Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer winner Payne (1941--2018) spent nearly 30 years researching and writing this monumental biography of human rights activist Malcolm X. Completed by his daughter and researcher, Payne's richly detailed account is based on hundreds of interviews with Malcolm X's family members, childhood friends, cellmates, allies, and enemies, and meticulously tracks his journey from Omaha, Neb., where he was born Malcolm Little in 1925, through his teenage pot dealing in East Lansing, Mich., and street criminal days in Boston and Harlem, to his emergence as the Nation of Islam's "most gifted and successful proselytizer and demander of justice," and his assassination in 1965. Along the way, Payne folds in incisive portraits of such major figures as Marcus Garvey, whose teachings on racial uplift Malcolm X's parents followed; Moorish Science Temple leader Noble Drew Ali, whose follower, Fard Muhammad, founded the Nation of Islam; and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Payne also documents the radio dramas and jazz music Malcolm X listened to, reveals how a clandestine meeting with the Georgia Ku Klux Klan in 1961 contributed to his break from the Nation of Islam, and interviews two men wrongly imprisoned for his murder. The result is an extraordinary and essential portrait of the man behind the icon. Agent: Faith Childs. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
As renewed calls for Black liberation fill the streets and the airwaves, what better time to review the legacy of one of the most influential proponents of Black independence, Malcolm X. Based on decades of interviews with family members, classmates, and associates, this monumental new biography was Les Payne's life work, completed by his daughter and fellow researcher Tamara after Payne's untimely death in 2018. So what distinguishes Payne's book from other Malcolm X biographies? Payne's Malcolm is less a revolutionary than part of a continuum of Black struggle, beginning with Malcolm's parents and their devotion to the Black uplift of Garveyism, through the myth-making of a gloriously exotic Black ancestry found in the Moorish Science movement, a precursor to the Nation of Islam (NOI). Malcolm was not the first in his family to discover the NOI, but his gift was in braiding the mystical, the spiritual, and the political into an unbeatable movement for Black dignity, self-sufficiency, and self-defense. Malcolm's NOI became a uniquely youthful, pan-African movement for global liberation, influencing the philosophy and demands of Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, SNCC, CORE, and others who rejected respectability politics and assimilation. That same tension, between largely white-affiliated, accommodationist Black organizations like the NAACP and the radical actions of Black Lives Matter, is part of Malcolm's legacy.
Guardian Review
"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. Malcolm X was a radical and electrifying speaker: there was a dynamism about the man but also an unruffled cool. He carried within him an unforgiving memory of the head-bowed deference expected of black Americans. His fierce stance was a thrilling counterweight to the daily reports of non-violent black protesters on freedom marches battered by police. If you slapped Malcolm X, he wouldn't turn the other cheek, he'd slap you right back. First characterised as a philosophical street fighter in his collaboration with writer Alex Haley for The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), other attempts to capture the self-dramatising, silver-tongued polemicist include photographer Eve Arnold's 1961 shots for Life magazine of a striking poster boy for the NOI in a cocked hat, with browline glasses, a gold watch and Masonic ring. In 2011, Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention cast Malcolm as a self-made American with flaws (an adolescent thief, stealing from his impoverished mother, and a misogynist). Largely sympathetic, Marable portrayed him as an absent father and husband; egregiously, for some, he also suggested Malcolm's willingness in his youth to indulge the homoerotic fantasies of elderly white men. In the new book, Malcolm emerges as a vengeful critic of black and white detractors, nursing a deep well of hurt and unmasked seething resentment towards white supremacists, the cause of so much tragedy for his family. His brother Wilfred, a minister of the Nation of Islam, appears central to his development, introducing him to the black American "customised Islam" when jailed for a string of burglaries. In his subsequent single-mindedness, Malcolm was more like his father, Earl Little, a Baptist preacher and black self-help advocate. In 1931, Reverend Little died in suspicious circumstances, crushed by a tramcar. Malcolm always believed the Ku Klux Klan had engineered the "accident". Shortly after, his traumatised mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Undoubtedly, trauma, too, was evident in the delinquent behaviour of her son, more given to "rolling up marijuana leaves [than] shirt sleeves", who once taunted a policeman who pulled a gun on him: "Go ahead, pull the trigger, whitey." Still a teenager, he arrived in Harlem, determined to become "one of the most depraved, parasitical hustlers", an ambition he fulfilled in the "numbers" lottery racket and acting as a low-level pimp before his luck ran out. Emerging from prison, he brought a convert's enthusiasm to expanding the NOI's membership in a decade to tens of thousands. But the most compelling section of The Dead Are Arising focuses on his breach with the movement, following its leader Elijah Muhammad's instruction in 1961 that he negotiate with the Klan. The exploratory Atlanta meeting - support for a NOI black state within the US in exchange for helping the Klan fight the "scourge of integration" - is portrayed in cinematic detail, with Malcolm adopting high sarcasm until the Klan's real objective becomes clear: information on Martin Luther King Jr's movements to help "eliminate" him. No information was proffered, but Malcolm X increasingly felt an alliance with the Klan unconscionable. It was, though, Muhammad's personal immorality - impregnating several young NOI secretaries - that eventually led to an irreversible rupture with his once ardent devotee. The Dead Are Arising's unprecedented testimonies show how, in publicly denouncing Muhammad, Malcolm incensed former allies who plotted his murder with the "advance knowledge" of the FBI. Though this 640-page book doesn't match the raw excitement and idiosyncrasy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, it captures the uncompromising clarity that speaks to this moment of Black Lives Matter. Since his death, Malcolm X's ideas have circled like planes in a holding pattern, dropping down when landing slots are freed up. Embedded in music culture from Erykah Badu to Wu-Tang Clan, his revolutionary message is manifest on the streets today, emblazoned on the chests of those protesting against the state-sponsored murder of African Americans, expressed in their demands for justice "by any means necessary".
Kirkus Review
Comprehensive, timely life of the renowned activist and his circuitous rise to prominence. Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Payne died in 2018, leaving it to his daughter, Tamara, to complete this book, on which he had been at work for 30 years. The catalyst was an introduction through a school friend to one of Malcolm X's brothers, who told him stories of young Malcolm Little (1925-1965) in childhood. Malcolm had grown up bookish and popular, even among the white children with whom he went to school in Michigan, but he also acted out during adolescence, a trajectory that ended behind bars. (The detectives who arrested him, appreciating the fact that, as one said, "He wasn't fresh at all," gave him a couple of packs of cigarettes.) While incarcerated, Malcolm experienced the intellectual reawakening that put him on the path to becoming a political activist and Muslim. Payne delivers considerable news not just in recounting unknown episodes of Malcolm's early years, but also in reconstructing events during his time as a devotee of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, in whom he believed "as deeply as his parents back in Michigan had believed in Jesus of Nazareth." One instance was a meeting with the Ku Klux Klan that Malcolm brokered, finding a sole bit of common ground in the fact that both groups abhorred the notion of mixed-race marriages. Indeed, as Payne writes, for a long time, Malcolm was a committed advocate of black separatism. It was only while on a hajj to Mecca, where he saw blond-haired, blue-eyed Muslims as devoted as he was, that he abandoned his former teachings and broke with the Nation. Payne's accounts of the consequences of that rupture and Malcolm's assassination at the hands of a "goon squad" with ties to the FBI and CIA are eye-opening, and they add a new dimension to our understanding of Malcolm X's last years. A superb biography and an essential addition to the library of African American political engagement. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This book is a monument to investigative reporting and to daughter Tamara's devotion to her Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist father (1941--2018). Les Payne (The Life and Death of the SLA) dedicated 28 years to examining the life and death of Malcolm X (1925--65), including how he became who he was as a public and private person, and how he died as a victim of a murderous conspiracy. With meticulous day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute detail, Payne retraced the steps of the seventh son of Marcus Garvey adherent and itinerant preacher Earl Little, from childhood pranks to the petty hustle of drugs and street crimes who became a Black folk hero as a born-again revolutionary moralist insistent on unflinching self-respect. Gathering information from exhaustive interviews with family, friends, acquaintances, allies, and foes, and with archival research and revelations from the FBI, NYPD, and other public agencies, Payne corrects and fills gaps in Malcolm X's 1964 autobiography with Alex Haley. VERDICT This gripping read delivers penetrating explanations and fresh insights into previously unexamined dimensions of Malcolm X and his becoming and being El-hajj Malik El Shabazz within the context of Black life. Highest recommendation.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe