Book Review: ‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ by Manning Marable

Malcolm X

A Life of Reinvention

Manning Marable

Viking: 594 pp., $30

Malcolm X never died. While his contemporary Martin Luther King Jr. lives on in the noble but fixed ideal of a racially unified and enlightened America, Malcolm lives on in the fluid black discontent with the ongoing lack of justice. Forty-six years after his assassination, it is Malcolm who looks like the prophet. Though the black middle class has made spectacular gains, the struggles of the black urban working- and underclass from which Malcolm came and that still describe much of black America are substantially what they were in the ‘60s. The self-confidence and skepticism Malcolm voiced that were once deemed so toxic have become common sense, even among the most successful of us. Blacks still live in an age of exceptionalism, not integration, and Malcolm’s warnings about the fallibility of them pinning all their hopes on an idea that Americans had resisted for centuries — often violently — look not radical or hateful now but self-evident.

“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” by Columbia University professor Manning Marable is therefore timely. The death of the author a few days before the publication of an oeuvre that was 20 years in the making is utterly unfortunate: Marable is not around to defend the work from his many critics who charge him with needlessly deconstructing and distorting the legacy of a genuine black hero and revolutionary of the modern age. I disagree with the opposition.

“Reinvention” is absorbing and well-written, passionate but painstakingly evenhanded in its explication of a figure who was evolving when he was cut down by assassins at age 39. Most importantly, Marable gives Brother Malcolm the scholarly, almost Shakespearean consideration that’s long overdue. Like all good biographies, this means getting behind the myths both good and bad — the stalwart black Muslim warrior who sacrificed himself for his people, the raging anti-white demagogue. The only comprehensive narrative we’ve really had to go on until now is the memoir “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”; this new book fills in the blanks with information gleaned from research and government files (like King, he was wiretapped and followed mercilessly) and extensive interviews with people close to Malcolm, including longtime Nation of Islam chief Louis Farrakhan. The resulting portrait is that of a man not distorted but more dynamic than we realized, in evolution at every point in his brief but exceptional public life.

Logging details almost like a journal, “Reinvention’s” most revealing moments are not necessarily dramatic but more day-to-day. Malcolm struggled to be a good husband on a hectic speaking schedule; he worried about money; he grew increasingly uncertain about how to synthesize his changing views of the civil rights movement that challenged his more facile beliefs about it. Most affecting is how at every point he tried to live up to the black strongman image that outgrew even him. His followers weren’t necessarily interested in the epiphanies he was experiencing toward the end of his life; epiphanies were fine, but not if they softened the views that had electrified audiences and made him such a folk hero. Malcolm understood these expectations well, but he wanted to be true to himself, and his attempts to negotiate between the two is the real story here.

Reexamining the hugely popular “Autobiography” is one way in which Marable alarms the Malcolm faithful. For instance, he asserts that Malcolm exaggerated many of his criminal exploits in his street-hustler days when he was known as Detroit Red to better dramatize his later rehabilitation by the Nation of Islam. But that doesn’t make his transformation from ex-con to Muslim minister and political activist any less real or compelling. (That Malcolm was a bad character rather than a despicable one hardly seems like something to complain about.) Another controversial assertion is something that Malcolm does mention in the “Autobiography” but attributes to someone else. Marable says that in his hustler days, Malcolm had sexual encounters with a wealthy white gay man. Marable does not believe that Malcolm was homosexual, as some critics have overheatedly charged.

There is a great anxiety among many that this scrutiny might take down or tarnish one of the few black leaders with a valuable reputation of being straight-talking, disciplined and incorruptible. The irony is that while Malcolm X emerges from this book much more human, those qualities emerge more clearly than ever — remarkable given all the pressure he was under.

The other battle Malcolm fought was against the organization that made him, the Nation of Islam. An incident that happened in Los Angeles in 1962 became a real turning point in Malcolm’s long, slow break with the organization: the killing of Nation of Islam official Ronald Stokes by Los Angeles police officers during a confrontation at a mosque in which the police claimed Muslims had provoked them. Marable says the news “shattered” Malcolm in New York and he resolved to come to L.A. with his followers to finally meet violence with violence. Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, however, wouldn’t allow it. Farrakhan told Marable that Malcolm, bitterly disappointed, figured that the Nation of Islam chief was trying to “protect the wealth that he had acquired, rather than go out with the struggle of our people.” By 1964, Malcolm experienced another shift as he started to realize simultaneously that the Nation of Islam’s orthodoxy was flawed, to put it mildly, and that not all civil rights supporters were racial sellouts. “Instead of a bloody jihad, a holy Armageddon, perhaps America could experience a nonviolent, bloodless revolution,” Marable writes. “At some point, Malcolm must have pondered the unthinkable: it was possible to be black, a Muslim and an American.”

Marable does take him to task, however. He eventually began saying different things to different constituencies —Trotskyists, socialists, black nationalists, Muslims, pan-Africanists, human rights advocates — not because he wanted to deceive but because he was starting to embrace different philosophies that appeared contradictory. That strained the patience of many, particularly the dispossessed in Harlem who relied on him to be the uncompromising black voice in the increasingly splintered ‘60s. Marable also criticizes Malcolm for misreading the importance of things like voting to black Americans; far from being anUncle Tom, King was regarded by the vast majority of blacks as a moral hero. While the book charts Malcolm’s journey of self-discovery with clear admiration, it also says that it took him a bit too long to come around.

Of course, he didn’t exactly “come around.” A big part of the Malcolm myth is that at the time of his death he was shedding strict Afrocentrism and fully embracing the multicultural tenets of the civil rights movement. Marable rejects that as incomplete. As Malcolm was gravitating toward unity among blacks on all fronts, he began to accept the civil rights fight as one legitimate expression of the worldwide fight for black justice and self-determination. But his core interest remained local. Sara Mitchell of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, one of two groups Malcolm formed after he left the Nation of Islam, said that “underlying {his} efforts was his still unfulfilled and paramount ambition: the redemption of the ‘disgraced’ manhood of the African American male. That was the spur piercing him; it would not let him stop or even rest.” To this day, he does not.

Aubry Kaplan is a contributing editor to the Times Opinion pages. Her collected essays will be published in October.

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