92 pages • 3 hours read
Malcolm X, Alex HaleyThe Autobiography of Malcolm X
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Harlemite”
After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, more and more jobs are available to men like Malcolm who are too young to enlist in the U.S. Army. Having heard so much about New York, Malcolm gets a job on the wait staff of the Yankee Clipper, a train that runs between Boston and New York. Ella encourages this, given her disappointment over Malcolm’s ongoing relationship with Sophia. Nevertheless, Sophia and Malcolm continue to see each other often.
On his first trip to New York, Malcolm falls in love with Small’s Paradise, a historic Harlem nightclub. Later, he goes to see Dinah Washington and Lionel Hampton perform at the Savoy Ballroom, which dwarfs the Roseland in size and stature.
Malcolm’s insubordination and rudeness to customers cause him to be fired from the Yankee Clipper. He gets a job as a day waiter at Small’s Paradise where he thrives, learning various hustles from the old-timers who frequent the nightclub during the daytime.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Detroit Red”
Malcolm describes “the numbers,” the dominant betting system in Harlem in the 1940s. Like many young men and women, Malcolm bets his daily tips on guessing the last three numbers of the Stock Exchange’s daily U.S. sales. A winning dollar bet returns $600, and larger bets can win enough money to buy a controlling interest in a neighborhood bar or restaurant. The bankers and runners who oversee this industry pay a percentage to the cops to look the other way.
Malcolm befriends the neighborhood’s most prominent hustlers and thieves, who educate him on a variety of topics, including how to spot plainclothes police officers. His closest friend among these individuals is Sammy the Pimp. Malcolm earns the nickname “Detroit Red,” thanks to his red hair and his Michigan roots.
A few months after getting a job at Small’s, Malcolm is fired after he offers to connect a customer, an undercover cop posing as a Black serviceman, with a sex worker. Had the officer not let Malcolm go, Small’s could have faced harsh penalties for breaking laws governing the morals of servicemen.
Malcolm has no money or job prospects, so Sammy fronts him $20 to start a small operation selling marijuana. With Malcolm’s many contacts in the music industry, the operation becomes profitable very quickly. However, he also draws the attention of narcotics detectives. After Malcolm learns he is on the narcotics squad’s special list, he starts selling marijuana in cities along his old railroad line, using his expired railroad identification card to get free rides.
After Malcolm turns 18, he delivers an unhinged performance before the Draft Board to avoid enlisting in the U.S. military. He secures the coveted 4-F status—given to those completely unfit for service—by pretending to a psychiatrist that he wants to organize Black soldiers to kill White people.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Hustler”
Malcolm is banned from Grand Central Station after a confrontation over a blackjack game in which he pulls out a gun. This ends his brief career selling marijuana along the East Coast railroad lines. Still under the watchful eye of the New York narcotics squad, Malcolm supports himself by carrying out small robberies and stickups in nearby cities. Around this time, he begins to snort cocaine to steel his nerves ahead of a robbery. When Malcolm’s younger brother Reginald quits the merchant marines to live in Harlem, Malcolm sets Reginald up with a simple, safe hustle involving the resale of defective clothes.
Malcolm describes the racial tensions in Harlem. The wealth accumulated by Black-owned businesses in the 1920s was wiped out in the 1930s. While the Great Depression was a major factor, Malcolm also points to the ruinous economic impact of a 1935 riot that broke out after employees at a five-and-dime store allegedly beat a Black Puerto Rican teenager accused of shoplifting. In 1943, while Malcolm is living in Harlem, another riot breaks out after a White cop shoots and wounds a Black serviceman. According to Malcolm, these incidents discourage middle- and upper-class Whites from patronizing businesses in Harlem.
After a botched robbery during which a bullet grazes Sammy, Malcolm decides to start running numbers for an outfit associated with the late mobster Dutch Schultz. Through this gig, Malcolm meets West Indian Archie, a fearsome old-timer who used to be one of Schultz’s enforcers. Reflecting on Archie’s ability to remember a day’s worth of bets without writing them down, Malcolm wonders about the success Archie might have achieved in a field like mathematics, if not for his race.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Trapped”
One day, Malcolm wins $300 on a numbers bet placed with West Indian Archie. The next day, Archie tracks down Malcolm and accuses him at gunpoint of lying about which numbers he bet. By this point, because Malcolm is high on marijuana during virtually every waking hour, and he increasingly snorts cocaine and smokes opium, Malcolm admits to himself that he might have made a mistake. However, the dispute is no longer about repaying the $300, most of which Malcolm still has; instead, it’s a “classic hustler-code impasse” (146): With word of the dispute already trickling through the neighborhood, neither party can back down without losing face.
Archie gives Malcolm until the following day to pay him back. That evening, while under the influence of an extraordinary amount of cocaine and armed with a pistol, Malcolm goes to a bar Archie frequents. Archie arrives, visibly high though he rarely uses drugs. After narrowly avoiding a confrontation, Malcolm spends the next few days in a state of high anxiety, relying on cocaine, pills, weed, and opium to cope with the stress. Sensing the walls closing in on his friend, Sammy calls Shorty to pick Malcolm up and take him home to Boston.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Caught”
In Boston, Malcolm moves in with Shorty, who now plays saxophone in a band of moderate local repute. He resumes his relationship with Sophia, even though she is now married to a White man. Malcolm relies on her money to support his marijuana and cocaine habits and physically abuses her on a routine basis. Nevertheless, Sophia continues to visit, even bringing along her 17-year-old sister who enters into a relationship with Shorty.
Malcolm, Shorty, Shorty’s friend Rudy, Sophia, and Sophia’s sister start a small burglary outfit. Sophia and her sister case potential targets, using their youth, beauty, and femininity to gain access to homes under various pretenses. Later, Malcolm and Shorty rob the homes while Rudy waits outside in a getaway car.
After months of successful and lucrative burglaries, Malcolm makes a mistake when he brings a stolen watch to a jewelry shop for repairs. With the watch matching the description reported by its rightful owner, the repair shop calls the police. When Malcolm returns to pick up the watch, the police arrest him. Although Malcolm does not reveal the identities of his accomplices, there is plenty of evidence in his apartment implicating them. All are arrested except Rudy, who leaves town and is never caught, to Malcolm’s knowledge.
Chapters 5-9 Analysis
It is worth examining the social and racial context surrounding Malcolm’s descent into the crime and drug addiction. Shut out of the upper echelons of White society, and having seen that the best he can hope for as a law-abiding assimilating Black man is to work as a mail carrier, Malcolm embraces the underground economy, where he can earn both money and status. Though these rewards are ephemeral—Malcolm lists the countless prominent thieves and hustlers who ended up dead or in jail—the young and impulsive Malcolm embraces this fate to avoid the restrictions designed to perpetuate a system of anti-Black oppression. This does not excuse his behavior; Malcolm looks back on this period with deep shame and regret. Yet it helps explain why a Black man would choose to live this way, in the absence of the same legal economic options Whites enjoy.
One option many young Black men embraced during WWII was to join the U.S. military. Malcolm is not one of them: “Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: ‘Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight’” (83). His cynicism will be born out, as Black men who hoped that by putting their lives on the line for American democracy, they might finally earn equal treatment at home, the G.I. Bill, which provided World War II veterans with college tuition, low-cost mortgages, and other benefits, was predominantly for White servicemen, “deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.” (Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.)
Malcolm details the history of Harlem in a passage that reflects the complex dynamics of Whiteness and assimilation in America:
The Germans came first; the Dutch edged away from them, and Harlem became all German. Then came the Irish, running from the potato famine. The Germans ran, looking down their noses at the Irish, who took over Harlem. Next, the Italians; same thing—the Irish ran from them. The Italians had Harlem when the Jews came down the gangplanks—and then the Italians left. Today, all these same immigrants’ descendants are running as hard as they can to escape the descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships (95).
Malcolm’s succinct history of Harlem summarizes 19th and 20th century European immigrant trends. Although each wave of immigrants initially faces systemic and individual discrimination, within a generation’s time they are accepted as White. Yet Black Americans, despite having been in America virtually as long as the earliest European settlers, and despite the fact that the early American economy was built on their forced labor, continue to be relegated to the status of second-class citizens.
Finally, Malcolm revisits one of the book’s major themes: The loss of Black intellectual potential because of White supremacy. In West Indian Archie, a mathematical savant who can hold a day’s worth of bets in his head, Malcolm sees one of the countless Black Americans deprived of the opportunity to improve America’s collective intellectual capital: “If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used. But they were black” (135). No one has to explicitly tell young Black men they cannot be mathematicians and lawyers, because the system of White supremacy in which they are raised sends these messages automatically.
Related Titles
By these authors
