Read Malcolm X Online

Authors: Manning Marable

Malcolm X

BOOK: Malcolm X
12.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Table of Contents
 
 
ALSO BY MANNING MARABLE
Barack Obama and African-American Empowerment
(edited with Kristen Clarke)
 
Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African-American Anthology
(edited with Leith Mullings)
 
Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line
(edited with Vanessa Agard-Jones)
 
Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future
 
Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006
 
W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat
 
Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis
(edited with Kristen Clarke)
 
The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life
 
Freedom: A Photographic History of the African-American Freedom Struggle
(coauthored with Leith Mullings)
 
Black Leadership
 
Black Liberation in Conservative America
 
Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Radicalism, and Resistance
 
Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives
(edited with Keesha Middlemass and Ian Steinberg)
 
Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy
(edited with Eric Foner)
 
The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology
(editor)
 
Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics
 
The Crisis of Color and Democracy
 
African and Caribbean Politics
 
Black American Politics
 
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society
 
The Autobiography of Medgar Evers
(edited with Myrlie Evers-Williams)
 
Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary Experience of the African-American Experience
(editor)
 
Dispatches From the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African-American Experience
(editor)
 
Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race,
Class Consciousness, and Revolution
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi- 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
 
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England
 
First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
 
 
Copyright © Manning Marable, 2011 All rights reserved
 
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Copyright © 1964 by Alex Haley and Malcolm X. Copyright © 1965 by Alex Haley and Betty Shabazz. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
 
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
Insert p. 2 (top): Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos • p. 2 (bottom): Frank Scherschel / Getty Images • pp. 5 (bottom), 15: © Bob Adelman / Corbis • p. 6: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis • p. 8: Keystone / Getty Images • p. 10: Orlando Fernandez, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress • p. 12: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress • All other photographs: © Bettman / Corbis
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Marable, Manning, 1950–
Malcolm X : a life of reinvention / Manning Marable. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44527-3
1. X, Malcolm, 1925–1965. 2. Black Muslims—Biography. 3. African Americans—Biography. I. Title.
BP223.Z8L57636 2011
297.8’7092—dc22 2010025768
[B]
 
 
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
 
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

http://us.penguingroup.com

No one has made more sacrifices to realize the completion of this
work than Leith Mullings. For more than a decade, she has been
my constant companion and intellectual compass as I have
attempted to reconstruct the past.
This work is hers.
PROLOGUE
Life Beyond the Legend
I
n the early years of the last century, the neighborhood just north of Harlem, later to be named Washington Heights, was a sparsely settled suburb. Only the vision of a businessman, William Fox, led to the construction of an opulent entertainment center on Broadway between West 165th and 166th streets. Fox’s instruction to the architect, Thomas W. Lamb, was to design a building more splendid than any theater on Broadway. By the time all was finished, in 1912, an expensive terra-cotta facade adorned the front walls, marble columns stood guard at the entrance, while carvings of exotic birds graced the foyer: it was these colorful motifs, inspired by the great nineteenth-century artist John James Audubon, that prompted Fox to name his pleasure palace the Audubon. On the building’s first floor, Lamb designed a massive cinema, large enough to seat twenty-three hundred people. In subsequent years, the second floor was reserved for two spacious ballrooms: the Rose Ballroom, which could accommodate eight hundred patrons, and the larger Grand Ballroom, holding up to fifteen hundred.
Within a few decades, the neighborhood around the Audubon began to change, becoming increasingly black and working class. The Audubon's management catered to this new clientele by booking the most celebrated swing bands of the era, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Chick Webb. The Audubon also became the home for many of the city’s militant trade unionists, and from 1934 to 1937 the newly formed Transport Workers Union held its meetings there—accompanied by the occasional violent confrontation. One night in September 1929, for example, a four-hundredstrong party sponsored by the Lantern Athletic Club was disrupted by four gunshots. Two people were badly wounded.
During World War II, the Audubon was rented out for weddings, bar mitzvahs, political meetings, and graduation parties. After 1945, however, the neighborhood changed yet again, as many white middle-class residents sold their properties and fled to the suburbs. Columbia University’s decision to expand its hospital at West 168th Street and Broadway into a major health sciences campus generated hundreds of new jobs for the black influx, while the Audubon adapted to economic realities by shutting down its cinema and subdividing the space it had occupied into rentals. However, both the Rose and Grand ballrooms remained.
By the mid-1960s, the building had surrendered most of its original grandeur. The main entrance for the ballrooms was small and drab. Customers had to climb a steep flight of stairs to the second-floor foyer, then maneuver past the manager’s office and on into either the Rose, at the building’s left (east) side, or the Grand, which faced Broadway. The larger room was about 180 feet by 60 feet, its north, east, and west walls housing about sixty-five separate booths, each of which could hold up to twelve people. Farthest from the building’s main entrance, along the south wall, was a modest wooden stage, behind which was a cramped, poorly lit antechamber where musicians and speakers would muster before walking out to perform.
On the winter afternoon of Sunday, February 21, 1965, the Grand Ballroom had been reserved by the controversial Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a Harlem-based political group. For nearly a year, the Audubon's management had been renting the ballroom to the group, but it remained concerned about its leader, Malcolm X. About ten years before, he had arrived as the minister of Temple No. 7, the local headquarters for a militant Islamic sect, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam (NOI). Later commonly described in the press as Black Muslims, its members preached that whites were devils and that black Americans were the lost Asiatic tribe of Shabazz, forced into slavery in America’s racial wilderness. The road to salvation required converts to reject their slave surnames, replacing them with the letter
X
, the symbol that represented the unknown. Members were told that, after years of personal dedication and spiritual growth, they would be given “original” surnames, in harmony with their true Asiatic identities. As the Nation’s most public spokesman, Malcolm X gained notoriety for his provocative criticisms of both civil rights leaders and white politicians.
The previous March, Malcolm X had announced his independence from the Nation of Islam. He quickly established his own spiritual group, Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI), largely for those NOI members who had left the Nation in sympathy with him. Despite his break, he continued to make highly controversial statements. “There will be more violence than ever this year,” he predicted to a
New York Times
reporter in March 1964, for instance. “The whites had better understand this while there is still time. The Negroes at the mass level are ready to act.” The New York City police commissioner responded to this prediction by labeling Malcolm “another self-proclaimed ‘leader’ [who] openly advocates bloodshed and armed revolt and sneers at the sincere efforts of reasonable men to resolve the problem of equal rights by proper, peaceful and legitimate means.” Malcolm was not intimidated by the attack. “The greatest compliment anyone can pay me,” he responded, “is to say I’m irresponsible, because by responsible they mean Negroes who are responsible to white authorities—Negro Uncle Toms.”
BOOK: Malcolm X
12.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Plague by Victor Methos
Poison by Molly Cochran
My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
Cast a Pale Shadow by Scott, Barbara
The Memory of Lemon by Judith Fertig
Impossibly Love by Shane Morgan