On Eve of Redefining
Malcolm X, Biographer Dies
By Larry Rohter
Published: April 1, 2011
For two decades, the Columbia University
professor Manning Marable focused on the task
he considered his lifes work:
redefining the legacy of Malcolm X. Last fall
he completed Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention, a 594-page biography
described by the few scholars who have seen
it as full of new and startling information
and insights.
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Philippe Cheng
The author and historian
Manning Marable.
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Richard Saunders/Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture
Malcolm X, the black
nationalist, with his wife, Betty Shabazz,
and their daughters Attallah, left, and
Qubilah around 1962.
The book is scheduled to be published on
Monday, and Mr. Marable had been looking
forward to leading a vigorous public
discussion of his ideas. But on Friday Mr.
Marable, 60, died in a hospital in New York
as a result of medical problems he thought he
had overcome. Officials at Viking, which is
publishing the book, said he was able to look
at it before he died. But as his health
wavered, they were scrambling to delay
interviews, including an appearance on the
Today show in which his findings
would have finally been aired.
The book challenges both popular and
scholarly portrayals of Malcolm X, the black
nationalist leader, describing a man often
subject to doubts about theology, politics
and other matters, quite different from the
figure of unswerving moral certitude that
became an enduring symbol of African-American
pride.
It is particularly critical of the
celebrated Autobiography of Malcolm X,
now a staple of college reading lists, which
was written with Alex Haley and which Mr.
Marable described as fictive. Drawing
on diaries, private correspondence and
surveillance records to a much greater extent
than previous biographies, his book also
suggests that the New York City Police
Department and the F.B.I. had advance
knowledge of Malcolm Xs assassination
but allowed it to happen and then
deliberately bungled the investigation.
This book gives us a richer, more
profound, more complicated and more fully
fleshed out Malcolm than we have ever had
before, Michael Eric Dyson, the author
of Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning
of Malcolm X and a professor of
sociology at Georgetown University, said on
Thursday. Hes done as thorough
and exhaustive a job as has ever been done in
piecing together the life and evolution of
Malcolm X, rescuing him from both the
hagiography of uncritical advocates and the
demonization of undeterred critics.
Over the course of a 35- year academic
career, Mr. Marable wrote and edited numerous
books about African-American politics and
history, and remained one of the
nations leading Marxist historians. But
the biography is likely to be regarded as his
magnum opus. He obtained about 6,000 pages of
F.B.I. files on Malcolm X through the Freedom
of Information Act, as well as records from
the Central Intelligence Agency, State
Department and New York district
attorneys office. He also interviewed
members of Malcolm Xs inner circle and
security team, as well as others who were
present when Malcolm X was shot to death.
Poor health had slowed his progress, but
Mr. Marable remained optimistic. For a
quarter-century I have had sarcoidosis, an
illness that gradually destroyed my pulmonary
functions, he wrote in the
volumes acknowledgments. In the
last year in researching this book, I could
not travel and I carried oxygen tanks in
order to breathe. In July 2010, I received a
double lung transplant, and following two
months hospitalization, managed a full
recovery. (An interview with The New
York Times was planned, but did not take
place.)
The books account of the
assassination of Malcolm X, then 39, on Feb.
21, 1965, is likely to be its most incendiary
claim. Mr. Marable contends that although
Malcolm X embraced mainstream Islam at least
two years before his death, law-enforcement
authorities continued to see him as a
dangerous rabble-rouser.
They had the mentality of wanting an
assassination, Gerry Fulcher, a former
New York City police detective who
participated in the surveillance of Malcolm X,
told Mr. Marable for the book.
That is why law-enforcement agencies
acted with reticence when it came to
intervening with Malcolms fate,
the book asserts. Rather than
investigate the threats on his life, they
stood back.
In a statement, Paul Browne, the chief
spokesman for the Police Department, said,
As much as conspiracy theorists may
press to reach a sweeping, unsupported and
untrue conclusion, the fact is the N.Y.P.D.
was not complicit in Malcolm Xs
assassination, and its gratuitously
false to suggest as much.
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Eve Arnold/Magmum
Malcolm X with Elijah
Muhammad in 1961. The Marable biography adds
new information about causes behind their
split.
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Bettmann/Corbis
Police photographs of
Malcolm Little, 18, in 1944. The new book
says he had less of a criminal history than
he claimed.
Based on his new material, Mr. Marable
concluded that only one of the three men
convicted of killing Malcolm X was involved
in the assassination, and that the other two
were at home that day. The real assassination
squad, he writes, had four other members,
with connections to the rival Nation of
Islams Newark mosque two of whom
are still alive and have never been charged.
Since Malcolm Xs death, the
posthumous Autobiography, along
with Malcolm
X, Spike Lees 1992 film drawn
from it, has made a pop-culture hero out of
the man who was born Malcolm Little. But the
Marable book contradicts and complicates key
elements of his life story.
Malcolm X himself contributed to many of
the fictions, Mr. Marable argues, by
exaggerating, glossing over or omitting
important incidents in his life. These
episodes include a criminal career far more
modest than he claimed, an early homosexual
relationship with a white businessman, his
mothers confinement in a mental
hospital for nearly 25 years and secret
meetings with leaders of groups as divergent
as the Ku Klux Klan and the Palestine
Liberation Organization.
Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention shows, for instance, that
at a time when Malcolm X claimed in the
autobiography to have devoted himself
to increasingly violent crime in New
York, he was actually in Lansing, Mich., his
hometown. Mr. Marable attributes the
embroidery of amateurish attempts at
gangsterism to Malcolm Xs wish to
demonstrate that the Nation of Islams
gospel of pride and self-respect had the
power to redeem even the most depraved
criminal.
In many ways, the published book is
more Haleys than its authors,
Mr. Marable writes, noting that Haley, who
died in 1992, was a liberal Republican and
staunch integrationist who held racial
separation and religious extremism in
contempt but was fascinated by
the tortured tale of Malcolms personal
life.
The book maintains that several chapters
of the autobiography explaining Malcolm
Xs evolving but still radical political
vision were deleted before publication,
perhaps out of Haleys desire to produce
a work that frames his subject firmly
within mainstream civil rights respectability
at the end of his life.
The Marable book also sheds new light on
Malcolm Xs departure from the Nation of
Islam and the subsequent feud with the
organization and its founder, Elijah Muhammad,
preceding his assassination. That split is
usually attributed to theological and
political differences and the jealousy of
Muhammads children and inner circle.
But Mr. Marable also points to an episode
of almost Oedipal sexual duplicity, in which
Elijah Muhammad impregnated a woman Malcolm X
had loved since he was a young man.
Malcolm must have felt a deep sense of
betrayal, Mr. Marable writes.
Malcolm Xs subsequent trip to Mecca
in 1964 a likely turning point in his
religious evolution was recounted in
both the autobiography and the biopic. The
Marable book, however, provides extensive new
material about a second, 24-week trip to
Africa and the Middle East later that year,
drawing on Malcolm Xs own travel diary
and providing details on a campaign he waged
to have the United States condemned for
racism in a vote at the United Nations.
As part of that effort to open a foreign
front for the civil rights struggle, which
was closely monitored by American
governmental agencies, Malcolm X met with
numerous African heads of state as well as
Chinese and Cuban diplomats. The Johnson
administration was so upset, Mr. Marable
writes, that Nicholas Katzenbach, the acting
attorney general, considered prosecuting him
for violating a law that bans United States
citizens from negotiating with foreign states.
These are new facts being unveiled,
showing just how serious and sustained was
Malcolms interest in the global
dimension of the domestic civil rights
struggle, Mr. Dyson said. They really
do suggest he was a subversive figure, trying
to undermine the best interests of the U.S.
government in the name of a larger pan-African
cause. That is a fresh insight, one of
many.
Mr. Marables editor, Wendy Wolf,
said Friday evening that his every
fiber was devoted to the completion of this
book. She added: Its
heartbreaking he wont be here on
publication day with us.