Malcolm and Manning

Abstract

ATRAGIC IRONY binds Malcolm X and Dr. aManning Marable: neither lived to enjoy the fruit of his endeavors. Malcolm was assassinated only months before his autobiography was published and Dr. Marable died a few days before his biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking, 2011), was released. Dr. Marable’s prodigious tome — nearly 600 pages with more than 100 pages of endnotes, bibliography and index — is the culmination of a score of years of research and a testament to his diligence and determination, particularly given the medical problems he endured. For more than a quarter of century he suffered from sarcoidosis, a disease affecting the lungs and other organs, and in the summer before his death had a double lung transplant. During the last month of his life he was hospitalized with pneumonia. The physical obstacles Dr. Marable surmounted to complete his book are tantamount to the social and political issues Malcolm encountered, and none more troubling for the freedom fighter than the last two years of his furious passage. Both Malcolm and Manning were restless spirits with one’s ceaseless search, peripatetic roaming matched by the other’s gypsy-like flights from one academic roost to another. There are shelves of books on Malcolm X, including his own compelling but flawed account, but Dr. Marable goes the extra mile, hears one more interview, and scours one more document in his pursuit of a man who he claims was continually reinventing himself — from hoodlum, to hedonist, to hustler, to hero, to martyrdom. Each one of these incarnations, Dr. Marable contends, is marked by a name emblematic of that plateau — Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Satan, Malcolm X, and El Hajj Malik ElShabazz, to list but the most prominent. BUT it was as Malcolm X, an avatar of aElijah Muhammad, that Malcolm Little became best known, and who remains for many an unimpeachable icon of the struggle for human rights, despite the humanistic gloss applied to his odyssey by Dr. Marable. Because of his popular autobiography and that so much of his latter years are part of the public record, many readers will be familiar with the terrain Dr. Marable nimbly traverses. Nonetheless, even the most informed Malcolm X scholar will be amazed by the accumulation of new material he has assembled and the fresh analysis he applies. An equal number will be disturbed by his focus and conclusions. After a general assessment of Malcolm’s early years, Dr. Marable practically proceeds in a chronological, day-by-day approach, unearthing facts that properly situate Malcolm within the context of African American social and political thought. However, rather than reinvention — which has a deliberate implication of a shedding of skin or changing one mask for another — there is every indication that Malcolm’s life was a steady, and often intrepid, intellectual and political evolution, the latter concept Dr. Marable only mentions once in passing. Not to quibble, because whether reinvention (with an insinuation of agency that Dr. Marable intuits throughout) or evolution, Malcolm X was a phenomenal American, and like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he was symbolic of a singular philosophical and ideological perspective. And several scholars have proposed that Malcolm and Dr. King’s political trajectories were gradually merging, and though Dr. Marable doesn’t expend too much capital on this possibility, he does a remarkable job explaining the growing, and at last fatal hostility between Malcolm and the Nation of Islam.