What would Malcolm X have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? As a 14-year-old, roaming East Lansing, Michigan, he and a pal were pulled up by cops. With a policeman’s .38 revolver just inches from his head, the lanky teenager horrified his friend by taunting them: “Go ahead, pull the trigger, whitey.” The officers backed off, telling the boys to “get their black asses” back to their side of town. Their suspected offence? Flirtation with two white girls, who were whisked off, no doubt to a chastening lecture about the dangers of consorting with “negroes”.
Malcolm would no doubt have been intrigued by this year’s street protests. But this new biography, by the late Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist Les Payne and his daughter, Tamara, suggests that
