A credit to Allah?

Station Hill (UK distributor, Element Books), #19.95 (pp 544)

RACISM is tenacious and adaptable, a clever disease. It is, always,

full of contagious ideas.

Recently there appeared in America yet another theory to describe that

nation's woes. An underclass has emerged among us, the experts said.

They fail at school and they fail at work. They are ''welfare

dependent'', squandering dole on drink and drugs.

They prefer things that way.

Sexually promiscuous, they breed without thought. For them, the

nuclear family is a memory. Single mothers produce lawless sons who,

lacking father figures, fill the prisons when they are not killing one

another. They are dangerous to themselves and dangerous to us.

And by the way, most of them are black.

The idea is less coherent than convenient. Sense might say that

communities do not long survive the ghetto, or that those who for

decades have been last and least in the jobs market are liable to think

little of the work ethic. In America, it seems, sense has ceased to

matter.

It is as though they need a new excuse. Once ''experts'' talked of a

sub-species. Once the caricature of the lazy, shambling black -- but

hey, the boy can dance! -- was common-

place.

Then came the genetic argument, rank with the stench of eugenics.

Now it is the underclass: the nigger has a new name.

In the sixties, briefly, that changed. Martin Luther King and Malcolm

X put white America on the defensive, forced it to look and forced it to

see. Both were eloquent, both were murdered.

Death, tranforming him into a legend, has been unkind to Malcolm, the

underclass personified. In turn, Spike Lee's long film, heavy on message

and light on accuracy, has rendered the legend as a marketing exercise.

It is hard now to say what the electrifying orator really stood for

beyond a teeshirt demanding change ''by any means necessary''.

To that extent, Bruce Perry's book, the fruit of 20 years' work, is

welcome. He has interviewed 420 people who knew Malcolm, including his

family, his friends, his fellow prisoners, and his Black Muslim

colleagues. Perry has combed newspapers and newsreels. He has studied

2000 pages of FBI reports, the files of the NYPD, the CIA and the State

Department. He does not write well, but his dedication is awesome.

He has two theses. One is that Malcolm's life has been mythologised

(not least by Malcolm himself); the second that his miserable childhood

explained his later radicalism. Perry almost pulls it off.

It has long been known that The Autobiography of Malcolm X should be

read with caution. Written ''with the assistance of'' Alex Haley, its

convictions are a deal more plausible than its facts. Perry sets out to

show that much of it was an exercise in self-dramatisation and

self-justification.

According to the autobiography, for example, a group of Ku Klux Klan

riders threatened the household of Earl Little one night when his wife

Louisa was pregnant with Malcolm. The episode appears in Lee's film, but

Perry says it never happened.

Similarly, according to Malcolm, the Reverend Earl, a follower of

Marcus Garvey, was murdered by whites. In later years he would contend

that members of the ''Black Legion'' had beaten his father unconscious

and laid him on trolley tracks before an oncoming car.

Perry shows that this was a theory absorbed from Louisa alone. She had

been unhappy with her husband but did not want to believe his death was

an accident. Before he died, however, Earl told police he had simply

missed his step and fallen beneath the trolley's wheels.

Perry also says that Malcolm's parents beat their children and that

Louisa was mentally unstable. The family suffered racism and poverty but

this did not explain all. Malcolm's career as a zoot-suited hood was

launched, so the author's witnesses suggest, by a dysfunctional family.

Psychology, the bane of biographers, permeates the book. As a child

Malcolm suffered headaches, which recurred while he was in jail. But the

prison doctor found that these ''responded to placebo treatment''.

Haemorr-

hoids and constipation also plagued him and Perry puts this down to

''harsh toilet-training''. Faced with a myth, the author reaches for the

mundane.

He finds significance in the fact that Malcolm was light-skinned and

teased for it as a child. As a young man, he consorted with white women.

Which means, evidently, that he became ''blacker than black'' after his

conversion to militant Islam because he was unsure of his identity. The

idea that he reached a political position by hard thinking is given less

credence.

Perry is less than eloquent. ''He [Malcolm] rebelled against civil

authority with a fervour stemming from earlier, unresolved battles

against parental and pedagogical authority,'' he says, meaning that the

boy got eight to 10 years hard for burglary and became prisoner 22843 in

Charlestown pen in 1946.

It was in prison, nevertheless, that Malcolm found a direction when he

was converted by the Black Muslims. He had studied other religions while

in jail and thought of becoming a lawyer. Instead, determined to change

his life, he became an activist and a preacher.

The Nation of Islam's teachings are nonsense, but no worse than those

in white bibles. Mecca was founded by blacks; an evil outcast genius

bred a ''devil-race'' -- whites -- to revenge himself on his people;

these colonised Europe. Eventually the first wave of them, the Jews,

were allowed 6000 years of hegemony by Allah.

By the twentieth century, a great change was on the way, or so said

Elijah Muhammad, the Nation's deeply implausible leader and the man to

whom Malcolm X (the consonant repudiating a slave name) became devoted.

The Nation gave Malcolm his power base. Like Marcus Garvey, it offered

separatist myths that restored black pride. Yet when Malcolm became more

popular than the disreputable Elijah Muhammad (and unhappy with the

Nation's racism) a split was inevitable.

A trip to Mecca convinced the protege that his mentor had, to say the

least, misled him.

''No man will be successful in opposing me,'' said the Nation's

leader. Malcolm's house was fire-bombed and he knew he did not have long

to live. On February 21, 1965, aged 39, he was gunned down by three men

while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom, between Broadway and St Nicholas

Avenue in New York. The identity of the killers is still disputed.

All of this Perry reports. Yet so intent is he on finding a

sociological rather than a political explanation for Malcolm X that we

are left with no clear idea of this most ''flexible'' (his own word) of

thinkers. A Muslim, he flirted with socialism. A revolutionary, he spoke

well at the end of the non-violent civil rights movement. He was, most

of all, a black voice of stunning clarity.

Nothing in Perry's writing has the force of the autobiography, which

concludes:

''I know that societies often have killed the people who have helped

to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light,

having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist

cancer that is malignant in the body of America, then all the credit is

due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.''