Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [313]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND RESEARCH NOTES
The origins of this book date back to the winter of 1969, my freshman year at Earlham College in Indiana, when I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm had become the icon of the Black Power movement, and I eagerly devoured the edited volumes of his speeches and interviews. Like others, I did not question the inconsistencies between some parts of his speeches and recordings and the printed texts of these same speeches in publications. Nearly all of the scholarly work on Malcolm was based on a very narrow selection of primary sources, his transcribed speeches, and secondary sources, such as newspapers articles.
Nearly two decades later, in 1988, I was teaching a course in African-American politics that included The Autobiography of Malcolm X as part of the required reading, at Ohio State University. A close reading of the text revealed numerous inconsistencies, errors, and fictive characters at odds with Malcolm’s actual life history. There also seemed to be missing sections of analysis. Chief among them was the absence of any detailed discussion of Malcolm’s two groups formed in 1964—Muslim Mosque, Incorporated, and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. The Autobiography had been long accepted as Malcolm’s political testament, yet it was largely silent on major political issues. There was also a strange yet unmistakable fissure within the body of the text, separating chapters one through fifteen from a second “book” consisting of chapters sixteen through nineteen. About two-fifths of the book focused exclusively on Malcolm’s childhood and juvenile years, describing the criminal exploits of the teenage Malcolm, “Detroit Red.” It was only years later that I would learn that much of Detroit Red was fictive, that Malcolm’s actual involvement in burglaries and hard-core crime was short-lived.
At the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I taught from 1989 to 1993, I began work on what I thought would be a modest political biography of Malcolm X. The study was first designed to map the evolution of his political and social thought. I hired a team of student researchers, led by then Ph.D. candidate Eleanor Hubbard, and we began to construct a bibliography of nearly one thousand works about the black leader.
Opportunities rarely come in life without a certain cost. In 1993, I accepted the appointment as director of the newly established Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. For the next ten years my primary focus was building the Institute; the Malcolm X biography project was placed on hold. It was only in 1999-2000, after meeting on several occasions with one of Malcolm’s children, Ilyasah Shabazz, that I decided to return to the biography. But in reading nearly all of the literature about Malcolm produced in the 1990s, I was struck by its shallow character and lack of original sources. Many Malcolmites had constructed a mythic legend to surround their leader that erased all blemishes and any mistakes he had made. Another version of “Malcolmology” simplistically equated Martin Luther King, Jr., with Malcolm, both advocating multicultural harmony and universal understanding. I decided to write a full, comprehensive study of Malcolm’s life.
The historical Malcolm, the man with all his strengths and flaws, was being strangled by the iconic legend that had been constructed around him. There were several reasons for this. Inexplicably, Betty Shabazz, and later the Shabazz estate, did not make available to the public hundreds of documents—personal correspondence, photographs, texts of speeches—by Malcolm X until 2008. Following Malcolm’s 1965 assassination, many of his closest associates went underground, fled the country, or simply refused to speak to scholars. The Nation of Islam, accused of murdering Malcolm, obviously had no incentive to go on the record explaining its reasons for opposing the former Black Muslim leader. NOI leader Louis Farrakhan had made speeches and statements about his relationship with Malcolm,