New Books In African American Studies

Nearly 50 years after his death, Malcolm X remains a controversial figure. An 8th grade dropout (he ditched school when a white teacher told him it was unrealistic for a black kid to dream of being a lawyer), he rose to prominence as the second most influential minister in the Nation of Islam, only to dramatically break with the Nation and convert to Sunni Islam the year before he was killed. As the nickname “Detroit Red”–gained during his hustling days in Harlem–implies, Malcolm X makes for a sneaky biographical subject. In the public imagination, he’s largely defined by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley and published shortly after his death. However, as the late Columbia University scholar Manning Marable reminds us in his ground-breaking biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Penguin, 2011), The Autobiography is a text and not a history. The Autobiography itself was a reinvention. The winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History, Malcolm X is an attempt to reshape the narrative