The Dead Are Arising: Malcolm X’s legacy not served well

When he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X began his journey towards a form of secular sainthood. A new book attempts to scrape away some of the mythology.

Malcolm X, left, at rally in Harlem with Louis Farrakhan, far right, in 1963.

The past half-century of African-American history has been a debate over the legacy of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Is reconciliation or conflict the best way forward? When the jury at the OJ Simpson trial – perhaps the most potent test of race relations since the civil rights era – chose to ignore the mountain of evidence and deliver a not-guilty verdict, it was choosing Malcolm over Martin.

In popular culture, too, it is Malcolm who cuts the cooler, more streetwise figure. More than 50 years after it was published, his autobiography – the story of how a petty criminal, born Malcolm Little, found religion, turned his life around and became the lost prophet of black America – still wins over new readers.

When he was assassinated in 1965, three years before King met a similar fate, he began his journey towards a form of secular sainthood.

Having risen to fame as the hyper-articulate, media-savvy spokesman of the separatist cult the Nation of Islam – otherwise known as “Black Muslims” – Malcolm eventually broke with the movement and, shortly before his death, became a Sunni Muslim.

Unlike King, however, he was not killed by a white supremacist. The men who shot him at a meeting in Harlem were working on the orders of the Nation of Islam. Such was Malcolm’s punishment for denouncing the cult’s leader, Elijah Muhammad.

It’s to the credit of Les Payne and Tamara Payne, authors of The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, that they attempt to scrape away some of the mythology.

The Dead are Rising.

Les Payne, a respected reporter who was a founder of America’s National Association of Black Journalists, began researching this book in 1990. After his death in 2018 the manuscript was completed by his lead researcher, his daughter, Tamara.

Its chief virtue is that it gives a voice to Malcolm’s brothers, Wilfred and Philbert. It has a sharp eye, too, for the social divisions in the black community, some of them based on the hierarchy of skin tone.

While he may have been an admirer of Malcolm and would read his dog-eared copy of the autobiography every five years, Payne doesn’t airbrush the facts.

In the memoirs, for instance, Malcolm describes his father, a lay preacher and follower of the “Back-to-Africa” movement of Marcus Garvey, dying at the hands of a white hate group in Michigan. Payne isn’t the first author to question that story – Bruce Perry raised serious doubts in his contentious 1991 biography – but he adds significant testimony from Wilfred.

There is also fascinating detail on the origins of the Nation of Islam. Payne describes how a gaggle of mystics concocted their own “Moorish” faiths in the inner city, patching together elements of millenarianism, biblical teachings and ill-digested chunks of eastern religion, which seemed to owe as much to Hollywood’s sense of the exotic as anything emanating from Mecca.

Payne contends that Wallace D Fard, the shadowy founder of the Nation of Islam, had no Middle Eastern roots at all and was, in fact, a white drifter, possibly from New Zealand, who had served time in San Quentin prison.

Over time the Black Muslims concocted a fantastical set of beliefs. According to them, the world’s original population had been black, but had been enslaved by a malevolent white race created some 6000 years ago by an embittered black scientist living on the Greek island of Patmos. White Americans were, literally, white devils and could expect no mercy in an apocalyptic showdown in which vengeful motherships would circle the planet.

Born in 1925, Malcolm had been converted to the faith while serving time in prison in his twenties. By the mid-1950s, he had emerged as the most fluent and charismatic of the Nation of Islam’s ministers. If the theology was off-putting to many, the Black Muslims’ emphasis on self-reliance and self-discipline – and their reputation for moral probity – earned them a growing following. It seems puzzling, all the same, that Malcolm seemed not to be bothered by the fact that authentic Muslims regarded the creed as blasphemous, at best. You get a sense of his naivety from a message sent to Elijah Muhammad in 1954:

“Many of the [Black] Muslims are asking me [for] information on Ramadan. I’m not versed enough to answer their questions. Will you help me on it? Let me know what we do during that month and also why we always have it in December, and in the East it is another month.”

Disillusionment slowly set in. Stories were circulating that Muhammad was seducing the young women among his staff. Malcolm’s faith was also tested when his leader ordered him to hold an exploratory meeting with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta in 1961.

Heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) with Malcolm X during Clay's visit to Harlem.

Since both groups opposed racial mixing, it was thought they could come to an agreement on granting black Americans a separate homeland in the south. The narrative comes close to farce here, with the white supremacists trying to tempt their potential partners with the prospect of being allowed to wear purple gowns. Apart from hostility to Jews, the two factions had little else in common.

It’s a fascinating, if strange episode. Sad to say, however, most of this 500-odd page narrative is rambling and repetitive. The authors might have been better advised to write a shorter book focusing on the family interviews. He gives us far too much on Malcolm’s criminal career and then skates through his rise and fall as a national leader. Once he began to harbour doubts about Muhammad’s character, Malcolm swiftly fell from grace.

Some of the damage was self-inflicted, however. After John F Kennedy’s assassination, he couldn’t resist gloating over “chickens coming home to roost”. A year earlier, after Los Angeles police shot dead a Nation of Islam member and wounded several others, an angry Malcolm gave a crass reaction to the news that an airliner carrying tourists from the Deep South had crashed near Paris:

“I got a wire from God today – well, somebody came and told me that he really had answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it – because Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

The JFK comments so angered Muhammad that he banned his acolyte from making public pronouncements for 90 days. By 1964 Malcolm had left the organisation to set up his own, Muslim Mosque, Inc, as well as a secular organisation, the Organisation of Afro-American Unity.

That same year he made a pilgrimage to Mecca and made the belated discovery that Muslims could be of all colours. On that same trip he bumped into his erstwhile acolyte, the young Muhammad Ali, who pointedly shunned him. (Payne passes over the episode very quickly. It’s the subject of Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith’s compelling 2016 double portrait, Blood Brothers.)

Yet even if he had made a fresh start, Malcolm seemed to sense his time was running out. The Black Muslims wanted him dead, and finally succeeded in February 1965. The authors try to crank up the tension in the final pages, but the prose is so wooden that the final scene of mayhem seems almost an anticlimax.

You end this book admiring Malcolm’s courage and sense of destiny, but concluding that Martin Luther King will win the argument in the end.

Clive Davis is a critic at The Times.

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

By Les Payne and Tamara Payne

Viking, 640pp, $59.99 (HB)