Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in Omaha in 1925, went from small-time hood called Detroit Red to a leader of the Black Muslims. At one time he was considered extremely dangerous by the police and the FBI, but was assassinated on orders by the group that he energized. Eventually his legacy was so transformed that he would appear on a U.S. postage stamp.

Manning Marable, who has sadly passed away since the publication of his carefully researched biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, fascinatingly recreates Malcolm's journey. Not only do we get an understanding of the man, but we also get many details left out of the landmark The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Hailey, which was published after Malcolm's murder, and went a long way in crafting his legacy. In addition, Marable gives us a history of the Black Muslim movement that traces back to the 1830s.

Malcolm's parents were Marcus Garveyites, followers of the man who pushed for black repatriation to Africa. They moved around quite a bit, but Malcolm mostly grew up in Michigan. His father died under mysterious circumstances (likely murdered), and his mother was institutionalized. He ended up jailed for minor crimes, and went by the nickname "Detroit Red." It was in the late '40s that he found Islam, and he would devote his life to it.

The leader of the Nation of Islam was Elijah Muhammad, who was considered a prophet by his followers. Malcolm became one of his greatest acolytes, founding mosques in several cities, including Mosque No. 7 in New York City. As Marable notes, "What made him truly original was that he presented himself as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister." Marable also writes, "He was a truly historical figure in the sense that, more than any of his contemporaries, he embodied the spirit, vitality, and political mood of an entire population--black urban mid-twentieth century America." Marable also points out that the other side of the black civil rights movement, led my Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was predominantly led by the black middle-class who had grown up in small towns in the South.

Malcolm viewed these leaders as Uncle Toms. "The NOI could not imagine a political future where Jim Crow segregation would ever become outlawed. Consequently, Malcolm concluded, 'the advantage of this is the Southern black man never has been under any illusions about the opposition he is dealing with.' Since white supremacy would always be a reality, blacks were better off reaching a working relationship with racist whites rather than allying themselves with Northern liberals. This was a tragic replay of Garvey's disastrous thesis that culminated in his overtures to white supremacist organizations." Indeed, Malcolm would meet with the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

But the FBI misjudged the Nation's intentions: "The FBI never understood that the NOI did not seek the destruction of America's legal and socioeconomic institutions; the Black Muslims were not radicals, but profound conservatives under Muhammad. They praised capitalism, so long as it served what they deemed blacks' interests. Their fundamental mistake was their unshakable belief that whites as a group would never transcend their hatred of blacks. The FBI also viewed the Islamic elements of the Nation as fraudulent. As a result, the Bureau never grasped the underlying concerns that motivated Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, and how both men had constructed a dynamic organization that attracted the membership of tens of thousands of African Americans and the admiration of millions more."

Malcolm would become a national pariah in the white world after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when he said that "the chickens have come home to roost." This was a direct violation of Muhammad's entreaty that Malcolm avoid criticizing the government and Kennedy in particular. It was the beginning of a schism between Muhammad and Malcolm that would cost the latter his life.

His change was formed by two things: Muhammad's serial philandering, and Malcolm's travels through the Muslim world. Muhammad was a chronic exploiter of young women in the Nation--at one point he fathered four illegitimate children in one calendar year. Perhaps his impregnating Malcolm's old flame Evelyn Williams got under Malcolm's skin the most. Malcolm began blasting the leader for his distinctly non-Islamic ways, and broke with the Nation to found his own group.

But perhaps even more grating was Malcolm's realization that the Nation was not espousing true Muslim tenets. He made a hajj to Mecca, and visited many countries in Africa and the Middle East. He came to new conclusions: "I have eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God...with fellow Muslims whose skin was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue...[for] the first time in my life...I didn't see them as 'white men.'"

This was not welcomed in the Nation of Islam. "Most of Muhammad's family and the Chicago secretariat opposed Malcolm for two basic reasons. First, they were convinced that he coveted the Messenger's position: that once Elijah was incapacitated, or dead, Malcolm would easily take command. Their material benefits derived from being the 'royal family' would abruptly end. But equally important was the second reason: Malcolm's militant politics of 1962-63 represented a radical break with the Nation of Islam's apolitical black nationalism."

And angering the NOI could be deadly: "Punishment ran from simple beatings for routine transgressions to far, far worse. Elijah Muhammad, Jr.s stern reminder to the Fruit that 'in the old days' brothers who stepped out of line had been killed was inaccurate only its suggestion that such punishment remained in the past."

Marable points out that plans to kill Malcolm had been hatching for nearly a year before the date of his assassination, February 21, 1965, while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Marable creates an exciting, novelistic moment-by-moment recreation of that day, and comes to the concrete conclusion that it was the NOI that murdered him. However, he also points that the police had no interest in solving the crime, and in fact sent innocent men to jail for it. There are unsolved mysteries: why did Malcolm have no bodyguards on the stage with him, and why did the bodyguard who shot one of the shooters (the only one who was correctly convicted) subsequently disappear?

Like many men who fell in the 1960s, Malcolm's death invites a host of sorrowful "what-ifs." "His new political goals, he went on, were firmly within the civil rights mainstream. 'I am not anti-American, un-American, seditious nor subversive. I don't buy the anti-capitalist propaganda of the communist, nor do I buy the anti-communist propaganda of capitalists." "Malcolm now claimed that God embraced Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike--'We all believe in the same God'--and denied that whites were 'devils,' insisting 'this is what Elijah Muhammad teaches...A man should not be judged by the color of his skin but rather by his conscious behavior, by his actions.' Malcolm explicitly rejected the separatist political demand for a black state or nation, stating, 'I believe in a society in which people can live like human beings on the basis of equality.'" Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. met only once, but imagine what they could have accomplished together.

Marable's book is never less than fascinating, but is not a hagiography. He goes into depressing detail about Malcolm's marriage to Betty Shabazz, who was saddled with several small children and a husband who was hardly ever home and perhaps cheated on her. Marable is also hard on Malcolm consorting with white supremacists: "To sit down with white supremacists to negotiate common interests, at a moment in black history when the KKK was harassing, victimizing, and even killing civil rights workers and ordinary black citizens, was despicable. Malcolm's apologetics about negotiating with white racists were insufficient."

But clearly Marable ultimately admires the man. "A deep respect for, and a belief in, black humanity was at the heart of this revolutionary visionary's faith. And 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 or radical, global ethnic policies. Instead of the fiery symbol of ethnic violence and religious hatred, as al-Qaeda might project him, Malcolm X should become a representative for hope and human dignity. At least for the African-American people, he has already come to embody those loftier aspirations."