THE DEAD ARE ARISING
THE LIFE OF MALCOLM X
LES PAYNE AND TAMARA PAYNE
Viking, 640pp, £30
Malcolm X ‘was jailed for burglary at the age of 20’, explained Daniel Bates in the Daily Mail. ‘But life inside changed him... [he] found Islam, re-educated himself... He was introduced to the Nation of Islam through his brothers who knew its leader Elijah Muhammad. The black nationalist group believed white people are the “devil” and black people are inherently superior.’
Colin Grant of the Observer explained, ‘The Paynes have assiduously sought primary sources. Drawing on thousands of hours of first-hand interviews, eye-witness accounts and personal documents, they assemble a picture of Malcolm X’s evolution “from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary” who, through his words, terrified not just white America but, eventually, the Black Muslim leadership.
‘Unprecedented testimonies show how, in publicly denouncing [Elijah] Muhammad, Malcolm incensed former allies who plotted his murder with the “advance knowledge” of the FBI.’
Malcolm X ‘never dropped his opposition to mixed marriages’
Trevor Phillips in the Sunday
Times wrote: ‘The centrepiece of the book is a tension-filled account of the 1961 meeting between Malcolm and the Ku Klux Klan, who had correctly surmised that Elijah Muhammad saw Martin Luther King’s integrationism as a greater threat to Black Muslims than white nationalism. Malcolm agreed to the encounter on the leader’s orders.’ Malcolm X ‘never dropped his opposition to mixed marriages. His difference with the KKK was one of degree; neither believed whites and blacks could truly coexist.’
Phillips asked, ‘What would Malcolm X have made of Black Lives Matter?’ Although the book shows how he latterly tempered his animosity towards whites, Phillips thought he ‘would have kept his
distance, put off by the movement’s lack of discipline, and sceptical about its multiracial character’.