Manning Marable’s New Biography Investigates Conflicted Reality of the Civil Rights Leader

from Democracy Now

“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”:
Manning Marable’s New Biography Investigates Conflicted Reality of the Civil Rights Leader

Two decades in the making, Manning Marable’s nearly 600-page biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, is described as a reevaluation of Malcolm X’s life, providing new insights into the circumstances of his assassination, as well as raising questions about Malcolm X’s autobiography. Manning passed away on Friday, just days before his life’s work was published. To discuss his legacy, we’re joined by Michael Eric Dyson, sociology professor at Georgetown University and author of Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X, and also by Bill Fletcher, Jr., a friend of Marable and a longtime labor and racial justice activist. “There were three different sources that had an interest in Malcolm’s death, and that’s where [the book] becomes very, very important,” Fletcher says. “It was the police and the FBI, it was the Nation of Islam, but there were also people in his own organization who resented the trajectory that he was moving. And so, there was this confluence of forces that led to a situation where he was permitted to be killed. And I think that when people read this, it’s going to be an incredible eye opener.”