Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography Controversy:
A Response
by Bill Fletcher, Jr. | The Black Commentator
"In order to understand what is going on, one must identify multiple sources, much of which has almost nothing to do with the book itself. These include: the creation of Malcolm-as-icon; homophobia; personal jealousy targeted at Marable; New York chauvinism targeted at Marable; and on-going differences regarding strategy within the Black Freedom Movement."
On the day of Manning Marable’s death, April 1, 2011, I received an additional piece of disturbing information. A friend of mine informed me of a discussion he had just had with a Black activist-writer who, in hearing about Marable’s passing, went into what could only be described as a rant against Marable. Marable’s body was hardly cold, and this individual, who knew Marable, was castigating him to my friend, claiming that Marable was everything but a child of God. It was at that moment that I knew that Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (hereafter referred to as MX) would ignite a firestorm in some quarters of the Black Freedom Movement. Within days, despite the overwhelmingly positive response to the book, this firestorm emerged.
In approaching the controversies that surround MX it is important to ask two questions prior to responding directly to critics: (1)what did Manning set out to do? (2)did he succeed? We will take these one at a time before commenting on some of the issues raised by various critics and what lies beneath them.
What did Manning set out to do?
MX is a blockbuster of enormous proportions. The mere act of writing a 500+ page biography is a significant achievement on any scale. Yet Marable was not attempting to write the definitive biography when he first started out on this journey. As he himself noted, his first objective was to write what he called a “political biography” of Malcolm X. Over time the objectives shifted somewhat and became a bit more complex.
Much has been made of the biography “humanizing” Malcolm, a term which I have myself used. Yet that is not the starting point for understanding the objectives. A better starting point is perhaps derived from Marable’s own statements on the matter, the gist of which begins with the fact that Malcolm X had been—and remained—a hero for Marable, who, in his opinion, had been the most significant Black activist figure of the mid-to-late 20th century. It was Marable’s committed belief in Malcolm X’s significance that moved him to dedicate the last decade of his life to chronicling Malcolm’s life and legacy through the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University. And it is this same commitment to Malcolm X’s and his family’s legacy that caused Marable to utilize his institutional influence and resources to push Columbia University to make good on its promise to open the site of the former Audubon Ballroom as the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial Center. MX is the product of a historian who cared deeply for his subject, who felt that his subject was deserving of a comprehensive examination of his life. Marable took this task seriously, grappling with aspects of Malcolm’s life that he knew would challenge our iconic view of Malcolm but also do it in a way that would deepen our appreciation of his heroicism as human being to other human beings. Yet in trying to understand Malcolm’s trajectory, not just when he left the Nation of Islam, but much earlier, there were curious features in the Autobiography of Malcolm X that were difficult to either understand or explain.
Read the Full Essay @ The Black Commentator
