Chapter from Malcolm X bio auctioned

NEW YORK — For decades, scholars have wanted to get a closer look at unpublished sections of a towering 20th century book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” including cut chapters that may have contained some of the most explosive thoughts of the African-American firebrand assassinated in 1965.

They may get their chance after an auction on Thursday, when a manuscript of an unpublished chapter, titled “The Negro,” was sold by Guernsey’s auction house for $7,000.

“We are like the Western deserts; tumbleweed, rolling and tumbling whichever way the white wind blows,” reads part of the chapter. “And the white man is like the cactus, deeply rooted, with spines to keep us off.”

The buyer was The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, based in Harlem. The Schomburg Center also acquired a 241-page early draft of Malcolm X’s autobiography at the auction for an undisclosed sum.

The existence of unpublished chapters of the book has been known since 1992, when an entertainment attorney, Gregory Reed, bought them at an estate auction after the death of the autobiography’s co-author, Alex Haley.

Some pages have been exhibited in a Detroit museum. An unpublished introduction was read aloud at an event in 2010. But mostly the sections of the draft that were cut before publication have been locked away from public view.

Schomburg Center director Kevin Young said after the auction that the draft of the entire book is of immense value, beyond the historic, for the handwritten revisions and comments by Malcolm X and Haley.

Their dialogue, in writing, reflects the human rights activism of the Muslim minister, who indicted white America for what he saw as criminal behavior against blacks.