Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction.
Review
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve finished this book, but I wanted to come back and give it a proper review.
I read this shortly after finishing King: A Life, which was one of the most illuminating biographies I’ve read in a while. It gave me a better understanding of Martin Luther King Jr.’s motivations, philosophy and goals of his work in the Civil Rights Movement. With that in mind, I was interested in learning more about how Malcolm viewed that same tumultuous time period.
I selected this biography because the marketing copy and reviews lauded it as one of the most comprehensive biographies of Malcolm X ever written. It’s won a Pulitzer Prize AND a National Book Award!
Well, I guess we’re just giving Pulitzers out to anyone, because this book was a MESS.
How do you reduce Malcolm X to a background character in the story of his own life? How do skim over important milestones in the man’s life such as his birth, his marriage and his eventual disillusionment with the Nation of Islam but spend an entire chapter on a random Klansman’s favorite hat? HOW???
This book feels like a collection of historical facts and anecdotes tangentially related to Malcolm X. I listened to this via audiobook, which was approximately 12 hours long. Malcolm X isn’t even born until hour 2. What did I spend the first two hours learning about? His parents (which … that’s fair), race relations in America, Marcus Garvey, Garvey’s organizations, Garvey’s legal troubles and Garvey’s weird feud with W.E.B. DuBois. This book is as much Garvey’s biography as it is Malcolm’s.
The tangents don’t stop there. The book slogs through in-depth histories of the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple that preceded it, biographies of both organization’s founders and a discussion of new religious movements in the U.S. as a whole. Later, the author meanders on about the FBI, Dr. King, J. Edger Hoover (the fucking Thanos of the Civil Rights Movement, apparently), the inner politics of the Klan and the legal troubles of Malcolm X’s previous accomplices and/or girlfriends.
It also goes out of its way to point out discrepancies in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The one valuable correction it provided was that Malcolm X’s father was most likely killed in a streetcar accident and was not murdered as his autobiography states. Considering Malcolm was a toddler when his father died, it’s easy to see why he believed otherwise. Most of the other corrections are simply the fault of human memory/perception or contemporary misinformation.
The book never delves into when or where Malcolm met Betty Shabazz, what they thought of each other or why they decided to get married. His daughters aren’t named until the end of the biography when the author describes how he was murdered in front of them. We don’t know what he was like as a father or a husband. We get shallow mentions of his reflections of the Civil Rights Movement and his opposition to nonviolence. His major speeches and interviews are skimmed over, unless the author wants to point out some incorrect point of fact. His eventual break with the Nation of Islam is described by others who observed it, but we never get to hear from Malcolm about the situation. We barely get an understanding of what drew him to Elijah Muhammad in the first place.
(As an aside, of course, the book shares Elijah Muhammad’s full life story starting with his childhood in Georgia. This makes Betty’s absence even more glaring. Considering how much work she and their daughters put in to continue Malcolm’s legacy, it feels disrespectful.)
This book reads like the author had a word count to hit. Every random tidbit of information he dug up was included. I learned very little about Malcolm X as a person from this book, which is the worst thing you could say about a biography. Skip this one.