Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Seeing the play the Mountaintop turned me toward a book I bought a while back, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.” Marable was a Columbia University professor of public affairs and African-American studies until his death in 2011 just days before the book’s publication. He got interested in Malcolm because the book that made him well-known, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, a joint work with Alex Haley, the “Roots” author, seemed to have a lot of lacunae.
It turns out Haley was a liberal Republican and had an agenda, present Malcolm as a critic of racial affairs that his peers could listen to. Malcolm apparently agreed to the limited scope of the book’s treatment because the parts that were left out often made him look bad, or different from his own mythology. Example. His criminal past wasn’t nearly as thuggish as he represented, but merely amateurish. He and Haley also left out much of Malcolm’s community organizing efforts.
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
By Manning Marable
Hardcover, 608 pages
Viking Adult
So Marable spent years going over Malcolm’s life again, re-interviewing and interviewing people in his life, reading his correspondence, much of it lovingly copied and photocopied by the FBI for inclusion in Malcolm’s voluminous file. His writing is clear, his presentation straightforward if a little bloodless. He has so much data that it threatens to and often does overwhelm the flesh and blood man whose story is its focus.
I like it a lot. Malcolm always seemed to have a better analysis of racism and class issues than MLK did. In this book his deep roots in the Marcus Garvey movement, his mother and father were both organizers for Garvey, and his incredible self-education while in prison for a string of burglaries, show a man hungry to understand himself and the world around him. He organized working class blacks, knew the life of the criminal underclass as a participant and appreciated the iron power of white dominance.
Malcolm’s eventual conversion to orthodox Islam comes much further into the book than I am now, but his story has already shown me the cyclical patterns of race relations in this country and that King’s achievements, while notable, were the children of earlier and often more radical movements.
Well worth the time.