Rescuing Malcolm X From His Calculated Myths
The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 1, 2011
Joseph, Peniel E. "Rescuing Malcolm X From His Calculated Myths." The Chronicle of Higher Education 57.35 (2011).
Biography In Context. Web. 28 May 2013.
Malcolm X bestrides the postwar age of decolonization alongside global icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma
Gandhi. If King and Gandhi evoked nonviolence and disciplined civil disobedience as a shield to protect the world from
imperial wars, racism, and rampant materialism, Malcolm wielded the specter of self-defense, violence, and revolution as
a sword to permanently alter power relations between the global North and South. In an epoch contoured by revolutions
that connected local political struggles to national and international upheavals, he self-consciously brokered links among
Africa, the Middle East, and America, setting the stage for political, religious, and cultural reverberations that would
continue past his lifetime.
… Embraced by Black Power activists, hip-hop artists, socialists, and black nationalists, Malcolm's iconography had been
successfully rehabilitated enough by the 1990s to merit a major motion picture, an official U.S. postage stamp, and
mainstream identification as King's angry but eloquent counterpart. Recognition came at a high cost. Despite a plethora of
popular and scholarly works -- on Malcolm's political and religious views, his life as hipster and hustler, his embrace of
Pan-African impulses, his break with the Nation of Islam -- a definitive scholarly biography illuminating his singular
importance as a dominant 20th-century historical figure remained absent. For personal, financial, and political reasons, his
widow and subsequently his estate restricted access to important archival material until 2008. His former associates were
loath to give interviews, and the Nation of Islam remained mostly silent about the circumstances surrounding his death.
The FBI and the New York City Police Department closed off thousands of pages of surveillance and wiretapping records.
Then too, the success of the Autobiography as a literary memoir narrowed the opening for a scholarly biography.
Historical scholarship has focused on Malcolm's words of fire, depicting him more as a brilliant speaker than a community
organizer. His supple intellect, burgeoning political ambitions, and organizing prowess have garnered far less attention. As
have details of his private life. And no single volume has attempted to craft a cohesive portrait that stands outside the
Autobiography's considerable shadow. In that celebrated book, Malcolm X outlined his views on the importance of
producing an accurate history: "I've had enough of somebody else's propaganda," he proclaimed.
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking), by Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia University who died just days
before publication of what is clearly his life's work, achieves the rare feat of rescuing a man from his own mythology with
deep archival research and brilliant insight. Marable's untimely death adds a layer of poignancy to a biography that will
stand as the most authoritative account of Malcolm's life that will be written for a long time.
…In Malcolm X, Marable found a perfect subject, one whose uncanny ability to reinvent himself during his prematurely
short life and truncated public career touched upon themes of black political self-determination, economic justice,
internationalism, and radical democracy represented in the scholar's own intellectual corpus.
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Marable's subtitle, A Life of Reinvention, succinctly captures his book's larger effort to recast the political and personal life
of the Black Power icon in both subtle and surprising ways. The Malcolm X revealed in these pages is at once a largerthan-life figure and a scaled-down, even frail human being. Marable refuses to shy away from Malcolm's flaws, candidly
discussing his sexism, errors in political and personal judgment, and occasional anti-Semitic utterances.
…. Years in the making, Malcolm X is a thoroughly researched biography, mining a rich archive of primary sources
(including many never accessed before) and collecting oral histories from Malcolm's associates and Nation of Islam
officials (most notably Louis Farrakhan). Marable's discussion of Malcolm's at-times strained marriage relies on such oral
histories and on personal correspondence from Malcolm to Elijah Muhammad, his mentor and the Nation's spiritual
leader, which offer substantive evidence of a troubled union. That's also the kind of material undoubtedly painful for
surviving family members. …
Racial politics formed part of Malcolm Little's birthright, an inheritance from his parents, Earl and Louise Little, two
politically courageous supporters of Marcus Garvey -- or, depending on your perspective, ill-fated pioneers of black
nationalism -- in the distant outpost of Omaha, Neb., where Malcolm was born on May 19, 1925. While Malcolm was still
young, the family moved to Lansing, Mich. His was a difficult childhood, plagued by bouts of domestic violence,
harassment from the local Klan, and Earl's gruesomely suspicious death (he was cut nearly in two by what white
authorities claimed was a streetcar accident and Malcolm surmised was part of a lynching). Earl Little's death shattered
his surviving family, hurling them into an emotionally fatiguing battle with state relief agencies that found the young
Malcolm relying on foster care and eventually triggered Louise's mental breakdown and institutionalization. By 1941,
Malcolm had moved to Boston to live with his older half-sister Ella. It was here that Malcolm Little first reinvented himself
as a small-time hood whose crimes were at least partially inspired by Ella's own extralegal activities in pursuit of a middleclass lifestyle.
Marable deconstructs the the Legend of Detroit Red outlined in the Autobiography, finding that Malcolm purposely
exaggerated his criminal exploits as a way of obscuring painful and embarrassing memories and of emphasizing the
importance of the Nation of Islam in his eventual transformation. Far from being aligned with major gangsters, in this
period Malcolm alternated between part-time legal employment like selling food on railroads (where he was known as
Sandwich Red), dealing small amounts of marijuana to jazz musicians, and engaging in largely amateurish holdups, at
least one of which ended in an early arrest. Successfully evading the draft by feigning mental illness, Malcolm engaged in
escalating drug abuse and petty crime that ended abruptly shortly after World War II. Arrested in 1946 for a series of
burglaries, fooled by false promises of leniency, he turned in his whole crew. The interracial makeup of the burglary ring,
which included Malcolm's white girlfriend, inspired a harsh sentence of eight to 10 years.
Within the walls of Norfolk Prison Colony, in Massachusetts, Malcolm Little would reinvent himself again. Through letters
from his brother Reginald, he was first introduced to the Nation of Islam, a religious nationalist sect whose emphasis on
pride, self-respect, and discipline echoed his father's distant Garveyite preaching. Newly energized and clean and sober,
Malcolm dove into a meticulous study of religion, history, and philosophy. Paroled in 1952, he quickly became a full-time
Nation of Islam minister. Whereas Garvey resurrected ancient African kingdoms as proof of black nobility and self-respect,
the Nation of Islam touted religious prophesy through an imaginative blend of Islam, black nationalism, and religious
mythology that identified whites as "devils" and predicted America's destruction even as it embraced a conservative
economic vision of black capitalism.
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Reborn as Malcolm X, a surname that reflected black people's loss of identity in America's racial wilderness, the former
Detroit Red now embraced personal self-discipline and an ascetic lifestyle. "The trickster disappeared," writes Marable,
"leaving the willful challenger to authority." The biography weaves in new details to flesh out the narrative of Malcolm's
becoming a minister and his rise to power within the Nation of Islam. He was an indefatigable organizer, whose
remarkable ability to inspire new converts and recruits helped propel the Nation's tiny infrastructure into a formidable
group with global ambitions.
… Marable takes pains to illustrate that the iconography in Haley's Autobiography at times presumptuously crafted an
image of Malcolm in line with Haley's own political views as a liberal Republican -- and one apt to sell commercially. The
Autobiography sanitized Malcolm's radical politics by tacking on an introduction by a New York Times writer and an
epilogue by Haley himself, even as it excised three chapters originally designed to showcase Malcolm's new political
philosophy.
… More than 45 years after his death, we now have a historical portrait of Malcolm X that goes beyond literary cliches and
autobiographical fictions to reveal an all-too human man beset by personal trials and political tribulations that would have
felled the less courageous. Stripped from the cocoon of his posthumous aura of invincibility, Malcolm X emerges from
these pages an endlessly fascinating and protean figure whose shortcomings make his political accomplishments all the
more remarkable. Against the backdrop of private disappointments and embarrassingly public betrayals, Marable reminds
us that Malcolm X still managed to transform "the discourse and politics of race internationally," a final enduring
reinvention that continues long after his death.
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