Manning Marable's death aged sixty on 1 April 2011 added a poignant note to the publication of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Had he lived, he would no doubt have been pleased to see his biography scale the best-seller charts before being selected as BBC Radio 4's “Book of the Week” in June 2011.Footnote ¹ Helped by an excellent publicity drive, the book received so much attention in the media and the blogosphere that it was at times difficult to recall that in 1965 Malcolm X had only a small devoted following. Yet Marable's death skewed the reception of the book to such an extent that it has become difficult to disentangle the book from its immediate context. Numerous media features referred to the biography as Marable's valedictory opus, which certainly provides for an easy narrative in which to encase the book. Moreover, Marable's friends, many of whom are acclaimed scholars, contributed to the book's media profile by giving it great prominence in their eulogies. Henry Louis Gates led the tributes: “the Malcolm book stands as the greatest testament we could have to Manning Marable's brilliance, his passion and his intellectual fortitude.”Footnote ² Another friend, Michael Eric Dyson, offered an encomium which suggested that the book is unsurpassable:

These panegyrics were echoed in the mainstream press, although most reviewers were arguably less qualified to offer a thorough analysis of the book's contents or offer a critique of Marable's research.Footnote ⁴ Of these mainstream reviewers, only David Garrow, biographer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a historian noted for prodigious research of his topics, is arguably qualified to offer a thorough review of the biography. Concluding that Marable's “hugely insightful” biography is likely to “endure as a definitive treatment of Malcolm's life, if not of the actors complicit in his death,” Garrow tends towards a friendly opinion, but he notes that Marable's assessment of the FBI and NYPD involvement in Malcolm X's death is little more than “undisciplined and inconsistent speculation.”Footnote ⁵ The other mainstream reviewers generally have little background in African American history, as revealed by their disinclination to test Marable's arguments with reference to other biographies of Malcolm X.Footnote ⁶ The domination of the mainstream response by nonspecialists has resulted in a largely flawed, myopic and, in some cases, misleading critical consensus in which Marable's arguments are not fully contextualized and his findings not scrutinized rigorously, while his interpretation of Malcolm X's political development is uncritically accepted.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the African American response beyond Marable's circle has been shunted to the sidelines, largely being confined to blogs and online reviews. This has revealed a far greater variety of opinions and positions, ranging from the hagiographic to the venomous. Former activists have offered their own considerations while bloggers have weighed in with their opinions, and various media outlets, including the Al Jazeera television station, have broadcast roundtable discussions and interviews with Marable's defenders and critics. These critical opinions have ranged from condemnations of Marable's lack of deep thought about his subject to his ill-considered reading of Malcolm X's politics, his class bias and the book's lack of revelatory insights.Footnote ⁷ Afrocentric scholar Molefi Kete Asante dismisses the book for its alleged fundamental flaws – essentially Marable's failure to acknowledge the importance of an Afrocentric approach to Malcolm X – while William Sales laments Marable's failure to engage with the existing Malcolm X scholarship. Sales notes, for example, that Marable makes similar points about Malcolm X's autobiography to John Edgar Wideman and Arnold Rampersad without addressing the other writers’ interpretations.Footnote ⁸ The relative sidelining of these voices once again reinforces the racist assumption that black America remains a subordinate presence in American culture.

African American dissent has regularly been considered an aberrant feature of American political discourse, and it is rare for dissenters to achieve mainstream acceptance (Malcolm X being the prime example of a rare voice that becomes recognizable). Moreover, the tacit silencing of such voices has produced a mainstream assumption that the “black community” has (or rather, deserves) a homogeneous opinion. This racist filter is exposed by the vibrancy and volume of critical approaches to Marable's biography among African American intellectuals. The vast differences in approaches and opinions in black America become apparent in the online response to the biography. While some online reviews written by black Americans head into the realms of conspiracy theory, most are more incisive, better informed and more scholarly than the mainstream reviews.Footnote ⁹

But what of the biography? The brouhaha surrounding its contents has often threatened to overshadow the book. Indeed, enough reviews have been published that a book assessing the reception of the biography is surely only months away from publication itself.Footnote ¹⁰ Unfortunately, the book's findings are quite limited: a particular disappointment given the vast amount of research that underpins it. Readers familiar with the contours of Malcolm X's life seeking startling revelations and fresh insights will doubtless be disappointed. In terms of tone, it sits in between Peter Goldman's nuanced portrait and Bruce Perry's more salacious attempt at psychohistory, weaving between his political and personal life while also emphasizing the increasing pressure that Malcolm X faced as he became a national and then international icon. For Goldman, Malcolm X remained a lifelong black nationalist even as the latter's views on white devilishness abated. His biography, based in part on close observation of Malcolm X himself, reveals a softer, more thoughtful person than that of the legend that existed in the early 1970s. More importantly, Goldman refuses to mould Malcolm X into a liberal figure, acknowledging both change and continuity in the major threads of Malcolm X's intellectual history. Resisting George Breitman's provocative but unconvincing attempt to render Malcolm X a socialist, Goldman's is an enduring and sympathetic portrait which does much to aid an understanding of Malcolm X's political philosophy.Footnote ¹¹ Perry, by contrast, presents an emotionally crippled Malcolm X, driven by and drowning in childhood traumas and self-hatred. Attempting to build on Eugene Victor Wolfenstein's Freudian–Marxist probing of Malcolm X's psychology, Perry presents simplistic and often controversial cause-and-effect speculations, suggesting that Malcolm X had homosexual encounters because he lacked a strong father figure in childhood, and that he had a deeply confused understanding of his own racial identity. This pathologizing of Malcolm X overshadows Perry's impressive archival research, which helped to confirm the unreliability of Malcolm X's autobiography.Footnote ¹²

Marable's Malcolm X sits politically as a more centrist, liberal figure than the Malcolm X of Goldman's and Breitman's accounts. The central trajectory of his political life appears to be the gradual rise and fall of his fidelity to black nationalism. Thankfully, Marable avoids Perry's simplistic psychological models, but he touches frequently on Malcolm X's private life without drawing particularly great meaning from it. This invasion into the private, Marable asserts, is crucial to the humanizing of Malcolm X, which for him is perhaps the most important facet of the biography.Footnote ¹³ Oddly enough, however, the biography does not transform our view of Malcolm X in any fundamental way. It is driven by the events in Malcolm X's life, following a traditional biographical structure and dwelling only briefly on matters pertaining to Malcolm X's philosophy. Marable's probing of Malcolm X's speeches and political writing essentially confirms our understanding of the major themes of his thought rather than proposing any major reassessment of Malcolm X's contribution to African American intellectual history. A Life of Reinvention is essentially a conservative biography, content to trace the contours of Malcolm X's life but not offer any deeply radical or challenging new insights or approaches. Five key themes emerge from this portrait. Most obvious is Marable's attempt to humanize Malcolm X, which largely revolves around Malcolm X's private life. Aside from being the central stated aim of the biography, this feature has dominated recent discussion of the book; any consideration of the book's importance must evaluate this theme. The second theme – the increasing violence that surrounded Malcolm X's life as it neared its end – may well prove to be the biography's lasting contribution to our understanding of Malcolm X, since Marable arguably does more than any other author to demonstrate the extent of the Nation of Islam's war on its apostate. Malcolm X's relationship with the global Islamic community and the extent to which he was attempting to move “beyond” race are two closely related themes that Marable emphasizes throughout the biography and are worthy of further consideration. Finally, Marable's treatment of his sources is an underlying issue of the book. This methodological issue calls into question the nature of Marable's working methods and – more troublingly – the very preservation of African American history.

Setting aside the obvious suggestion that the Malcolm X of other accounts is “inhuman,” Marable's insistence that he sought to humanize Malcolm X reveals a curiously unambitious reading of the purpose of biography, and indeed of Malcolm X himself. Much of this humanizing process involves the inclusion of often speculative detail about Malcolm X's private life. Marable's account of Malcolm X's sex life has provoked an outpouring of condemnation, titillation and even rage. Put simply, it revolves around Marable's suggestion that Malcolm X's sex life with Betty Shabazz was unsatisfactory for both parties, that he had a small number of extramarital affairs, and that during his youth he was paid to engage in a homosexual encounter. According to Marable, in witnessing his mother's decline after the death of his father, Malcolm X concluded that “all women were, by nature, weak and unreliable.”Footnote ¹⁴ Later deciding, however, that he needed a wife to improve his standing as a representative of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X sought a wife in a decidedly unromantic style. Declaring himself “halfway impressed” by Betty Shabazz's intelligence and education before proposing marriage over the telephone, Marable's Malcolm X is less interested in a soul mate than in a household partner.Footnote ¹⁵ This somewhat formal relationship was apparently less than fulfilling for Betty Shabazz, who was known to flee their house at particularly stressful times.Footnote ¹⁶ Malcolm X was also prone to escaping the family home, notably after the births of his daughters.Footnote ¹⁷ This occasional physical distance was, according to Marable, less troublesome than his more frequent emotional distance, and was compounded by their apparent sexual problems and supposed extramarital affairs.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus the Malcolm X–Betty Shabazz marriage becomes characterized by emotional and often physical distance and numerous incompatibilities, an interpretation that has been challenged by two of their daughters, Ilyasah and Malaak Shabazz.Footnote ¹⁹ While Marable refrains from fingering Malcolm X as a bad father, his refusal to explore other reasons that might have led Malcolm X to be somewhat distant, or indeed include an alternative viewpoint which might suggest his positive parental qualities, leaves the reader free to interpret Malcolm X's abilities as a father as s/he wishes. It also suggests that Malcolm X's response to the arrival of his children was irrational or even in some way pathological, thus implicitly enabling an ideological interpretation of African American fatherhood which ignores the psychological burdens placed on Malcolm X.

More controversially, Marable has extended Bruce Perry's detailing of Malcolm X's alleged youthful homosexual encounters. Perry identified William Paul Lennon as an elderly white male who paid the young Malcolm X for “general housework,” which, according to Malcolm X's friend Malcolm Jarvis, included some sexual activity. Marable takes the Lennon relationship further, alleging that Lennon visited Malcolm X in prison, and perhaps offered to house him after his release: in Marable's mind, an implication that the two men shared “more than a business association.”Footnote ²⁰ Even a cursory glance at the footnotes reveals that Marable's conclusions lack concrete evidence. Marable does not countenance the suggestion that, if Lennon was the white gentleman who visited Malcolm X in prison and if Malcolm X did extend the possibility of furthering their relationship in return for Lennon's assistance with his parole application, then Malcolm X might have been continuing to hustle Lennon. Assuming that they were on friendly terms, it is as likely that this association represented Malcolm X using any means necessary to achieve parole as it suggests that the two men were engaged in a relationship. For, as Marable notes, by the time of the parole hearings (when he assumes the two men were still in contact) Malcolm X had converted to the Nation of Islam and was becoming increasingly attracted to their Manichean view of racial difference.

For better or for worse, this relatively minor aspect of the biography has attracted much attention, largely from African American commentators. The Raw Cotton blog declared that Marable “drops the bomb” with this poorly corroborated revelation that was allegedly “added for purely tabloid reasons.” Raw Cotton correctly notes that Marable does not do anything with this information – there is no discussion of the psychological impact of his sexuality on his personal or political life, for example.Footnote ²¹ For Maulana Karenga, Marable's discussion of Malcolm X's sexuality is a “lurid and baseless … sordid assembly of rumor, innuendo, insinuations and unfounded assumptions.”Footnote ²² Karl Evanzz similarly dismisses the discussion of Malcolm X's alleged homosexuality and alleged affair with an Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) secretary as “scurrilous.”Footnote ²³ Scurrilous or not, Marable's discussion of Malcolm X's sex life raises important questions about the biography: not whether information detracts or adds to Malcolm X's character but whether we should primarily see biography as merely a diachronic life story or as an inquisition into the meaning and significance of a life. Cemented by the lack of discussion of the impact of his sex life on other aspects of Malcolm X's life, Marable's biography tends towards the former approach. Consequently, rather than humanizing Malcolm X, the details of the private life serve only to distract attention from the lack of a theoretical underpinning to the book and from Marable's failure to evaluate Malcolm X's intellectual life thoroughly. Indeed, Peter Goldman sketched a far more human character without recourse to any salacious detail.

A second aspect of the book is more successful and arguably does more to humanize Malcolm X than any other feature. All accounts of Malcolm X's life stress the importance of the fifteen months following his suspension from the Nation of Islam, and Marable's is no different. His account is strongest in its discussion of the Nation of Islam's disgusting campaign of violence against Malcolm X and his family in the wake of his expulsion from the organization. Although Marable has no revelations or new evidence regarding the extent to which Malcolm X's family was harassed, he draws together the major events of this period of his life (the firebombing of the family home, for example, and the frequent physical threats from Nation of Islam thugs) with the less sensational but equally troubling incidents such as the regular telephone calls to the family home threatening Malcolm X's life. The cumulative impact of living under daily threat had a major impact on Malcolm X, and Marable's treatment of his attempt to cope with such pressure is patient and well constructed. Indeed, it paints a picture of almost heroic stoicism while also further contextualizing Malcolm X's frequent comments in 1964 and 1965 that the Nation of Islam would kill him sooner rather than later.

Malcolm X's awareness of his position as an apostate was entrenched by his growing interest in more orthodox forms of Islam, another key theme of the book. Marable is keen to place Malcolm X within the global Islamic community, positioning him as such even at the time of his conversion to the Nation of Islam while he was in prison. The tale of Malcolm X's conversion is now very familiar, and Marable's account adds no new revelations, but its insistence that Malcolm X saw himself as a member of the wider Islamic ummah is curious. Based on the evidence of a letter of complaint to the prison authorities which threatened that he might appeal to the wider authority of the “Whole Body” of Islam, it sets Malcolm X apart from Elijah Muhammad even at this early stage in Malcolm X's new religious life.Footnote ²⁴ Marable also touches on the relationship between the Nation of Islam and the wider Islamic community, noting that Muhammad was keen to acquire legitimacy for his sect within the Islamic ummah and to link the Nation to the Shi'a denomination.Footnote ²⁵ Malcolm X was similarly concerned with minimizing the theological distance between the Nation of Islam and the ummah. In the early 1960s this was largely a ploy to counter the divide-and-conquer strategy of Islam's enemies, but as his reading of Islamic theology deepened, so did his understanding of the incompatibility of the Nation's racial essentialism with the pan-racial worldview of the ummah.Footnote ²⁶ This connection with the wider Islamic world was, of course, cemented by Malcolm X's hajj in 1964 but, as Marable correctly acknowledges, it was also informed by his first trip to Africa in July 1959.Footnote ²⁷

Yet while Marable ably demonstrates the increasing internationalization of the Nation of Islam and the concurrent broadening of Malcolm X's political interests, he seems uninterested in assessing which of these impulses was leading the other. It is common knowledge that Malcolm X's widening political interests became a source of tension in the Nation of Islam, but the question whether this broadening developed out of the Nation's quest for Islamic legitimacy remains moot.Footnote ²⁸ In similar vein, while Marable acknowledges the importance of Garveyism to Malcolm X's parents, there is little discussion of the long-term impact of Garveyism on Malcolm X's political development, particularly in the later sections of the biography. This would add considerable nuance to Marable's investigation of Malcolm X's position within the ummah, not least because it helps to deepen our understanding of Malcolm X's international vision, adding further political context to his religious quest. Malcolm X's increasingly pan-African worldview certainly has echoes of the Garveyite call to the “mighty race” and a thorough understanding of Malcolm X's intellectual history is arguably impossible without reference to Garveyism. The task of the biographer is surely to untangle and offer insight into such issues, for Malcolm X's religious and political lives were firmly entwined: after all, for example, politics intruded into the supposedly separate religious sphere of the Muslim Mosque Inc. through the decision to deny membership to whites.

Marable's treatment of the Nation of Islam itself is curious. References to the strange nature of the Nation of Islam's philosophy are frequent enough that readers might be forgiven for concluding that nobody in their right mind would join such an odd group with such a peculiar worldview and “strange cosmology.”Footnote ²⁹ While Marable is right to set the Nation aside from the Islamic mainstream, in stressing the peculiarities he does not engage with the factors that led hundreds of thousands of African American people to ally with the group. It could be that this is a deliberate ploy to elevate Malcolm X to a higher status and set him apart from the rest of the Nation's leadership, since the only logical conclusion that a reader could draw from Marable's account is that Malcolm X was the main – perhaps only – attraction for a significant proportion of the new members. Certainly, one cannot separate the burgeoning popularity of the group in the 1950s and early 1960s from Malcolm X's mesmerizing personal, organizational and oratorical capacities. Yet Marable's account crucially overlooks exactly how charismatic Malcolm X was. There is little in the biography to suggest how he was able to attract so many recruits to the organization or why Elijah Muhammad became increasingly concerned about Malcolm X's rival power base in the Nation. For example, Marable notes that by late 1957 Malcolm X had achieved great popularity as a speaker. Yet there is little indication of why he was so compelling an orator. Marable notes that by 1960 his fame was such that even a ten-minute speech would prompt a two-hour question-and-answer session, but readers are given no indication of why these audiences found him so compelling.Footnote ³⁰ His oratorical style – so essential to his appeal – receives short shrift: he was apparently confident and “vivid,” and made good use of chalkboards; Louis Farrakhan claims that he was a unique speaker, but Marable goes no further.Footnote ³¹ In this, Marable's humanizing impulse humbles Malcolm X, and serves to undercut one of X's many claims to greatness.

Marable's limited engagement with Malcolm X's intellectual history is arguably defined by his insistence that, towards the end of his life, Malcolm X was moving “beyond race.”Footnote ³² Many of the mainstream reviews of the book played on this palliative theme to assert that Malcolm X lived what might be termed an “American” life: in overcoming personal and philosophical obstacles, Malcolm X evolved from a man defined by hate into a person who rejected racism – hence the extremely tenuous link between Malcolm X and Barack Obama highlighted by reviewers such as David Remnick.Footnote ³³ Marable's discussion suggests that he considers black nationalism to exist in tension with a universalism that embraces all races. In placing nationalism and universalism in tension, Marable both neglects the subtlety of Malcolm X's thought during the final years of his life and overlooks the extent to which Malcolm X was still seeking solutions himself. Malcolm X was undoubtedly a far more nuanced thinker than Marable suggests. At the time of his death he had rejected the essentialist concepts of race that defined the Nation's theology but he remained a firm believer that his quest was to end white supremacy and that a form of black unity was necessary to achieve this goal. Marable concludes that Malcolm X had become an antiracist warrior by 1965, and while there is truth here, Marable underemphasizes the extent to which black nationalism underpinned Malcolm X's later philosophy, as even a brief perusal of the OAAU's aims and objectives reveals.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, many would contend that Malcolm X was never truly a universalist thinker. Malcolm X was certainly looking beyond racial essentialism but not beyond race itself.

A more important theme of the book – albeit one that Marable would have been completely unaware of – is the thorny issue of sources. The panoply of material available to him vastly outscores that available to Malcolm X's other biographers. Marable was most obviously able to call on the combined works of dozens of writers who have engaged with Malcolm X's history over the last fifty years. He interviewed many individuals who knew Malcolm X, including a number who had not previously spoken to Malcolm X's biographers. He made use of FBI files that had previously been closed to the public, and crucially had full access to the Malcolm X Collection, now held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Previously held in private hands, the collection includes Malcolm X's invaluable diaries from his foreign travels in 1964, drafts of speeches and a vast array of documents pertaining to his life.Footnote ³⁵ Gregory Reed even allowed Marable access to the unpublished portions of Malcolm X's autobiography, manuscripts that Reed guarded jealously for years and that have yet to arrive in the public sphere.Footnote ³⁶ The wealth of sources utilized by Marable over the years during which he was writing A Life of Reinvention suggests that the biography should be as close to a definitive portrait as we shall ever see.

Unfortunately, and seemingly unbeknownst to the mainstream reviewers, Marable's treatment of his sources ensures that his biography falls short. Many critiques of the book have identified numerous failings in Marable's techniques, from misspelling of names to more troubling mistakes, including the regurgitation of previous research without proper attribution.Footnote ³⁷ Abdul Alkalimat has highlighted fifteen clear examples of Marable making statements that are not supported by correct evidence or are suspicious in other ways.Footnote ³⁸ These are by no means the only examples, which range from the pointless – Marable muses that the 1936 detective movie Bullets or Ballots influenced the title of Malcolm X's “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech despite having no evidence that Malcolm X was aware of, let alone watched, the movie – to the macabre – Marable speculates that Malcolm X foresaw that he would be assassinated on 21 February 1965 and wonders why he invited his family to be present at his death.Footnote ³⁹ There are also numerous interpretations that might raise eyebrows. Marable's reading of “The Ballot or the Bullet” is highly contestable, for example. To Marable, the speech is paradoxical in that it encourages African Americans to register to vote while castigating the major political parties for failing to treat the African American population fairly. This aspect of the speech is better viewed as a call for the creation of a united black voting bloc which could either force the parties to adjust their policies or threaten to establish a separate party itself. Malcolm X was arguing that the vote represents power, and that the African American population needed to unite to exercise its power, whether it be through the ballot or via other means, rather than simply advocating full participation in the American political process. Indeed, it might be argued that “Ballot” is best read as a response and an elaboration of Malcolm X's previous “Message to the Grassroots” speech in its advocacy of black nationalism. Quite why Marable chooses not to engage with such a reading of “The Ballot or the Bullet” is curious.Footnote ⁴⁰

On a charitable note, it is entirely possible that A Life of Reinvention is as incomplete as Malcolm X's autobiography. Marable suffered from sarcoidosis for over twenty years, during which much of the biography was written, and it is entirely plausible that his 2010 double lung transplant reminded him that he was racing against time.Footnote ⁴¹ Some of the book's shortcomings might be due to the decline in Marable's health. On the other hand, Marable had been working on the biography for twenty years.Footnote ⁴² His errors of judgement, interpretation and technique should lead the critical reader to be highly sceptical of his treatment of his sources. This is all the more important because crucial portions of his research remain unavailable to the public, including interview recordings and transcripts, and other private or unpublished material. Gregory Reed's unpublished “chapters” of Malcolm X's autobiography are, arguably, only the tip of the iceberg. Marable claims that Reed allowed him fifteen minutes to read the material while both men were at a restaurant, which is clearly not enough time.Footnote ⁴³ Reed has since been tantalizing the public with the material, perhaps because what it contains does not particularly add much to the previous record, or simply to remain in the limelight. More urgent is the need for the public to read the travel diaries and other political material from Malcolm X's life. Although part of the Malcolm X Collection at the Schomburg Center – and hence open to the public, albeit in only one location and during the Center's limited opening hours – the travel diaries deserve to be read by a wide audience. A full scholarly edition, complete with an authoritative commentary and footnotes explaining the many obscure references in the text, will be a boon to Malcolm X studies and would be the ideal companion to his autobiography, before paving the way for a full scholarly edition of Malcolm X's papers. Whether these will appear is another matter. At this stage we can only hope that Malcolm X receives the same kind of treatment that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has in the multivolume collection of his papers.

Ultimately, once the commotion has subsided, Marable's book will likely be remembered more for the controversy than for its contents. It seems content to position Malcolm X as a far less revolutionary figure than his reputation might suggest. In rendering Malcolm X “ordinary” Marable arguably strips away that which was – and remains – extraordinary about Malcolm X. It is this very extraordinariness that lies behind our continued fascination with a man who, lest we forget, had only a handful of followers and friends at the end of his life. Malcolm X deserves biographical treatments that probe, deconstruct and grapple with his extraordinary qualities. For he was never more human than when he embarked on his reassessment of his religious beliefs, never more inspiring than when advocating pressure “by any means necessary,” never more frail than when he was being threatened by the Nation of Islam's hierarchy, and arguably never more alive than whenever somebody engages with his political thought.

Perhaps more importantly, Marable's biography offers little that is new. Even its supposedly revelatory naming of the gunman who killed Malcolm X is less than it would seem: William Bradley has already been named as the shooter.Footnote ⁴⁴ While Marable alludes to the complicity of figures such as Louis Farrakhan and Elijah Muhammad in the plot, his biography would have been truly revolutionary had it uncovered the evidence which finally reveals exactly who ordered the assassination, for Bradley was merely a pawn.Footnote ⁴⁵ Marable's concluding paragraphs, which suggest that Louis Farrakhan knew more about the assassination than he currently admits, are enlightening, however. Elsewhere, he treats Farrakhan's evidence largely uncritically, but Marable questions the veracity of Farrakhan's recent statements on his reaction to Malcolm X's death and suggests that Farrakhan was so blinded by ambition that he might even have acquiesced in the decision to order the assassination.Footnote ⁴⁶ Crucially, however, Marable refrains from the speculation that characterizes his treatment of Malcolm X's private life. This speculation, combined with Marable's reticence to engage critically with Malcolm X's intellectual history, arguably defines the book. It also raises fundamental questions about the nature of historical biography. As a chronicle of Malcolm X's life, A Life of Reinvention arguably succeeds, but as a historical biography it is somewhat disappointing. Its organizing principle – the concept of reinvention – lacks real originality and its notion of “humanizing” is somewhat unambitious. We see little attempt by Marable to engage critically with Malcolm X's intellectual development, which is quite possibly the book's greatest failing. While some have used the biography as a platform to call for the investigation into Malcolm X's assassination to be reopened – a case that will likely remain closed, and even if reopened will likely remain inconclusive – this distracts attention from the more troubling questions that the book raises concerning Marable's methods and the historical memory of Malcolm X.Footnote ⁴⁷Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention will likely stand as a testament to Marable's career and may become the final word on Malcolm X's life. Whether that is a good thing is another matter.

Next to Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X was arguably the most influential Black leader in post-World War II America. In significant ways, Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention brings us up to date. Marable's synthesis draws heavily on past scholarship, but he also conducts new interviews (two with Louis Farrakhan), offers fresh readings of government and law-enforcement files, and uses Malcolm's letters and travel books. Marable's biography is partly a spiritual narrative but mostly a political manifesto. Marable presents Malcolm as a political animal, always keenly cognizant of the plight of his people and deeply appreciative of black culture. Even in his early myopic cultish sermons, Malcolm preached secular street gospel as he trolled for converts, and mixed jive-talk with prison-learned erudition. His mesmerizing power attracted the dispossessed out of pool halls, barbershops, bars, and storefront churches and into the Nation of Islam. Marable offers the most thorough treatment to date of how Malcolm's fearless razor-sharp brilliance, quick retorts, biting sarcasm, and easy rapport led to a quick rise to fame. Malcolm was self-sacrificing and had a breakneck work pace, all in the name of Allah and his “messenger.” Malcolm built Elijah Muhammad's fledgling cult of four hundred into a national organization attracting tens of thousands; he transformed the Fruit of Islam into a paramilitary force that intimidated errant Nation members and law enforcement; he founded Muhammad Speaks, which created the wealth that allowed the Nation to expand its business interests. Malcolm's network grew beyond former hustlers and down-and-outs. Academics such as John Henrick Clarke, politicians such as Adam Clayton Powell and Percy Sutton, writers such as James Baldwin, and actors such as Ossie Davis and Sidney Poitier embraced the charismatic Harlem minister. We can literally see Malcolm X standing on 125th Street like so many before him. What at first glance seems like the usual harangue becomes an eloquent sermon making so much sense that it cannot be ignored.

Marable illustrates how Malcolm X deftly adjusted his evolving political ideology, skillfully walking the thin line between the Nation's apolitical principles and his concern for civil and human rights. Merging both agendas provided Malcolm with venues for debates on college campuses, talk shows with integrationists, alliances with politicians, and welcoming Fidel Castro to Harlem. All of this, of course, quickly drew attention from the power structure and the media; it inspired the admiration of young black activists and incited wrathful jealousy within the Nation.

The reader feels Malcolm's despair when the man and the movement that rescued him from a prison grave inexplicably cast him adrift. According to Marable, so loath was Malcolm, the disciple, to leave the Nation that he was willing to overlook Muhammad's failings. Yet the author is never clear on just why the divine cast off his disciple. Was it jealousy? Was Malcolm dangerous because he outgrew the Nation's bizarre race philosophy and pseudo-Islamic beliefs? Was the problem Malcolm's growing international reputation among Muslims and pan-Africanists? Marable offers no analysis. Nonetheless, in becoming a Sunni Muslim, an avowed black nationalist/pan-Africanist, anticolonialist, international spokesman for black human rights, and finally an open critic of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X created the conditions for his own death. Whether the Nation of Islam or the American government killed Malcolm, Marable, like other authors, offers circumstantial evidence that implicates both. And the biography suggests that Malcolm knowingly sacrificed himself.

The book is a good read. However, its claims of originality and revisionism of the Autobiography are questionable. For example, Marable belittles the Autobiography chapters on the rise and fall of hustler “Detroit Red.” Marable's “Red” was actually an amateur “petty criminal” preying on fellow blacks, including his long-suffering sister Ella, and was even a snitch who betrayed his friends. This is not new. Louis DeCaro's 1996 religious biography of Malcolm X used FBI and police reports to question a number of seemingly “fictitious” aspects of the Autobiography.Footnote ¹ Marable's early structuring of the biography also borrows from DeCaro's emphasis on Malcolm's father, Earl Little, and the Marcus Garvey movement.

What is original in Marable's “Detroit Red” account and not mentioned in DeCaro is the assertion that “Red” had an “intimate relationship” with Paul Lennon, a white well-to-do occasional employer. Marable writes that “circumstantial but strong” evidence ties “Red” to a “homosexual encounter” with Lennon. In the Autobiography, Lennon was the “old man” who paid “Red's” friend, Rudy, to sprinkle talcum powder over his body; Lennon, said Malcolm, “would actually reach his climax from that.” Rudy, Marable insists, was actually Malcolm. Whether this is true or false, sprinkling talcum powder on an undressed man hardly represents a sexual encounter.Footnote ² Manning Marable does not provide a single footnote to substantiate his assertions.

Marable casts Malcolm's relationship with his wife Betty in a negative light. Marable interviewed Malcolm's former lieutenant James 67X, who stated that Malcolm married Betty merely to fulfill his obligation to the Nation. Marable cites Louis Farrakhan as insisting that Malcolm truly loved another woman, Evelyn Williams, whom Muhammad later impregnated. In the early Autobiography chapters, Malcolm disparaged women as distrustful, gossipy, and weak. Marable suggests that Malcolm was a cold, domineering, and unaffectionate man whom Betty left on at least three occasions. Marable's choicest piece of evidence about the “troubled” relationship is Malcolm's letter to Muhammad written a year after their marriage. “SEX” was the source of their difficulties. Betty “placed a great deal more stress upon it than I was physically capable of doing,” and she proclaimed their incompatibility. “When I was going all out to keep her satisfied … she told me … I had never given her any real satisfaction.” James 67X further asserts that during Malcolm's second trip abroad in 1964, rumors circulated that Betty was having an affair with Charles 37X Kenyatta, whom Malcolm appointed his family's protector. Marable writes that Malcolm asked James 67X about the “romantic relationship” between Charles and Betty: “I understand that my wife has been ‘tripping the light fantastic’ while I've been gone.” According to James 67X he avoided answering Malcolm directly.Footnote ³

Like the homosexual issue, insinuations about Malcolm's marriage seem more sensationalistic than substantiated. James 67X and Charles 37X Kenyatta were rivals, and it is surprising that Marable would rely solely on James 67X about Betty Shabazz's “inappropriate” behavior. Moreover, the flippant exchange between Malcolm X and James 67X about Betty's rumored infidelity seems out of character for the fiercely private minister. Malcolm X was not only protective of his wife, he was also so possessive that Betty could not have a male doctor. It is further unsettling that Marable cites his interview with Farrakhan (thought to be involved in Malcolm's death) as evidence about Malcolm's love life. As for the letter, it surfaced in 2002 and is discussed in Russell Rickford's 2005 biography Betty Shabazz. Although some doubt the letter's authenticity, Rickford admits that early on the marriage was “intense.” Betty chafed under the patriarchal authority of a Muslim marriage to the cult's most popular minister, who traveled incessantly, ate irregularly, slept little, read for recreation, and was not sexually stimulating. Betty was young, attractive, and inexperienced, but spirited and middle-class. She received her registered nurse license on the day she married but was not allowed to work. According to Rickford and others, loneliness precipitated her early temporary flights. But in 1963 Betty probably fled to her Detroit family because of her anxiety over Malcolm's refusal to realize their precarious position within the Nation. Marable does not contextualize Betty's personal situation. He evinces little empathy for the cloistered young woman who forsook a career to become Malcolm X's wife, homemaker, secretary, and hostess, and to bear him six children in seven years only to be widowed at the age of thirty. And nowhere does Marable suggest, as Rickford explains, that whatever their issues, the couple adjusted and compromised and Malcolm X deeply loved his “Brown Sugar.” According to Rickford, Betty convinced her distraught husband that his twelve-year relationship with Muhammad and the Nation had crumbled and they would not take him back. In the Autobiography, Malcolm wrote, “I would never have dreamed that I would ever depend so much upon any woman for strength as I now lean upon Betty.” Words between them were often unnecessary because of “the caliber of wife that she is, with the depth of understanding that she has.” Feeling the envelopment of her comfort, he added, “I knew that whatever happened, she was with me.”Footnote ⁴ Betty was Malcolm's rock. Unfortunately, Marable misses this perspective.

This book needed more analysis in general. The urgency of Manning Marable's health probably precluded that, since he died just before its publication. He deserves our thanks for an excellent, sensitive effort to “humanize” the public Malcolm. However, Marable's attempt to “humanize” Malcolm by speculating about his private life is problematic. Marable's mischaracterization of Betty Shabazz misrepresents the couple's marriage, and thereby weakens an otherwise important biography.

Making sense of Malcolm's extraordinary life and legacy has long proved a formidable challenge. Historians have had to grapple with the influence of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (cowritten with Alex Haley), a hugely popular (yet problematic) text; Malcolm's own contradictions and construction of “multiple masks that distanced his inner self from the outside world”; the apparent changes in his views during the final months of his life; and a series of posthumous embellishments and myths.Footnote ¹ In his 1973 biography, The Life and Death of Malcolm X, the Newsweek journalist Peter Goldman described how Percy Sutton – a Harlem-based lawyer, local NAACP leader and politician – evoked the ancient fable of the blind men and the elephant to describe those who sought to categorize Malcolm: “One feels the ear, one feels the trunk, one feels the tail and so on, and each of them thinks he can describe the whole animal.”Footnote ² Based on extensive archival research and more than twenty years of effort put into understanding “the interior personality and mind of Malcolm,” Manning Marable's goal is to “go beyond the legend: to recount what actually occurred in Malcolm's life.”Footnote ³ In evaluating Marable's account, I have focussed my discussion on three areas: the theme of “reinvention,” the question of speculation and analytical strength, and the biography's invaluable role in illuminating Malcolm's work ethic.

The concept of “reinvention” runs as an interpretative thread throughout Marable's highly detailed and extensive account of Malcolm's life. Malcolm, we are told, “acquired the subtle tools of an ethnographer, crafting his language to fit the cultural contexts of his diverse audiences,” and his “strength was his ability to reinvent himself, in order to function and even thrive in a wide variety of environments.”Footnote ⁴ Given this focus on reinvention it is somewhat ironic that Marable's book actually draws attention to a number of fundamental continuities in Malcolm's career. While the Malcolm of late 1964 certainly differed in important ways from the Malcolm of 1957, he remained consistent in his uncompromising promotion of black pride, his faith in self-help, his emphasis on black unity, his commitment to Islam, and his insistence that the African American struggle for freedom had to be understood within an international context. Moreover, when it comes to the November 1963–March 1964 break with the Nation of Islam – the unorthodox Muslim sect that had dominated his life from his conversion in 1948 – Marable does an excellent job of highlighting and explaining the tensions over religious practice and political activism that had been bubbling away for years (and which were exacerbated by Malcolm's discovery of Elijah Muhammad's personal moral failings). We also see clearly that, long before the break, Malcolm was involved directly in local civil rights activity. Indeed, despite the Nation's proscription on political activism, Malcolm repeatedly pushed at the edge of what was permissible. During 1957, for instance, his sermons frequently contained political messages, with references to international affairs, criticisms of President Eisenhower over school desegregation, and encouragement to blacks to use their voting power. He campaigned frequently against police brutality and also demanded religious freedoms for NOI prisoners. In September 1960 Malcolm was part of the “welcoming committee” that greeted Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro in Harlem, and a year later he joined A. Philip Randolph's Emergency Committee that sought to build a united front to tackle the neighbourhood's social and economic problems. In the summer of 1963, Malcolm helped organize street rallies to protest against gambling, prostitution and drugs in Harlem, and he also spoke out against employment discrimination at a Brooklyn hospital construction site. Given all this, “A Life of Evolution” might have been a more appropriate, though admittedly less dramatic, subtitle for the biography.

The notion of “reinvention” does not entirely convince either when it comes to explaining Malcolm's final months. As Marable points out, leaving the Nation was not simply a case of “departing a religious cult,” it involved “abandoning an entire spiritual geography” and way of life.Footnote ⁵ Malcolm actually spent much of his last year abroad, where, in addition to finding safety from the NOI thugs who were intent on destroying him, he was feted by admiring African and Middle Eastern statesmen and scholars. Viewing himself as a citizen of the world, Malcolm grew ever closer to orthodox Islam; advocated pan-Africanism; showed signs of greater respect for religious, racial and gender equality; and emphasized “human rights.” Yet Malcolm struggled for consistency and clarity as he adopted ideas that were sometimes contradictory, sought to fashion a coherent strategy to advance black freedom, and changed his message and his tone to suit his audience. All too frequently, he fell back on his old, demagogic style of rhetoric. In any case, Malcolm's habit of calibrating his ideas and rhetoric to match his audience was less a case of reinvention than evidence of a pragmatic desire to secure influence, support and publicity (less charitably, it might be considered evidence of opportunism). Malcolm may well have been in the process of reinventing himself, but the chaos and confusion of those final months, and Malcolm's premature death, have always invited speculation about the path that he might have taken, had he lived. In his own biography, Peter Goldman explained how:

Further, although Marable emphasizes the search for what he calls “factual truth,” he does, as Joe Street rightly points out, demonstrate a fondness for speculation.Footnote ⁷ For example, he suggests that Malcolm “may have believed” that his mother's affair and out-of-wedlock pregnancy constituted, “in some way, a betrayal” of his late father.Footnote ⁸ In seeking to explain why Malcolm continued to bait the Nation of Islam despite the clear dangers involved, Marable wonders whether “at some level” Malcolm, perhaps even influenced by the martyrdom of the Shi'ite imam, Husayn ibn Ali, at Karbala in 680, “may have been inviting death.”Footnote ⁹ He even suggests that Malcolm may have invited Betty and the children to hear him speak at the Audubon Ballroom on 21 February 1965 because he “wanted his death to be symbolic, a passion play representing his beliefs.”Footnote ¹⁰ A more serious criticism is that, on occasion, Marable's analysis falls short. For example, he seems to argue, on the basis of the most slender evidence, that Malcolm influenced Che Guevara's attempts to foment revolution in Congo during 1965, and that the two men were “kindred spirits politically.”Footnote ¹¹ His description of the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity on 28 June 1964 as a “pivotal event in black American history,” meanwhile, seems rather generous.Footnote ¹² Perhaps the least convincing moment comes when Marable attempts to explain away Malcolm's appalling comments following a plane crash in Paris on 3 June 1962 that killed 121 rich white Atlantans (“a very beautiful thing,” “We call on our God – He gets rid of 120 of them”). Marable draws a parallel between Malcolm and the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater by arguing that the former's “most outrageous statements about the necessity of extremism in the achievement of political freedom and liberty” were “not unlike” Goldwater's line, from his acceptance speech at the 1964 convention, that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”Footnote ¹³ One might have thought that, here, context was everything, and Marable's argument jars given his earlier critical appraisal of Malcolm's “ugly” and “despicable” dealings with the Ku Klux Klan.Footnote ¹⁴

Marable's commendable desire to reach a broad audience, and the demands of writing for a trade press, may help explain the lack of explicit historiographical discussion in the biography. While in many ways refreshing, it is not entirely unproblematic – not least because Marable self-consciously sets his own account of Malcolm's life against the 1965 Autobiography. The result is that one would not necessarily know that, over the last few decades, a number of distinguished writers have attempted to unpick and make sense of Malcolm's life; test the claims of the Autobiography; and grapple with the question of if, how and to what extent Malcolm had changed in the months following his break with the Nation. The line between the original and the synthetic in Marable's analysis thus becomes a little blurred.

Finally, it is worth pointing out the fantastic job that Marable does of capturing Malcolm's extraordinary work ethic and peripatetic lifestyle. Giving speeches and interviews and penning essays, Marable's Malcolm is constantly on the go and on the move, whether recruiting new converts, building up new mosques or troubleshooting for the Nation of Islam in towns and cities across the United States, or travelling around the world in search of allies in his bid to internationalize America's race problem and forge productive links with orthodox Islam, following his break with the sect. Extraordinarily, after spending nineteen weeks in Africa and the Middle East between July and November 1964, he returned to the United States for only a few days before heading off to the United Kingdom – and this on top of a lengthy trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco and Algeria earlier that spring. The relentless nature of Malcolm's work ethic is illustrated by the fact that he flew to Detroit to give a speech only hours after the firebombing of his family home, wearing a coat jacket that “stank of smoke.”Footnote ¹⁵

Malcolm's Achilles heel was always the lack of a coherent programme that might deliver tangible gains for black Americans. Nevertheless, Marable makes a convincing case that Malcolm was “a truly historic figure” who, “more than any of his contemporaries … embodied the spirit, vitality, and political mood” of urban blacks in the United States, and crafted a message that was received enthusiastically by many black Africans, as well as African Americans.Footnote ¹⁶ Although it undoubtedly constitutes a substantial addition to the scholarly literature, I think it unlikely that Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention will stand as the last word on the subject for very long. Almost a hundred years ago the distinguished American historian William E. Dodd lamented, “In the field of history-writing there is no fame any more … since Gibbon. To write a good book may win one the approval of a few good friends and some others, but in ten years the best book has to be re-written.”Footnote ¹⁷ While Marable certainly strained every sinew, and undertook prodigious research in his heroic efforts to make sense of Malcolm X, there remains much good work to be done.

Death sanctified Malcolm X. The last months of his life had seen him struggling to retain the popularity and profile that he once held as the chief public spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Yet, in his public afterlife, whether through his Autobiography, through his influence on the emerging Black Power movement, or as rediscovered by a new generation in the 1980s and 1990s, his reputation grew in ways that could not have been imagined at the Audubon Ballroom on 21 February 1965. Manning Marable's biography is the latest and perhaps most eagerly awaited retelling of his story.Footnote ¹

In grappling with Malcolm X's life and very public death, Marable attempts to “humanize” the man by looking beyond the legend. Marable sets out to show us the private life of Malcolm X, supposedly to better understand the personal influences on his political ideas. Yet while the private Malcolm supplements the public figure, we emerge with little real sense of how the two combined. Take the discussion of Malcolm X's marital difficulties, for example: despite a degree of prying detail, we glean little more than Marable's prosaic suggestion that a lack of sexual or emotional satisfaction at home impelled his energetic activism.Footnote ²

The problem with Marable's approach is that his attempt to humanize Malcolm X is largely undermined by his treatment of Malcolm X's assassination. This highlights the difficulty of reconciling the private, human Malcolm and the public icon of legend. The book's introduction likens Malcolm to a method actor – an ironic comparison because by the time we reach the book's conclusion, Malcolm X seems little more than a character whose life ended in a horrific public drama, appropriately enough, onstage.Footnote ³ To be fair, assassination poses a huge problem for the biographer and offers great challenges: death can come as a moment of transcendence for the martyred public figure but is always also a moment of human suffering and the annihilation of the private individual. In biography, such a subject in effect dies two deaths, with the biographer facing a choice. In his recent biography of John F. Kennedy, Robert Dallek was content to let the public assassination blot out the man, dispensing with the death of the President and the role of his lone assassin in two dozen terse lines.Footnote ⁴ In Dallek's book, Oswald killed a political figure, not a man. Dallek preserved the integrity of his human subject, but at the expense of losing a sense of him right at the very end: a biography cut off as abruptly as Kennedy's own unfinished life. Conversely, Taylor Branch leads the reader through Dr. Martin Luther King's final private moments, right to the sudden end: a man in conversation, joking with his comrades. The assassination is handled subtly, implied rather than described. There is no dramatic denouement. This is the death of a man, not of a public figure.Footnote ⁵ Marable set out to “humanize” Malcolm X – but his approach to the assassination does not lend itself well to that purpose.

There is, it should be said, much to admire about Marable's account of the weeks and months before Malcolm X's death. The biography's narrative drive is both pacy and suspenseful. The sense of Malcolm's energy, and of the creative intellectual turmoil let loose by the hajj, is made evident, as is the private turmoil caused by the Nation of Islam's hate campaign.Footnote ⁶ This campaign of harassment and intimidation grew ever more intense, as the telephone threats, attacks on his followers and the firebombing of his family home culminated in a carefully planned assassination. While Marable does not radically transform our understanding of these events, he provides his own perspective on the possible inner workings of Malcolm X's mind – all the more poignant, perhaps, given that the writer completed the work as he faced his own mortality. “It is difficult to know what Malcolm may have contemplated as he pondered the likelihood of impending murder,” Marable writes. He lived “for over a year with death threats coming from the Nation, and in his final days he seemed of two minds, partly accepting of what he believed to be his fate and partly wishing or hoping that the problems might disappear.”Footnote ⁷ Here is an insight about the predicament of a man marked for death, and Marable holds out the possibility that the assassination might be used to explain what we have been missing in our understanding of Malcolm X the man. Oddly, however, Marable hesitates. What we get instead is drama: elegantly written, detailed, but drama all the same. Malcolm X the man fades into the background as the public figure plays out his fate.

Partly, the structure of the book hinders Marable's attempt to humanize his subject as death draws near. Its otherwise engaging narrative arc cannot quite accommodate that larger ambition. Marable sets out to lead us nearer to the private man, but as the assassination approaches, he takes us further and further away. The book is too heavily laden with doom. “Death … missed him and his family that night,” Marable writes of the bombing of Malcolm X's home; “he would not run from it tomorrow.”Footnote ⁸ In the following chapter, ominously titled “Death Comes on Time,” Malcolm X begins to take on a seer-like quality, repeatedly predicting his own death, and telling the New York Times that he felt “like a man who's already dead.”Footnote ⁹ Fair enough: Malcolm X did make such predictions. The question, however, is whether we need to see these predictions in the context of a chapter that announces his meeting with fate. In another context they might seem more like expressions of a man under extreme strain, whose hope was failing. Would Marable have been comfortable writing the end of Malcolm's life as a psychological decline under the pressure of Nation of Islam intimidation and ultimately extinction at the hands of the organization's killers? Peter Goldman presents Malcolm X weeping, in need of sedatives and “close to breaking.” His appearance in Detroit after the firebombing of his home was “an odd and sad performance,” uncharacteristically “stammery and meandering.” When Goldman reveals that Malcolm X was telling people “I'm going to be dead by Tuesday” or “I'm a marked man,” he seems hunted and desperate.Footnote ¹⁰ By contrast, what we have in Marable's account is an attempt to fit the facts into a transcendent narrative. Already we see Malcolm the man fading and a new figure of legend being inscribed in his place.

Nothing demonstrates this more than Marable's speculation regarding the Shi'a martyr Husayn ibn Ali. “Like Husayn,” Marable argues, “Malcolm made the conscious decision not to avoid or escape death.” Instead of remaining in Africa until the Nation's ire had dimmed, “he chose to return to the United States,” and this “meant that he recognized the real possibility of being killed at any moment … If he did not desire death, he still seemed prepared to embrace it as an inevitable part of his personal destiny.”Footnote ¹¹ Perhaps there is something in that. But in attempting to account for Malcolm's behaviour, Marable abandons the quest to reveal the man behind the legend and instead sets the assassination up as Malcolm X's destined martyrdom – and an ersatz Husayn ibn Ali begins to supplant Malcolm X. One considerably older legend is conjured up to replace the more familiar one.

We might well ask whether a more “human” Malcolm X helps us to understand the black liberation struggles of the twentieth century. The key, perhaps, is that this is a biography rather than a work of history. It ultimately follows the exemplary and exhortational tradition of American biographical writing. Perhaps most significantly, given Marable's own decline, it tells us how to face and triumph over death. Marable refashions the didactic narrative familiar from the Autobiography into a lesson for our own times about the political possibilities suggested by Malcolm X's life of self-invention and reinvention. The stories Malcolm X told about his past reinvented his life history, and by taking on a new persona he was able to reach “the most marginalized sectors of the black community, giving justification to their hopes.”Footnote ¹² Behind it all, though, he remains a pilgrim on a journey of moral discovery in this new retelling – “his lifelong quest,” as Marable puts it, was “to discern the meaning and substance of faith.”Footnote ¹³

It is not necessary to explain this approach as an attempt to humanize Malcolm X, even if it does involve some consideration of his life behind the rhetoric and the carefully constructed public facade. Indeed, Marable's Malcolm X is no more “human” than the Malcolm X in Goldman's account. Rather, what is interesting about Marable's biography is that it Americanizes Malcolm X by setting him in the frame of self-(re)invention. And it is in that context that Marable's handling of the assassination makes much more sense: Malcolm X's final act of reinvention was to permit his dramatic public death. It was a death that helped establish his status as a martyr of the black liberation struggle – and ultimately as an American icon.

Interview with Peter Bailey by Stephen Tuck, Wednesday 7 March 2012.

Peter Bailey first met Malcolm X in December 1963. He was a founding member of the OAAU and the editor of the OAAU's newsletter. He was also present at the Audubon theatre on the day that Malcolm X was assassinated. He was editor of Ebony between 1968 and 1975; cowrote Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X (2002) with Malcolm X's nephew, Rodnell Collins; and assisted the editing of Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (ed. John Henrik Clarke, 1995).

Tuck: What is your main reaction to Marable's book?

Bailey: I found it basically to be completely overhyped … by his academic friends and colleagues. All that talk about “the greatest thing since” and “the best book since” and blah blah blah. For those of us who have been around and have been staying on top of things there was practically very little new information in that book. Having read Zak Kondo's Conspiracys: Unraveling the Assassination of Malcolm X [1993] and Carl Evanzz's The Judas Factor[: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X, 1993] you know, much of that information – especially around his assassination – had been published back in the 1990s. I was interviewed for the book back in 2003 at a luncheon at Columbia University. One of the researchers was a young lady that I knew and because of her I went up and spent about two hours basically just answering questions. They never contacted me again.

You felt it was overhyped because it didn't have anything new to say?

Other books that have been written did not get a whole lot of play because they did not come from the big, you know, high-level Ivy League-type academia. There was very little in the book that was new to me. I didn't find anything that – it's just another book on Malcolm X. To me it's like all the rest, all the others that have come out since he was assassinated. I found one thing that kind of gave me a clue as to Marable's mentality in the epilogue. There is a very, very determined effort on the part of both what I call Marxist-oriented integrationists and capitalist-oriented integrationists to take Brother Malcolm away from black nationalism. In his epilogue Marable makes the statement that to me – I literally laughed when I read it – he says that Brother Malcolm, and I'm kind of paraphrasing because I don't have it exactly but he says that Brother Malcolm was moving away from the limitations of black nationalism and he was moving towards – now listen to this – he was moving towards race-neutral concepts such as pan-Africanism and Third World revolution.Footnote ¹ Now when did pan-Africanism get to be race-neutral? You could not even be a black nationalist and not be a pan-Africanist – it was impossible. That shows you how the whole idea is to be moving him away from the concept and ideology of black nationalism. When I read that statement I basically laughed.

Can I ask you about another aspect of the book, which is the focus on Malcolm X's private life – more than most other biographies? Firstly, did you feel that was warranted? And secondly did you feel it was accurate?

I think that he could do that considering what he was doing. I don't really know the total accuracy of it, some of those things you had heard before usually from people who were trying to in some kind of way bring him down or change his image, and I found nothing about his private life that was really unnerving to me or made me reexamine my commitment to who he was and what he was all about. My position is that anybody who does get put off by some of that stuff that Marable wrote is good riddance to them. You know, we don't need you anyway. Especially when it comes to the homosexuality aspects of it. My position was that if this were so then Brother Malcolm would probably still be alive because there is no way I can imagine that that kind of information would not have been used by the FBI, the CIA, the Nation of Islam, and other haters of Brother Malcolm to shut him down, to quiet it down. And if they had that kind of information there would have been no need to assassinate him. That's my whole attitude about that.

Can I ask about the reception of the book within the circles that you move in, former members of the OAAU and other sympathizers or supporters of Malcolm X? What's been the general reaction?

It has been basically similar to mine. Who is Marable? There is one book out already in response to that from different people.Footnote ² The second one coming out is the one to which I contributed; they hope to have it out I think in May or June. I decided a long time ago that there is no reason to do a lot of tap-dancing about this kind of thing because all you do then is promote the book. When these people put these kinds of things together I'm convinced that part of their marketing strategy is for us to be ranting and raving. When you deal with it you deal with it in a very calm, determined, scholarly way – or semischolarly at least because I am not a scholar. And you make sure you do what Brother Malcolm always told us. He used to say to us, “When I go out to speak I know that there are people in that audience whose sole reason for being there is to catch me with my facts wrong.” So when you go after these kinds of things you make sure you go after them, that they've got their facts wrong, if they have interpreted something falsely, you go after that but you don't do a whole lot of ranting and raving, screaming and helping to sell the book by raising a whole lot of controversy.

Do you think that there are redeeming features in Marable's book? Are you pleased that this book is being read by lots of people who haven't read the other biographies or would you prefer it not to have been written at all?

I'd like to say to anyone who reads Marable's book to just remember that you are reading a book by someone who was trying to build his reputation in the academic world. Look at everything he says with that in mind. I would not recommend anyone read the book. I know other books they could read – like I said you would not go about the assassination you read Zak Kondo's book which was published I think back in 1991 [1993]. And you know he named the five guys [who killed Malcolm X] then … But of course Zak Kondo was a professor at an historically black college and we know that professors at historically black colleges cannot write anything important. Not like professors at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, or somewhere like that – I tell people that if you read Marable read it as someone who as far as I'm concerned was someone who was writing a book designed to enhance his prestige in the academic world.

One of the strongest publicity points for the book was how many people the Marable project had interviewed, which of course conferred legitimacy on it.

You could interview a million people but if you don't interview the right people – because I know some very important people that would not speak to him. I'm really sorry that I did. The only reason that I did was because the person who called me and asked me to do it was a young lady that I knew who I have a great deal of respect for, one of his researchers. About a year after I did it she was let go.

You mentioned [before the interview] that you are referred to in the book seven times. Is the treatment of you correct, both factually and in terms of interpretation?

I'll tell you two things. One, that is kind of a distortion. There is a section in the book where he says that Brother Malcolm warned us, warned his supporters, and again I'm kind of paraphrasing, about possible arrest and things from the Nation of Islam. That's his sentence in the book. He says, “explained Bailey,” that's me.Footnote ³ And then when I say “Brother Malcolm warned us when we first got involved with him to be aware that it may lead to arrest from the FBI and the police,” [Marable] said “dangers from the Nation of Islam.” And then the next sentence “explained Bailey.” Those of us in OAAU, he never talked to us about the Nation of Islam. That may be small to some people but to me that's major. It's complete misuse of my sentence to back up something that you say. The next thing, this is total awful. He says in the book that on February 21, 1965, Brother Malcolm came into the Audubon Ballroom where he was encountered – he used the word – by Bailey.Footnote ⁴ Now first of all to me the use of the word encountered has a kind of a hostile tone to it. Then he says that Malcolm “ordered Bailey to not distribute copies of the OAAU newsletter at the Rally.” Well there was no effort to distribute the newsletter at the Rally. It was a one-page news release-type statement and this did not happen on February 21 it happened on February 20th, the Saturday. You see what I'm saying? Now that's out and out. Maybe they just misunderstood but can't you contact somebody and ask them about it before you go publishing it? You make it sound “he was encountered by Peter Bailey and he ordered …” makes it almost sound as though the situation between Brother Malcolm and I was kind of semi-hostile.

So how would you sum it up: careless or distorted?

I'll be very frank with you. Considering everything and the way the book – I'm beginning to think … initially I was going to be kind and say that it was carelessness but I – well, maybe it is carelessness but it is unnecessary carelessness … One thing that I found hilarious was that in the index he says that – he's talking about the book I cowrote with Rodnell Collins [Malcolm X's nephew] and he says Collins and Bailey provide some very good information about the relationship between Ella and Malcolm but they did too much embellishment in the narrative.Footnote ⁵ Now can you imagine Marable's book accusing us of embellishing something? One of my friends who is a scholar said to me who read the book within two weeks after it came out said that he has rarely seen a book – supposedly a book of scholarship – with so many probablies and maybes and perhaps and all these qualifiers …