"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 that it was possible the family would decide to sell the letter, but that that would be a group decision.
Alex Haley died in 1992.
"So much of African American history gets lost," Haley said, "and is sometimes not in the place where we prefer it to be."
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.
The letter was sent to publisher Grove Press for inclusion in the autobiography, which was first published in 1965. Grove included the letter in files it gave to Syracuse University in 1969.
Sean M. Quimby, senior director of the university's Special Collections Research Center, said it had documentation from Grove that showed Syracuse owned the transferred archive. He said that the school's ownership had never been challenged before in 43 years and that he has not seen any evidence that the letter was loaned, instead of given, to Grove.
"Our library and our special collections are publicly available to anyone," Quimby added, "and there is a greater good served."
William Haley's attorney, Gregory J. Reed of Detroit, said that Haley passed along the letter to Grove only so it could be included in the autobiography and that Grove never had legal title.
Haley said he was acting now because he only found out about details of the letter recently after talking to Reed, who collects Malcolm X material.
