Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (review)

The monumental new biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention may be the most important book about Malcolm’s controversial life since the Autobiography. Clearly a labor of love spanning many years, this final volume by the eminent African-American scholar Manning Marable (who passed away shortly before publication) chronicles Malcolm’s astonishing evolution over the thirty-nine years from his birth in Omaha to his 1965 murder in Harlem at the hands of Nation of Islam gunmen. Influenced at first by the Garveyite views of his parents, Malcolm then cycled from high-school dropout to petty criminal—with the moniker “Detroit Red”—before a six year stay in prison saw him convert to the Nation of Islam, whose nationalism jibed with his early Garveyite upbringing. Devoting most of his career to the cause, he quickly became the most prominent public face of the movement led by Elijah Muhammad. Tensions between Malcolm and Elijah led to a break in 1964, with Malcolm founding the rival religious group Muslim Mosque Incorporated and the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity. Stimulated by two extended trips to both North and Sub-Saharan African, Malcolm moved partway from his earlier hatreds and towards a more inclusive vision, especially after his pilgrimage to Mecca.

Marable calls upon thorough research to deepen and correct the received picture from beginning to end, often by noting disparities between the autobiography (mostly written by collaborator Alex Haley) and actual events. For example, the “Detroit Red” criminal persona crafted by Malcolm and Haley wildly exaggerates a few petty teenage crimes in order to provide a stronger contrast with Malcolm’s prison conversion to the Nation Of Islam. The self-serving cynicism of “Detroit Red” was set against Malcolm’s prison embrace of a cause beyond himself. As relations with the Nation of Islam deteriorated towards the end of his life, Malcolm foresaw his own assassination by that group, and Marable’s riveting account reads like a detective novel as he traces the escalating tensions, which included a firebombing of Malcolm’s house. Shortly after Malcolm’s assassination, three shooters were convicted of his murder. Marable argues convincingly that two of them were innocent, and that primary responsibility belonged with the Newark rather than the Harlem mosque.

Yet Malcolm’s violent end reverberated with the violent and sometimes hate-filled rhetoric that he had employed throughout his life. His primary targets were generic “whites,” whom he labeled “devils” responsible for nearly every evil in the world. After completing the hajj, Malcolm relaxed his views somewhat for some audiences, but for him white people were always on probation. He took an oddly essentialist view of race, referring to “the” white man, “the” white race, etc. Neither he nor Marable question the black/white dichotomy that governed Malcolm’s thinking, or the one-drop rule by which any trace of black African blood renders one black in America. And Marable offers little evidence to support his claim that a Cairo conference taught Malcolm that racial categories were not fixed. Even so, Malcolm’s views evolved considerably from his fascination with the Nation of Islam, whose unsophisticated doctrines, Marable summarizes, preached “that whites were devils and that black Americans were the lost Asiatic tribes of Shabazz, forced into slavery in America’s racial wilderness” (2).

Animus toward white people spilled over into other categories for Malcolm, most prominently towards gays, women, and Jews. Despite an early affair with the well-off white hotel manager William Paul Lennon before his incarceration (Lennon tried to keep up the relation, which only ended with Malcolm’s prison conversion), Malcolm regarded homosexuality as a perversion before and after his incarceration. In a letter to the Massachusetts prison commissioner, for example, he denounced “the homosexual perverts” who “can get job-changes whenever they wish to change or acquire new ‘husbands’” (95). His attitude towards women was also disturbing: “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak. They are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.” Marable...