Books of The Times
Peeling Away Multiple Masks
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: April 7, 2011
He was a master of reinvention who had as many names as he did identities: Malcolm Little, Homeboy, Jack Carlton, Detroit Red, Big Red, Satan, Malachi Shabazz, Malik Shabazz, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and, most famously, Malcolm X. A country bumpkin who became a zoot-suited entertainer who became a petty criminal who became a self-taught intellectual who became a white-hating black nationalist who became a follower of orthodox Islam who became an international figure championing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people.”
Philippe Cheng
Manning Marable
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MALCOLM X
A Life of Reinvention
By Manning Marable
Illustrated. 594 pages. Viking. $30.
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Related
On Eve of Redefining Malcolm X, Biographer Dies (April 2, 2011)
Manning Marable, Historian and Social Critic, Dies at 60 (April 2, 2011)
Excerpt: ‘Malcolm X’ (April 2, 2011)
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
In his revealing and prodigiously researched new biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” Manning Marable — a professor at Columbia University and the director of its Center for Contemporary Black History, who died just last week — vividly chronicles these many incarnations of his subject, describing the “multiple masks” he donned over the years, while charting the complex and contradiction-filled evolution of his political and religious beliefs. The book draws from diaries, letters, F.B.I. files, Web resources and interviews with members of Malcolm X’s inner circle.
This volume does not provide much psychological insight into why Malcolm X became such a protean figure (or why he needed to distance “his inner self from the outside world”), and it lacks the urgency and fierce eloquence of Malcolm X’s own “Autobiography.” Still, Mr. Marable artfully strips away the layers and layers of myth that have been lacquered onto his subject’s life — first by Malcolm himself in that famous memoir, and later by both supporters and opponents after his assassination in 1965 at the age of 39.
Mr. Marable argues that Malcolm X was a gifted performer, adept at presenting himself to black audiences “as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister.” He also suggests that Malcolm exaggerated his criminal youth in his “Autobiography” to create “an allegory documenting the destructive consequences of racism within the U.S. criminal justice and penal system,” and to underscore the transformative power that the Nation of Islam brought to his own life while in prison.
As Mr. Marable sees it, the “Autobiography,” which was written with Alex Haley (later of “Roots” fame), was in some respects “more Haley’s than its author’s.” Because Malcolm X died in February 1965, Mr. Marable writes, “he had no opportunity to revise major elements of what would become known as his political testament.” Haley, “a liberal Republican,” in Mr. Marable’s words, made the finished book read like a work in “the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography” rather than “a manifesto for black insurrection” — which perhaps explains its widespread popularity and prominent place in high school and college curriculums.
One of the many achievements of this biography is that Mr. Marable manages to situate Malcolm X within the context of 20th-century racial politics in America without losing focus on his central character, as Taylor Branch sometimes did in his monumental, three-volume chronicle of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. At the same time Mr. Marable provides a compelling account of Malcolm X’s split with the Nation of Islam as he moved away from that sect’s black nationalism and radical separatist politics, and as personal tensions between him and the Nation leader Elijah Muhammad escalated further after Muhammad impregnated a woman who had had a longtime romantic relationship with Malcolm X.
Along the way Mr. Marable lays out a harrowing picture of Nation members’ determination to do away with the charismatic Malcolm X, who after being exiled from the sect had struck out on his own, forming a new group and alliances with orthodox Islamic groups abroad. When surveillance records become fully available, Mr. Marable asserts, “it would not be entirely surprising if an F.B.I. transcript surfaced documenting a telephone call from Elijah Muhammad to a subordinate, authorizing Malcolm’s murder,” but he does not come up with a smoking gun on that count in these pages.
It is Mr. Marable’s contention that while two of the three men convicted of the murder had alibis, the man who actually fired “the kill shot, the blow that executed Malcolm X” went free, only to serve prison time later for other crimes. He says this man is one Willie Bradley, who was later inducted into the Newark Athletic Hall of Fame for his high school baseball achievements and briefly appeared in a campaign video, promoting the re-election of Newark’s mayor, Cory A. Booker. (The Star-Ledger of Newark published an article about a man it says is Mr. Bradley, but his family denies any connection to the shooting.)
Mr. Marable speculates that Mr. Bradley “and possibly other Newark mosque members may have actively collaborated on the shooting with local law enforcement and/or the F.B.I.,” but fails to provide any hard evidence concerning this allegation either. In addition he argues that law enforcement agencies did not actively investigate threats on Malcolm X’s life, but instead “stood back, almost waiting for a crime to happen.”
In the course of this volume Mr. Marable corrects some popular assumptions: for instance, Malcolm X was introduced to the Nation of Islam not by a fellow prisoner — as depicted in Spike Lee’s 1992 movie “Malcolm X” — but by family members. Somewhat more enigmatic and sharper-elbowed than the man in the movie, Mr. Marable’s Malcolm is a passionate, conflicted and guarded man, filled with contradictions — charming and charismatic with audiences and the press but detached, even chilly with his wife, Betty, whom he frequently treated with misogynistic disdain. Some people quoted in this volume depict Malcolm X as being fatalistic in the last days of his life, telling one former associate that “the males in his family didn’t die a natural death.”
As a young man in prison Malcolm steeped himself not just in black history, Mr. Marable writes, but in “Herodotus, Kant, Nietzsche, and other historians and philosophers of Western civilization.” His hungry intellect and gift for oratory would make him a magnetic proselytizer for the Nation of Islam, and later, after his split from the Nation, for his own more pluralistic vision, which would align him more closely with the civil rights movement and Dr. King, whom he had once denounced as an Uncle Tom.
There is one ill-considered effort in these pages to rationalize Malcolm X’s violent rhetoric in his Nation of Islam days. “In retrospect,” Mr. Marable writes, “many of Malcolm’s most outrageous statements about the necessity of extremism in the achievement of political freedom and liberty were not unlike the views expressed by the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who declared that ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.’ ”
This hardly seems an apt comparison given Malcolm X’s description of a 1962 airplane crash, killing more than a hundred well-to-do white residents of Atlanta, as “a very beautiful thing,” proof that God answers prayers. Or his description of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as an instance of “the chickens coming home to roost” — to which he added that “being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.”
For the most part in this book, however, Mr. Marable takes a methodical approach to deconstructing Malcolm X’s complex legacy: his articulation of the “frustrations of the black poor and working class” and his message of “black pride, self-respect, and an awareness of one’s heritage.” As for the incendiary actions Malcolm X sometimes took as a member of the Nation of Islam, these are duly chronicled here as well.
After a 1962 police raid on a Nation of Islam mosque in Los Angeles (in which more than a half-dozen Muslims were shot), Mr. Marable asserts, Malcolm X began to recruit members for an assassination team to target officers from the Los Angeles Police Department. The year before, Mr. Marable says, Malcolm and another Nation leader met with representatives of the Ku Klux Klan, assuring those white racists, according to F.B.I. surveillance, that “his people wanted complete segregation from the white race.”
Spiritual and political growth was the one constant in Malcolm X’s restless and peripatetic life. During a 1964 trip to Mecca he was treated with kindness by white Muslims and was moved by the sight of thousands of people of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds praying in unison to the same God. This would lead to his embrace of a kind of internationalist humanism, separating himself not just from Nation of Islam’s leadership but from its angry, separatist theology too. After Mecca, Malcolm began reaching out to the civil rights establishment and came to recognize, in Mr. Marable’s words, that “blacks indeed could achieve representation and even power under America’s constitutional system.”
Toward the end of his “Autobiography” Malcolm X wrote: “The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities — he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites. But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth — the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.”
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Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable – review
Black power hero Malcolm X held bizarre and contradictory beliefs – yet his popular legacy is greater than Martin Luther King's. Here at last is the meticulous portrait he deserves
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- The Observer, Sunday 10 April 2011
- Article history
Of all the American leaders who were assassinated in the 60s, that decade of turmoil and revolt, Malcolm X has enjoyed the greatest upturn in posthumous fortune. In the pantheon of black American protest figures only Martin Luther King occupies a more exalted position, but it is Malcolm X whose legend has the greater street credibility and aura of cool. It's he who was the subject of Spike Lee's biopic starring Denzel Washington, and it is Malcolm, not Martin, who today is cited by radicals and rap stars.
- Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
- by Manning Marable
- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
Yet Malcolm Little, as he was born, was a petty thief and a pimp who found salvation in theNation of Islam (NOI), a bizarre cult led by a mountebank and sexual predator named Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad preached that white people were a race of devils created 6,000 years ago by an evil scientist named Yakub. As Muhammad's leading minister, Malcolm X rejected the civil rights movement, labelled Dr King a "house Negro", and formed liaisons with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi party – organisations that he found preferable to mainstream political parties.
Although the Nation of Islam continually boasted of its willingness to defend itself and by extension the black community, it reserved its fire power for its own members, severely beating anyone who stepped out of line, and killing those (like Malcolm himself) who were deemed a threat to Muhammad. Malcolm X knew this, but he stayed loyal to the cause for the better part of his adulthood – only breaking from the NOI in his last year of life, when he was kicked out in an internal power play.
How and why has death treated him so well? One reason is theAutobiography of Malcolm X, a memoir ghosted by Alex Haley, who later wrote the Afro-American blockbuster Roots. The autobiography sold more than 6 million copies in the 10 years following Malcolm's murder by NOI hitmen in 1965, and continues to be a key revolutionary text. A gripping mixture of urban confessional and political manifesto, it not only inspired a generation of black activists, but drove home the bitter realities of racism to a mainstream white liberal audience.
But if the book's success established Malcolm's legacy, it also created a myth that deterred a more stringent analysis of his life and work. Now, almost a half century on, Malcolm has finally received the biography that his unique role in black and global resistance culture demands.
Manning Marable, who died on 1 April after a long illness, was professor of history and political science at Columbia University and was steeped in African-American studies. He has left a meticulous, comprehensive and fair-minded portrait of both Malcolm and the turbulent period of American history in which he lived and died. We learn that the "Detroit Red" image of Malcolm as a street hoodlum was exaggerated in the autobiography, the better to dramatise his conversion to the law-abiding but society-rejecting doctrine of Muhammad's NOI.
Long before multiculturalism entered the language of political discourse, Malcolm was busy exploring its logical endpoint of ethnic and cultural separation – which helps explain his collusion with far-right white racists, including meetings with the Ku Klux Klan and verbal support for Nazis. But then Malcolm said many things. As Manning shows, he was adept at tailoring his message to different audiences, often blatantly contradicting on a Wednesday what he had clearly and emotively stated on a Monday.
Not the least of Malcolm's flaws was his attitude to women, and his wife in particular. Betty Shabazz was abandoned in her home for the greater part of her marriage, including the period during which Malcolm and his family were targets of a campaign of NOI intimidation. Malcolm's habit, after the birth of each of his four children, was to embark on distant speaking tours.
Yet despite all of this, the man who emerges from this book is in many respects admirable: brave, loyal, self-disciplined, quick-witted, charismatic, acutely intelligent and a public speaker of quite awesome power. A fallacy that has grown over the years is that there were three distinct Malcolms: the street thug, the white-hating demagogue and, after his split with the NOI, a liberal integrationist who was in essence a slightly more outspoken Dr King.
Regardless of his book's subtitle, Manning convincingly argues that there was in fact a much stronger continuum. Malcolm (whose father was probably murdered by white racists) was first of all the child of supporters of the black nationalist Marcus Garvey. And while he softened his position vis-a-vis white America in his post-NOI phase, he remained capable of vehement anti-white rhetoric and overwhelmingly concerned with black power.
Given his difficult childhood (he was taken into care and fostered), and the fierce racism that dominated American civil and political life at the time, his attitudes were not surprising. What was out of the ordinary was the unrelenting determination that Malcolm brought to the business of galvanising black America. Lacking a formal education, he became a voracious reader and an inspired debater. Manning suggests that Malcolm's youthful appreciation of jazz helped create a vocal rhythm that broke from convention and propelled his speeches with a kind of bebop daring.
While Malcolm correctly predicted that black culture would assume a central role in American life, he would never have foreseen the election of a black president. And as is true of many militants, there was no tyrant, however murderous, that he wouldn't praise in the name of anti-imperialism. Yet in truth, he outgrew the NOI strategically and intellectually some years before the final breach, and stayed within the organisation, parroting lines for which he felt increasing contempt, out of blind allegiance. Perhaps he knew that to leave was to sign his death warrant.
In the NOI's newspaper, a few weeks before Malcolm's murder, one of the group's leading ministers declared: "Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death." They were the words of Louis X, who had been Malcolm's most promising disciple. He is now better-known as Louis Farrakhan, the current and long-standing head of the NOI.
Malcolm's killing on 21 February 1965 in front of a Harlem audience that included his wife and young children has been the subject of sometimes deluded speculation. He was shot down by three men, one of whom, a NOI member, was caught and disarmed by the crowd. The two others – whose identities have long been known – escaped, and two entirely innocent men were found guilty and imprisoned in an appalling miscarriage of justice that, ironically, served only to confirm Malcolm's opinion of America's prejudiced legal system.
Manning presents a strong case that there was some form of FBI collusion in the murder, if only to the degree that the bureau, which had spies all over the NoI, failed to prevent the plot. He also floats the probability that at least one of the killers was an FBI informant.
Whatever the truth, there is no disputing that Malcolm was shot dead by men who largely shared his beliefs. Nor that 30 years after his murder more than half a million black men would converge on Washington DC to protest, in the language he made popular, the demonisation and criminalisation of African-American males. The keynote speaker at that "million man march" was Louis Farrakhan. Malcolm, no doubt, would have appreciated history's gift for farce.
>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/10/malcolm-x-reinvention-review-mann...