University urged to return Malcolm X letter

ALBANY -- The son of Malcolm X's biographer is asking Syracuse University to hand over a letter in which the slain activist writes about his shifting views on race relations, claiming his family is the rightful owner.

Malcolm X wrote to Alex Haley, his collaborator for "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," from Saudi Arabia in 1964, about 10 months before he was killed at a Manhattan hotel ballroom. Grove Press, publisher of the 1965 autobiography, later gave the letter to Syracuse as part of a larger research archive.

But Haley's son, William Haley, said the publisher never had legal title to the letter and could not give it away. His attorney, Gregory J. Reed of Detroit, said yesterday that he plans to make a legal demand this week for the letter, which he believes is worth at least $650,000.

"The history is important for us as a family, the legacy," William Haley said. He said he was acting on behalf of himself and his two sisters. Haley said it's possible the family would decide to sell the letter, but that would be a group decision. Alex Haley died in 1992.

"So much of African-American history gets lost and is sometimes not in the place where we prefer it to be," Haley said.

Malcolm X's letter, written after a pilgrimage to Mecca, addresses the recent time he spent with Muslims "whose skin was the whitest of white." "In fact, what I have seen and experienced on this pilgrimage has forced me to 're arrange' much of my thought patterns, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions," he wrote.

Sean M. Quimby, of the university's Special Collections Research Center, said it has documentation from Grove that shows Syracuse owns the transferred archive. He said he has not seen any evidence that the letter was lent, instead of given, to Grove.