SOURCE: "The Odyssey of Malcolm X: An Eriksonian Interpretation," in Historian, Vol. 52, No. 1, Autumn, 1990, pp. 47-62.

In the following essay, Goodheart examines the identity of Malcolm X—as set forth in The Autobiography of Malcolm X—using the theoretical framework of Erik Erikson.

The black search for identity in the United States has been well put by the poet Robert Perm Warren: "Alienated from the world to which he is born and from the country of which he is a citizen yet surrounded by the successful values of that world, and country, how can the Negro define himself?" At the heart of the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s was the defining of the individual and collective identities of members of the largest racial minority in the United States. During what recently has been labeled a "Second Reconstruction." critical constitutional, legal, and federal-state...