“If you’re black you were born in jail,” said Malcolm X in 1964, the year before his assassination. The American dream was a nightmare as far as the black Muslim and former spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI) was concerned. But, he argued, there would be no peace for “blue-eyed devils” (white people) either, without a reckoning for the sins of slavery and the continued brutalisation of enslaved people’s descendants.
Malcolm X’s extraordinary life is emblematic of the painful truths revealed and sacrifices made in the fight for civil rights in the US. At first, he cast his rival Martin Luther King Jr as an “Uncle Tom”, but came to realise their goals had been the same and that either man “might personally meet a fatal catastrophe”.
With so many books published on Malcolm X, is there anything new to say? And does this latest biography, The Dead Are Arising, by the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Les Payne (who died in 2018) and his daughter and principal researcher, Tamara, deepen our understanding of him?
Previous works have often relied on conjecture and redacted, declassified FBI files, but the Paynes have assiduously sought primary sources. Drawing on thousands of hours of first-hand interviews, eye-witness accounts and personal documents, they assemble a more holistic picture of Malcolm X’s evolution “from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary” who, through his words, terrified not just white America but, eventually, the black Muslim leadership, too.
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