I have a long-standing interest in Malcolm X. I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school in the early 70s and have reread it a couple of times in the decades since. So when I saw a new biography of him published in 2020, I wanted to read it.

The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X is the result of nearly three decades of work by Pulitzer Prize-winner Les Payne, who died in 2018. His daughter and principal researcher, Tamara Payne, completed the book and is listed as co-author. The book contains a lot of details gleaned from interviews with Malcolm’s family and friends at all stages of his life as well as interviews with people who were in Nation of Islam. Points of interest for me included the following: (1) how the archetype of Malcolm’s father, who was a preacher and organizer for Marcus Garvey’s organization and who died when Malcolm was very young, may have molded the figure Malcolm eventually became; (2) Malcolm’s complex personality growing up, how selfish and streetwise and sensitive he was at an early age – he talks about this in his autobiography but this book adds detail that rounds out the picture without a confessional or didactic filter; (3) that the founder of Nation of Islam (NOI), Fard Muhmmad, was a White confidence man from New Zealand with a long criminal record who pretended to be from Mecca and, before he “disappeared,” anointed Elijah Muhammad, who posed as the Prophet (teaching that Fard had been Allah incarnate) and, it is suggested in the book, ran NOI to enrich himself; (4) Malcolm’s steadfast and unyielding will ,during childhood, as a criminal, as a preacher for NOI, and post-NOI, to unqualifiedly and openly oppose any individual or institutional forces assigning Blacks an inferior status. No matter how many times Malcolm recreated himself, this aspect of his personality remained constant, and through his oratory skills, intellect, and the force of his personality, he was able to awaken or transmit to others that same will.

The most stunning part of the book is the account of a meeting between Malcolm and the Georgia Ku Klux Klan. The KKK reached out to him, seeing a commonality of interest in that NOI promoted a separatist solution to racism and KKK opposed integration. Malcolm took the KKK’s inquiry to Elijah Muhammad, hoping for authorization to turn the invite into a public debate in which the sword of Malcolm’s intellect would slay every premise and axiom upon which the KKK rested. Instead, Elijah directed Malcolm and another NOI member to “meet with them devils” because “we want what they want,” at least on the issue of integration. You have to read the account of the meeting to appreciate everything about it, but at one point the KKK asks NOI to provide information on the movements of Martin Luther King so they can kill him, assuming King is an enemy the KKI and NOI have in common. Malcolm declines but, obedient to Elijah, proposes continued future contact. After the meeting, Elijah removed Malcolm from further involvement with KKK, substituting another NOI member instructed to cultivate commercial contacts through the KKK to invest in land purchases for NOI (or Elijah). The author suggests that this sequence of events was the beginning of Malcolm’s disillusionment with NOI. The KKK had tried to lynch Malcolm’s father when he was a child. Many of those Malcolm recruited into NOI had been affected directly and indirectly by the brutality of the KKK. Malcolm’s public denunciation after the break with NOI  emphasized Elijah Muhammad’s sexual immorality, but I suspect the author’s intuition is correct.

At 612 pages, this is a long book and may have too many details and repetition for some readers, but it was worth it for me. Even if you’re not interested in Malcolm as a personality, issues raised by Black Lives Matter connect to Malcolm, which connects to lynching and the KKK during the first half of the 1900s, which connects to Reconstruction, which connects to the Civil War, which connects to slavery, a loop that keeps repeating, the same issues reincarnating again and again. Here’s what The Guardian says:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/03/the-dead-are-arising-the-life-of-malcolm-x-les-payne-tamara-review