In these interview excerpts, family and friends remember Malcolm X. Alex Haley, a novelist and journalist, began working on The Autobiography of Malcolm X with Malcolm in 1963. The book was published after Malcolm's death in 1965.

Driving Around Harlem
One day Malcolm said to me would I like to ride with him. Periodically he would ask me that. He had a blue Oldsmobile and he liked to drive around, just tool around in Harlem. He called it patrolling his beat, it was among his people and he genuinely enjoyed it. People would recognize him and they would wave, in some areas he was like Sugar Ray Robinson, driving around. And one such day, in an afternoon, we were in Harlem up in the 130ths area and all of a sudden Malcolm slapped his big foot on the brake, the car just jolted to a stop, screeched. And I said, "Oh my God," I knew we were shot, because Malcolm was a target in lots of areas. And before I knew really what was happening he had burst out of the door, the driver's side door, and was over against the wall of a building and he's standing like an avenging devil over three young black men who would be say 18, 19, in that area, maybe 20, and his fingers out and it was the angriest I ever saw Malcolm. He was shaking his finger at them, and he was just raging at them. He was something like, "Beyond these doors is the greatest collection of information by black people in the world and other people in there studying about you, and the best you can do is be out here shooting craps against the door. You should be ashamed of yourselves." And these young men got up and I tell you literally they went slinking away.

Now the significant part is these were young men who probably would have cut the throat of anybody else who would have dared come up and accost them in such a manner. But they recognized Malcolm and such was Malcolm's image, such was his power in the image terms, that their reaction was just to slink away. They were embarrassed, they were guilty as charged. And he fumed about it. He had a way of coming upon something that would really get to him and then he would just mutter and go on about it until it kind of wore down. But he was furious about that and he was also furious about anything that he came upon that he interpreted as black people, particularly younger black people, shirking opportunities to learn about themselves, about anything. He said unless we get equipped with information that is taught, we will not be able to cope in this society. That was his general thematic thing.

A Synthesis of Roles
My own perception of Malcolm was one of something that bordered on fascination because I was looking at him and reacting to him as a subject. I was a young writer, I had been the usually requisite 15 years getting rejections slips for the most part and finally was beginning to get assignments. And I saw him as someone who was hard to top as a subject. He was always — I like to say of Malcolm — he was just simply electrical. Everything he did almost was dramatic and it wasn't that he was trying to be, it was just the nature of him. In later years I would be rather taken by a statement he would make of himself. He would say. "I am a part of all I have met." And by that he meant that all the things he had done in his earlier life had exposed him to things, had taught him skills of one another sort or had taught him traits of one another sort, all of which had synthesized into the Malcolm who became the spokesman for the Nation of Islam.

Such as that here was a man who in the eighth grade in Michigan — a school where I think he was the only black in his class and one of the very few in the school — had been an outstanding straight-A student, who had been in fact the president of his class. And all the others were white in the eighth grade. Obviously he had to be exceptional to be those things. So you had that quality which was a facet of him: the brains, the innate ability to learn and to acquire and to use and utilize knowledge. And then you had the Malcolm who had left school and who had gone to Roxbury, Massachusetts where he had gotten his first exposure to what might loosely be called hustling. I remember him telling me with great seriousness about how he had learned at the tutoring of an older person who came from where he had come from in Michigan and who had called him homeboy. I made that chapter, the title of that chapter was Homeboy. And this man had taught him his first hustle: that to be a shoeshine boy was okay; he would get say 15 cents or maybe 20 cents per shine, but if he learned how to make the rag pop loudly — there was a way you could use the rag kind of loosely and then jerk it down on the shoe and it would make a noise, a popping noise — and people somehow liked that and they would give Malcolm as much as a quarter tip. And so he became the poppingist shoeshine boy in town and so on. And this type of thing, the hustler world, became part of him. And then later he was into more serious things, you know, crime type things. And all of these sharpened his wits and his ability to connive and to do cunning things. And these were part of the Malcolm of 1961, 62 as well. And then finally, the ultimate thing, he was in prison and the world of the prisoner is one that is quite educational in its way. And so that was another part of him. And so Malcolm liked to say that he, the Malcolm as of 1961, 62, and subsequently, He said, "I am a part of all I have met," which was another way of saying he was a synthesis of all that he had learned in these various roles.