NONFICTION - June 21, 1992

MALCOLM X: As They Knew Him by David Gallen (Carroll & Graf: $21.95; 288 pp.). Six weeks before his assassination in 1965, Malcolm X told journalist Claude Lewis that he wanted to be remembered, above all, for his sincerity. Someone can be wrong, he said, “but if he’s sincere you can put up with him. But you can’t put up with a person who’s right, if he’s insincere.” The quotation doesn’t jibe with the current perception of the former Malcolm Little, for he belongs more to myth than history; he’s remembered today not for his sincerity, or the more moderate views he developed in his last year of life, but for his militancy, which included references to black superiority, the evil inherent in white “devils,” and the virtual Uncle Tomism of Martin Luther King Jr. This book--which consists of an introductory appreciation, transcripts of major interviews and previously published essays by Eldridge Cleaver, Alex Haley, James Baldwin and others--is no threat to Malcolm X’s classic “Autobiography,” but it does show sides of the man that haven’t come through so clearly elsewhere. Malcolm X was by all accounts a spellbinding orator, for example, but he was also a wit, as another black discovered after insisting in the course of a debate that he was an American first and a black second, by virtue of his place of birth. Malcolm X smiled and replied, “Now, brother, if a cat has kittens in the oven, does that make them biscuits?”