both, and help us to better ascertain
Malcolm X’s role in modern history.
Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination only exacerbated the
tendency to accept only aspects of this thought. As
he told an associate shortly before his assassination:
“For the Muslims, I’m too worldly; for the worldly,
I’m too religious. For the militants, I’m too
moderate, and for the moderates I’m too militant.”
To Alex Haley, he added, “I feel like I’m on a
tightrope.”
His legacy has been sliced and diced, appropriated and
exploited, made to service a variety of “isms” and
hidden agendas--everything but accepted in its
wholeness and RESPECTED. These documents could help
Malcolm X to finally step off the tightrope; they
could help to lay a broader foundation for
understanding the true depth and breadth of his
thought and character.
Despite the representations of his interpreters,
Malcolm X was not inscrutable, nor even particularly
complex. He was a highly premeditated man that
created and left an astonishingly rich record of his
ideas and actions, his plans and hopes. Since his
late widow chose not to make his personal records
public, editors, particularly the late George
Breitman, did their best to reconstruct his evolving
thought thru collections of his speeches, writings,
and interviews. Inevitably, this presented Malcolm
X’s public arguments, but not his private reasoning.
Nearly four decades is long enough to wait for a
balanced view of this historic inheritance. It
should not be sacrificed to the seller’s
shortsightedness.
4) Auctioning the papers presents the danger that they
will (1) disappear into separate private “vanity”
collections or (2) be purchased as financial
investments, like stocks, held from public view to
inflate their monetary value.
5) Finally, to auction off the papers is, to my mind,
immoral, a betrayal of our children. These are not
the papers of a pop star or athlete, but the material
legacy of a LIBERATOR, a man that dedicated and gave
his life in the cause of human freedom. He was more
than a son, brother, husband, father, uncle, cousin,
or friend. For better and worse, he consciously
sacrificed most of these roles in the service of what
he believed to be the greater good of everyone.
There is no reason that the seller shouldn’t
financially benefit from these papers, if that is
their right, desire or need, but EVERYONE should
benefit from the documents being protected, kept
intact, and made available for posterity. Our
generation has the opportunity to preserve for our
children and their grandchildren a fuller and fairer
record of one of the most important revolutionary
legacies of the last two centuries. If we fail in
this trust, then we deserve to be condemned and
forgotten by our progeny for our moral
irresponsibility.
If these papers are saved from public auction, it can
only be hoped that they will then be made available to
a competent scholar or group of scholars that will put
the elucidation and dissemination of this socially
valuable legacy above their personal biases and
ambitions.
Thank you for your kind consideration.
Copyright © 2002 by Paul Lee
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