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Playwrights and novelists took these heavily gendered political constructions and infused them into their works about the black freedom movement. In a 1989 published conversation between Attallah Shabazz and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s eldest daughter Yolanda King, both women acknowledged the problem. Attallah observed: "Playwrights always make Martin so passive and Malcolm so aggressive that those men wouldn't have lasted a minute in the same room." Yolanda King agreed, noting that in one play "my father was this wimp who carried a Bible everywhere he went, including to someone's house for dinner. That's not the kind of minister Daddy was! All these ridiculous clichés. And if it's about Malcolm, you know you're gonna see one strident, angry black man." Thus King, despite the enormous courage and discipline required to engage in civil disobedience, must be presented as effeminate, passive and ultimately powerless. Conversely, as Michael Eric Dyson noted: "(for) many...Malcolm is black manhood squared, the unadulterated truth of white racism ever on his tongue, the unity of black people ever on his agenda, the pain of black ghetto dwellers ever on his mind." The social reality behind the myth of Malcolm as "primordial black man" is, of course, far more complicated. Malcolm grew up in a household where his father routinely used physical force to discipline his children, and at times to intimidate his wife. Some speculate that Malcolm was anxious about marriage, perhaps owing to what he witnessed between his own parents when he was a young boy. After his father's death, and Louise Little's subsequent mental breakdown, Malcolm seemed later to attribute most of his teenaged shame and alienation to the failures of his mother. As Detroit Red, Malcolm Little lived the life of a street hustler, dealing drugs, engaging in petty theft and burglary just to survive. In the racialized world of "hep cats" and zoot suits, the most valuable signifier of black male prowess was the white woman. As the Autobiography of Malcolm X relates, Malcolm equated his sexual relationship with Sophia with winning a trophy. His sexual domination of a white woman gave the young hustler status and peer recognition: "important black hustlers and 'smart boys'...were clapping me on the back, setting us up with drinks at special tables.... Of course, I knew their reason like my own name: they wanted to steal my fine white woman away from me." As Big Red and Detroit Red, Malcolm learned the pleasures of the body, the joy of creativity of music, the athleticism of ballroom dancing, and the sensuality of sexual intimacy. After Malcolm's incarceration and subsequent entrance into the NOI, all of these emotions and experiences had to be locked away behind the doors of memory. But the years of streetwise hustling left an indelible mark on the Black Muslim Minister. Malcolm deeply respected his half-sister Ella Collins and appreciated the constant emotional and economic support she gave him. But Malcolm interpreted Ella's strength as masculinist; her economic self-sufficiency, intelligence and refusal to be intimidated in Boston's Muslim Temple were signifiers of her lack of femininity. He admired strong and uncompromising black women at a distance, like Billie Holiday and Abbey Lincoln. But within his own marriage to Betty Shabazz, Malcolm felt it necessary to exert his patriarchal authority. The "sins" of his former life on ghetto street corners and at juke joints were exorcised, replaced by extremely conservative standards for defining both black sexuality and masculinity set by the NOI.
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