Clearly [Malcolm X] had charisma, but powering that charisma was his capacity to understand and articulate his own American experience and so link it with that of other blacks that he was indeed a spokesman…. The nature of his own experience and its series of "conversions" … is distilled with candor and cutting clarity in [The Autobiography of Malcom X] (with writer Alex Haley serving as an admirably unobtrusive and astute organizer of the material)….

The autobiography is revelatory not only of Malcolm but also of diverse black members of this "pluralistic" society whom hardly any whites have yet begun to know—their values, their affirmations, their evasions, their ways of wit, rage and sorrow. Malcolm himself, as was clear to those who knew him, emerges as a man of warmth as well as fury, of wry perception, and most importantly, as a man with the ability to change...