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Books by & About Malcolm X
Malcolm X:
The Man and His Times /
Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X
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Martin and Malcolm and America
Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the
Caribbean
The Black Muslims in America
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X /
Malcolm X Speaks /
By Any Means Necessary
February 1965: The Final Speeches /
For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X
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The Death and Life of
Malcolm X
By Peter Goldman
To
Take One's X
A Review by Randall H. Evans
When I was 18 or 19 years
old, Malcolm X came to speak at Wayne State University in
Detroit. He spoke so harshly about middle-class blacks that I
was depressed for three years.
The memory of Malcolm’s
rapier sharp tongue and his incisive social analysis came
flooding back when I read Peter Goldman’s
The Death and
Life of Malcolm X. In contrast to Malcolm’s autobiography,
which deals mostly with the early and middle years, Goldman’s
book focuses on those last years and on Malcolm’s death in
February 1965 on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
Goldman moves from
Malcolm’s birth in Omaha, through his early years in Lansing,
Michigan (the family was burned out, as Malcolm reports, “by
the good Christians”), to his reformation in prison. From
“selling reefers, running number slips and bootleg whiskey,
steering johns to brothels, sticking up stores and discovering,
the pleasant sense of power a gun gave him,” he moved to a
discovery of the authority of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and
the sacraments of black Islam. In prison he also “began to
realize the meaning and power of words.”
Malcolm bought in heavily
to the Muslim line (his was a classic conversion): “To take
one’s ‘X’ is to take on a certain mystery, a certain
possibility of power in the eyes of one’s peers and one’s
enemies. . . . The ‘X,’ said Malcolm, announced what you had
been and what you had become: ‘Ex-smoker, Ex-drinker,
Ex-Christian, Ex-slave'.” The Muslims served him well for a
dozen years; then he grew restless with their non-political
stance toward the world and disturbed by the Muslim leaders’
taste for creature comforts.
Setting out on his own,
Malcolm founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and—on his return
from Mecca—The Organization of Afro-American Unity. Both
floundered as Malcolm oscillated, between opposite sides of the
Atlantic, between the religious and the secular, between being a
gadfly always on the outside of decisions and wanting to be
“one of the bots” with Martin King, Whitney Young, and Roy
Wilkins. His death ended the oscillation. Detective story buffs
will appreciate the 100 pages of detail about his murder, the
trial, and the aftermath.
Two points of a critical
nature: Goldman dwells more on facts than on interpretation and
meaning. In setting forth a detailed account of Malcolm’s
death and life he fails to deal adequately with the significance
of those details for a cancerous America. And Goldman’s
assertion that Malcolm was a prophet does not speak to my
concern. The author tries, for example, to find meaning in the
differences between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
But the differences fade as
Goldman explains that King’s politics depended on
“pageantry,” which is bad, while Malcolm dealt in
“symbolic action,” which is good – hence we shouldn’t
ask about the success or failure of Malcolm’s organizations;
that is apparently beside the point. Second, any inquiry is
obviously limited by the range of questions asked. I can’t
help regretting, however, that Malcolm’s death and life
don’t get tied into the larger question of the meaning of
black religiosity for a sterile and burned-over American
culture.
Source: The
Christian Century (March 28, 1973) -- (Harper & Row,
1973)
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1963_Debate Malcolm X_With_James_Baldwin.mp3 /
James Baldwin on Malcolm X (1 of 3)
Leon
Thomas—Malcolm's Gone
James Baldwin on Malcolm X (2 of 3) /
James Baldwin on Malcolm X (3 of 3)
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Malcolm X
artifacts unearthed—Police docs and more found among
belongs of 'Shorty' Jarvis—1 February
2012—Documents outlining the crime that landed
Malcolm X in prison in the 1940s are among some
1,000 recently unearthed items purchased jointly by
the civil rights leader's foundation and an
independent collector of African-American artifacts.
The documents and other artifacts belonged to late
musician Malcolm "Shorty" Jarvis, who served in
prison with Malcolm X and was one of his closest
friends. Jarvis' 1976 pardon paper also is part of
the collection, which was recently discovered by
accident. The items had been in a Connecticut
storage unit that had gone into default, and were
initially auctioned off to a buyer who had no idea
what he was bidding on. The Omaha, Nebraska-based
Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, which oversees the
Malcolm X Center located at his birthplace, will
house and display the just-arrived archives. It
split the cost with Black History 101 Mobile Museum,
based in Detroit—the birthplace of the Nation of
Islam.—Mobile Museum founder and curator Khalid
el-Hakim declined to identify the original buyer or
the price the two organizations paid for the trove.
Still, even after splitting the cost, he said it's
the largest acquisition to date for his mobile
museum, which includes Jim Crow-era artifacts, a Ku
Klux Klan hood and signed documents by Malcolm X and
Rosa Parks. . . . The collection also reveals an
enduring connection between the two Malcolms after
their incarceration, Malcolm X's conversion to Islam
and his rise to prominence. There's a 72-page
scrapbook of Malcolm X's life that was maintained by
Jarvis until after his friend's 1965 assassination.
One of the civil rights era's most controversial and
compelling figures, Malcolm X rose to fame as the
chief spokesman of the Nation of Islam, a movement
started in Detroit more than 80 years ago. He
proclaimed the black Muslim organization's message
at the time: racial separatism as a road to
self-actualization and urged blacks to claim civil
rights "by any means necessary" and referred to
whites as "devils."—TheGrio
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies. As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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