When the iconic Alex Haley, author of the award-winning best seller Roots, died in 1992 at age 92, attorney Gregory J. Reed sojourned to Haley’s Tennessee estate in order to “preserve history and artifacts.” Little did Reed know he’d wind up purchasing a literary goldmine: the missing chapters of the multimillion-selling classic, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Haley co-authored.
On May 19, 2010, Malcolm X’s birthday, Reed was afforded the rare privilege to read those four missing chapters – “The Negro,” “End of Christianity” and “Twenty Million Muslims” as well as the unpublished introduction — on the same stage where Malcolm X was felled by assassins’ bullets 45 years ago in the former Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Now renamed the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center, the occasion was also to commemorate what would have been Malcolm’s 85th birthday.
“Most sincerely, I want my life story to do as much good for humanity as it possibly can for both races in America,” says Reed, a nationally renowned lawyer who resides in metro Detroit, reading from the missing chapters that Malcolm wrote. “That is the reason for this interim chapter.”
Reed possesses 20 envelopes containing the 20 chapter manuscript of the Autobiography of Malcolm X as well as notes and writings Haley made while interviewing Malcolm. Like Malcolm, Reed strongly admonishes African Americans to become masters and owners of our own history, lest we imperil our future.
“It’s very important that we own our own history. I was afraid that someone would get it [the Alex Haley and Malcolm X papers] and alter history. If you don’t acquire or seek out this material, people will write your history and that keeps us in the dark. And that’s misappropriating our culture. That keeps your mind frozen from becoming all you can be,” says Reed.
In fact, ignorance and antipathy of even our most recent history is why the murdered civil rights icon is still referred to as Malcolm X. After his split with the Nation of Islam and his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964, Malcolm X legally changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz or Malik Shabazz for short.
Speaking of history, when Reed procured these priceless papers, he recovered lost history that may have never been uncovered otherwise. Reed revealed the five main topics covered in the missing chapters:
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“There was an economic plan in these writings. Malcolm X had laid out a economic plan for self-sufficiency, self-determination and self-reliance. He laid out an economic plan for wealth, in terms of building the community and being self sufficient. And that’s the problem that many blacks have today. We really don’t know how to build and sustain wealth. And so we’re always going by someone else’s plan and purpose but not our own purpose. And that’s how you can be controlled. And one of the reasons why these chapters were left out in order to keep the minds enslaved.”
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Wake up: Wake up and understanding who you are.
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Clean Up: Clean up is cleaning up yourself from dope, alcohol, gambling and [dis]respecting women.
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Stand Up: And the stand up concept deals with stop blaming others for your own opportunities and being able to control your own neighborhoods and communities and building your own enterprises.
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Knowing thyself: Whenever we deprive [ourselves] of who we are [we] can never fulfill all that [we] can be. –terry shropshire
Caption: Attorney Gregory J. Reed is on the far right.
