Prior to his death, Dr. Manning Marable was able to complete his classic tractate on the life and politics of Malcolm X. Unlike the accepted Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley, which spends almost half of its commentary discussing his childhood and scant criminal past and reads more like literary fiction than a historical work, Marable outlines as complete a picture as ever of the man in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.
From his father, Earl, growing up in Reynolds, Ga., in post-Reconstruction America, a proud Garveyite who left his first wife and remarried, eventually moving from Philadelphia to Omaha, Neb., where Malcolm was born in 1925, a tone of the man is set that cannot be refuted. From Nebraska, Malcolm and his family moved to Wisconsin, to Indiana, to Michigan, where his father died as a result of having his body severed in half by black-robed Klansman known as the Black Legion, the book provides insight that leads to what the author called his rise to “secular sainthood.”
Many of my confederates in academia and a corpus of writers, most of whom are African American, have been critical of the book, although it is more apparent that they have not even read the text in its entirety. They complain of the personal details regarding the man, yet cannot offer any significant critique of the information and meticulous detail of what the book entails. Marable presents new information, ranging from the other women Malcolm asked to marry him before Betty to naming the real members of the assignation team that ended his life.
The book provides major insight on the impact of Marcus Garvey on how his mother and father raised him and focuses strongly on his political development, from his joining the Nations of Islam to leaving and starting Muslim Mosque, Inc., to the Organization of Afro-American Unity. From being placed in foster care as a child at age 11, becoming class president of his junior high school until he moved to Boston to live with his half-sister, eventually turning to a brief life of crime and even the details of his mother and half-sister being confined to mental institutions, Marable’s book shows the attributes that made Malcolm special.
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is a must-read and manages to evince what historical scholarship in the written form should reflect. From his meetings with Robert Penn Warren, his close relationship with Maya Angelo, Percy Sutton and John Henrik Clarke, it will be hard for anyone who truly reads this book to be disappointed or have anything negative to say or write about it.
–torrance t. stephens, ph.d.
