Manning Marable Chronicles the Life of Malcolm X

by Amy Goodman

Malcolm X was born 80 years ago today. To commemorate the occasion we hear a speech by Columbia University professor Manning Marable chronicling his life. Marable is currently working on a major new biography of Malcolm X which is tentatively titled "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention."

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A group of people are making a pilgrimage today to the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York where Malcolm X is buried >During the program today we are going to journey through parts of Malcolm X's short but extraordinary life. We'll play portions of the documentary "Malcolm X: Make it Plain." But first, we begin with Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University. He is currently working on a major new biography of Malcolm X. Marable has already spent more than a decade researching the book which is tentatively titled "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention." Marable has said "Malcolm X was potentially a new type of world leader, personally drawn up from the wretched of the earth into a political stratosphere of international power."

Marable's research has raised new questions about The Autobiography of Malcolm X which was written with Alex Haley. Marable has also examined un-redacted FBI files which provide new insight into the role of FBI and the New York Police Department in the assassination of Malcolm X.

On the 40th anniversary of Malcolm X's assassination in February, Professor Marable spoke here in New York City.

• Manning Marable, Columbia University professor speaking on February 21, 2005.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Manning Marable, speaking in February on the anniversary of Malcolm X's assassination, talked about a number of issues. He has raised in his research for his biography new questions about The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which was written with Alex Haley. Marable has also examined un-redacted F.B.I. files which provide new insight into the role of the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department in the assassination of Malcolm X. On the anniversary of that assassination, Dr. Manning Marable spoke here in New York.

MANNING MARABLE: On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, of Malcolm X, if one had to select only one historical personality between the period of 1940 to 1975 who best represented and reflected black urban life, politics, culture and society in the United States, it would be impossible not to choose the charismatic figure of Malcolm X. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925 and growing up in the Midwest, young Malcolm Little was the child of political activists who supported the militant black nationalism Pan-Africanist movement of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. After his father’s violent death and his mother's subsequent institutionalization due to mental illness, young Malcolm was placed in foster care and for a time in a youth detention facility.

At the age of 16, he left school, relocating to Boston upon the invitation of his older half-sister, Ella Collins. During the Second World War, the zoot-suited Detroit Red became a small-time hustler, burglar and dealer in Harlem and Roxbury. In January 1946, Malcolm Little was arrested for burglary and weapons possession charges, and he received a 10-year sentence in Massachusetts prisons. While incarcerated, Little's siblings introduced him to the Nation of Islam, a then tiny black nationalist-oriented religious movement led by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Converting to the N.O.I.’s version of Islam, Malcolm experienced a spiritual and intellectual epiphany behind bars.

Emerging from prison in August 1952 as Malcolm X, the talented and articulate young convert was soon the assistant minister of N.O.I.'s Detroit Temple Number One. The actual public career of minister Malcolm X was, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, remarkably tragic and short. In 1954, Malcolm was named minister of Harlem's Temple Number Seven, which he soon led for a decade. As an itinerant spokesperson for black nationalism in the United States, Brother Malcolm traveled constantly across the country, winning tens of thousands of new converts to the Nation of Islam. Between 1954 and 1963, Malcolm was personally responsible for establishing over 100 Muslim temples or mosques throughout this country as the chief spokesperson for Elijah Muhammad.

Malcolm built the N.O.I. from a marginal sect to a spiritual organization of over 100,000 people. By the early 1960s, Malcolm was widely celebrated and feared as a public speaker and debater at universities and colleges and in the national media. The F.B.I., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its efforts to discredit the Nation and its leadership, led the agency to engage in a variety of illegal acts, wiretapping, surveillance, disruption, and harassment. In 1960, Malcolm helped to establish the newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, which by the end of the 1960s would have a national circulation of 600,000, by far the most widely read black-owned newspaper in the United States at that time. However, by the early '60s, serious divisions developed between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam’s leadership, and especially Elijah Muhammad. He also chafed under the N.O.I.'s political conservatism, its refusal to offer support to the growth of civil rights protests throughout the country.

In March 1964, Malcolm announced publicly his break with the N.O.I. He created two new organizations: Muslim Mosque Incorporated, designed for former N.O.I. members, as a spiritually-based organization; and a secular-oriented organization, the O.A.A.U., the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Now reaching out to the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm began to propose a broad coalition of black activist organizations working in concert to achieve racial justice. Converting to traditional Islam, Malcolm completed his spiritual Hajj to Mecca in April 1964 and returned to the United States the next month as El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.




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