Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [314]
My initial breakthrough came when I finally realized that critical deconstruction of the Autobiography held the key to reinterpreting Malcolm’s life. In this process, I was aided tremendously by Jonathan Cole, then Columbia University’s provost, and Vice Provost Michael Crow, who provided the financial support in 2001-2004 to fund the development of a multimedia version of the Autobiography. At one point more than twenty graduate and undergraduate students were employed by the Malcolm X Project, writing hundreds of profiles and abstracts of important individuals, institutions, and groups that were mentioned in the Autobiography. The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, directed by Frank Moretti, produced our extraordinary website, http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/malcolmx/, which greatly accelerated the early development of the biography. A more recent multimedia resource presenting materials on Malcolm X is available at http://mxp.manningmarable.com.
As we deconstructed the Autobiography, I came to appreciate the book as a brilliant literary work, but more of a memoir than a factual and objective reconstruction of a man’s life. Consequently, the book focused largely on personalities rather than on deeper ideological or political differences that increasingly divided Malcolm from the Nation. It also said little about Malcolm’s extensive travels across the Middle East and Africa, in July-November 1964.
Another important element in the making of this biography was the critical advice of Clayborne Carson, the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University. I visited the Stanford campus in 2001 to observe how Clay had organized his project, and assigned specific responsibilities to student researchers. Clay suggested that the key to writing a full biography of Malcolm X would be the construction of an extremely detailed chronological grid of his life; in covering his last two years, 1963 to 1965, there would be almost daily entries. Each entry would indicate where the information came from and, whenever possible, would contain multiple sources of documentation. Over a six-year period, a massive chronology was developed, which became the foundation for this biography.
One additional detail in reading this work is the issue of names. Most of the central figures in Malcolm’s life changed their names two or three times, or even more. Malcolm’s invaluable and crusty chief of staff, James Warden, was usually called James 67X when he belonged to Mosque No. 7, and was often referred to as James Shabazz in 1964-65. However, there was at the same time another James Shabazz, James 3X McGregor, head of the Newark mosque, a deadly opponent of Malcolm’s. Consequently, Warden is referred to throughout the text as James 67X. There are similar problems with others’ names: Malcolm’s trusted assistant minister, Benjamin 2X Goodman, was also Benjamin Karim after embracing orthodox Islam; Thomas 15X Johnson, who was unjustly convicted of Malcolm’s murder, was later Khalil Islam; Louis Walcott, also named Louis X, the minister of Boston’s NOI mosque, is known throughout the world today as Louis Farrakhan. Wallace Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad’s son who inherited the leadership of the Nation of Islam in 1975, changed the spelling of his name to Warith Mohammed. With the partial exception of Farrakhan, I have tried to be consistent in the identification of key personalities throughout the text. This guideline also extends to individuals such as Maya Angelou, who was for several years in the 1960s known as Maya Maké.
Any work of this type is the product of many individuals. One of my Columbia University doctoral