Malcolm X: What He Might Have Become

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. By Manning Marable. Viking Adult; 592 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

MALCOLM LITTLE had several names before his life ended in assassination in a New York theatre in 1965. As a youthful hustler, petty thief and drug-dealer he was “Detroit Red”. As a pious Sunni Muslim he became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. But in most memories he remains Malcolm X, the charismatic public face of the Nation of Islam, which preached that whites were devils and that black separatism was the answer to America’s problems of race.

Whatever the name, Malcolm’s short life (he was slain at 39) makes a fascinating story and is told well by Manning Marable, director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, who sadly died a few days before his book was published this week. The fascination lies in the evolution of Malcolm’s beliefs: from the black nationalism and pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey through the black separatism of the Nation of Islam to the colour-blind embrace of orthodox Islam. The tale includes the burning down of Malcolm’s childhood home, the ruthless brutality of Nation of Islam thugs, the sexual philandering of the Nation’s spiritual leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the enthusiasm with which political and religious elites embraced Malcolm on his trips to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
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* African-American issues
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Some of this detail comes from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, related by Malcolm to Alex Haley (later to become famous as the author of “Roots”) and published just after Malcolm’s death. But Mr Marable argues that the autobiography was more of a memoir—hence the exaggeration of the young Malcolm’s involvement in hard-core crime—than a solid exercise in objective fact. Rather than rely on the autobiography, Mr Marable has scoured contemporary press clippings in America, Europe and Africa. He has benefited, too, from the recent release to the public of hundreds of Malcolm’s letters, photographs and texts of speeches.

Malcolm was only one of the prominent black figures in America’s turbulent racial politics of the early 1960s. John Lewis, now a member of the House of Representatives, was organising the Freedom Riders in an attempt to register black voters in the American South; Martin Luther King was preaching non-violence in the black quest for civil rights; and Stokely Carmichael, one of the Freedom Riders but soon to join the Black Panther Party, was becoming impatient with non-violence and coining the slogan “black power”.

It was Malcolm, however, who appealed most to poor blacks, rural and urban alike: “Impoverished African Americans could admire Dr King, but Malcolm not only spoke their language, he had lived their experiences—in foster homes, in prisons, in unemployment lines,” writes Mr Marable. The question was how Malcolm would use this appeal.

He was originally Elijah Muhammad’s favoured disciple, but his attraction to politics did not fit with the Nation’s refusal to be involved in the civil-rights movement. By early 1964 Malcolm had formally left the Nation. The estrangement was both personal, thanks to the jealousy Malcolm had provoked at the Nation’s headquarters, and ideological: his conversion to orthodox Islam was at odds with the heresies of the Nation (not only did Elijah Muhammad claim to be a new prophet but the Nation’s founder, Wallace Fard, had claimed to be the personification of Allah).

Was the Nation responsible for Malcolm’s murder? Its leaders denied any link, but Louis Farrakhan, later to become the Nation’s leader on the death of Elijah Muhammad, had declared in December 1964 that: “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” As Mr Marable notes: “This code phrase was a call to arms within the sect.” The conviction of three men from the Nation failed to silence sceptics who suspected police and FBI complicity.

Mr Marable avoids judgment on the assassination. Instead he examines Malcolm’s legacy. Whereas King appeared on an American stamp and has a national holiday in his honour, Malcolm appeared on an Iranian stamp and has been lauded by al-Qaeda. Mr Marable speculates on what might have been if Malcolm had lived: “As his social vision expanded to include people of divergent nationalities and racial identities, his gentle humanism and antiracism could have become a platform for a new kind of radical, global ethnic politics.” Maybe. Yet some may feel that this conclusion rests more on the author’s wishful thinking than on the reality of the life he describes so well.

from the print edition | Books and Arts

Marable, The Economist

1959: The Year Everything Changed

Miles Davis
1959 The Year Everything Changed (2009)
By Fred Kaplan
It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill, the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop art, free jazz, “sick comics,” the New Journalism, and indie films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap—all bursting against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.
It was a year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were blurred and taboos trampled, when we crossed into a “new frontier” that offered the twin prospects of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation—a frontier that we continue to explore exactly fifty years later, at an eerily similar turning point.
In 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Slate columnist Fred Kaplan vividly chronicles this vital, overlooked year that set the world as we know it in motion. Drawing on original research, including untapped archives and interviews with major figures of the time, Kaplan pieces together the vast, untold story of a civilization in flux—and paints vivid portraits of the men and women whose creative energies, ideas, and inventions paved the way for the new era. They include:
Norman Mailer, musing on the hipster and the H-bomb while fusing journalism and literature in wildly new, influential ways; Lenny Bruce, remaking stand-up comedy by loosening the language and skewering politics and religion; Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, shattering the structures of jazz; John Cassavetes, making a new kind of movie, with improvised dialogue, shot in the city streets, outside the Hollywood system; Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, insinuating black urban music into mainstream pop culture; Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, suing the government’s censors and toppling obscenity laws; Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, advancing new and militant paths to civil rights and racial politics; Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Allan Kaprow, blurring the boundaries between art and life; Jack Kilby, a self-described “tinkerer,” inventing the microchip, which triggers the digital age; Margaret Sanger, a radical activist in her eighties, spurring renegade scientists to invent a “magic pill” that lets women control their reproductive processes and unleashes the sexual and feminist revolutions; and John F. Kennedy, the coalescing figure of the era, campaigning for president as a young outsider, keen to grapple with the “unknown opportunities and peril” of the coming “new frontier”—just as Barack Obama, an even unlikelier outsider, confronts the eve of a new decade in our own turbulent time.