The Malcolm X you don't know: Manning Marable's new book is stirring up old controversies

The Malcolm X you don't know: Manning Marable's new book is stirring up old controversies
The New York Daily News ^ | Monday, April 18th 2011 | Stanley Crouch

Posted on Monday, April 18, 2011 4:48:20 PM by presidio9
Ronald Reagan and the so-called Reagan Revolution have come under the critical hammer of scholars for some time now. But the black nationalist Malcolm X - now called a civil rights leader, though he never was one - is finally beginning to achieve such position under the scholarly microscope. The reason that this is only happening nearly 50 years after his assassination is simple: Those bullying and ruthlessly maudlin ideologues who for so long preferred posturing to thought began to die off and the people victimized by them and other kinds of hustlers for decades are now beginning to grow up - and speak up.

Any high-quality work that comes out of the world of ethnic studies, or is focused on ethnic concerns, is more often than not a condemnation of the entire field. The problem is not the interest itself, but the tendency to tilt more toward indoctrination than education, self-pitying myth rather than the facts and nuances of human life, which are never as simple as a placard. Whatever criticisms one might have of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, he has done serious battle over the years with the mumbo jumbo of "Afrocentrism," a hustler's lure if there ever was one.
In terms of serious work that makes a contribution to our understanding of important people and events, few have produced scholarship on the level of David Levering Lewis ("W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race" and "W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century"), Annette Gordon-Reed ("The Hemingses of Monticello") and Isabel Wilkerson ("The Warmth of Other Suns"). The first two deservedly won Pulitzer Prizes for their historical work while the third received the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Now, those interested in learning a substantial amount about the complexity of the world in which the vastly overrated Malcolm X actually lived may find much of interest in the final work of Manning Marable, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention." Marable died on April 1, just days before the explosive book's publication.
However much he is sympathetic to his subject, Marable accomplishes the difficult task of showing the bad boy of the civil rights era as an actual human being, quite ambitious but much smaller than the misleading myth he was made into after his death. Each page almost secretes the formidable research into hard facts. Marable lets the chips fall where they may because he is interested in the humanity of Malcolm X, as all true scholars should be. This will not be liked by those who prefer myth to truth, but that is nothing new.

Marable reveals the layers of great sadness, desperation, frustration and self-importance underneath all of the masks that Malcolm X fashioned for himself. He remained a maskmaker from his days as a hustler to the moment at which he was shot to death at the Audubon Ballroom, in New York on Feb. 21, 1965. Marable found out plenty about how such an audacious murder was brought off. And yes, he names names.

There is strong proof that the white people Malcolm X claimed would never protect black people from violence simply decided to step back and let the members of the racist cult with which he had fallen out do what they wanted. From that moment on, myth, not actual history, has dominated discussion of this complex man. Thanks to Marable, that may now be largely at an end.