[This award-winning biography mines some hitherto untapped
sources, including extensive interviews with members of Malcolm Xs
immediate family, to present the fullest picture yet of the famed
Black Liberation Movement leader.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE DEAD ARE ARISING—THE LIFE OF MALCOLM X  
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Herb Boyd
December 17, 2020
The Amsterdam News
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_ This award-winning biography mines some hitherto untapped sources,
including extensive interviews with members of Malcolm X's immediate
family, to present the fullest picture yet of the famed Black
Liberation Movement leader. _

,

 

The Dead Are Arising
The Life of Malcolm X
Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Liveright
ISBN: 978-1-63149-166-5

It was pure serendipity.

Each spring at City College of New York for 15 years, I have taught a
course on the life and legacy of Malcolm X. As part of introducing the
great leader to my students, I mix the course with invited guests,
classroom lectures and audiovisual presentations. At least half of the
time I take them on tours of Sugar Hill in Harlem and they can see
where Malcolm lived, worked, hustled, was eulogized, and accumulated
his iconic leadership. On one Saturday we met at the Tsion Café, a
place where Malcolm once worked with Redd Foxx, in fact they were two
reds—one from Detroit and the other from Chicago.

The class was just getting underway when I spotted Les Payne trekking
up St. Nicholas on one of his leisurely walks around the community. I
informed him of the class and asked if he could come and share a few
minutes with my students about his research on Malcolm X. For more
than a quarter century we had discussed Malcolm, most publicly as
panelists on Gil Noble’s “Like It Is” on ABC-TV on Sunday
afternoons. Without missing a beat he said he would gladly do it and
hurried off to his home up the street to fetch a chapter of his book
to share with us.

Since we were at the place once called Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, I
asked Les, if possible, to share with us his chapter where Foxx is
discussed. He returned promptly and unfolded the pages and read in
that soft baritone that I had heard so many times seated near him in
the studio. The students were mesmerized and hit him with a deluge of
questions after he finished. This was my introduction to the book that
would become “The Dead Are Arising” and eventually be the
recipient of the National Book Award in 2020 in the nonfiction
category.

In our many discussions about Malcolm and the project I had some clue
of his approach and was informed that it would be like no other
biography or commentary on Malcolm’s life. He only hinted at the
direction he was going to take, what angle he would devise in
examining a man he deeply admired, and one in which had not been
trammeled to oblivion. Knowing his journalistic acumen, I had a
feeling it would consist mainly of his own interviews and research,
demurring the works of others, particularly the more recent,
controversial ones.

On several occasions while waiting in the Green Room at the television
station, he would divulge bits and pieces as he exchanged memories
with Noble, me and Milton Allimadi, the other panelist. These were
opportunities to have him regale us on what it took to earn him a
Pulitzer Prize, and his role in the founding of the National
Association of Black Journalists. I believe he used his influence to
get me inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame. That subject
was broached to some extent over drinks at the NABJ annual convention
in New Orleans that he attended in 2017 with his son Jamal. Once more
we shared our Alabama roots—he was born in Tuscaloosa and I was born
in Birmingham. Our conversation was repeatedly interrupted by
dignitaries seeking a word or two with him. But the several Green Room
chats with its relative privacy were the most rewarding, and even then
it was nothing more than tantalizing teases, fresh perspectives he
promised on Malcolm, especially his early years, his family life and
his assassination, subjects that he felt had been given short shrift.
One of the last times we had to chat was during a casual walk down St.
Nicholas, and the banter then was on the Obama legacy, and few were
informed as he was on the nation’s political machinations,
particularly the Trump regime. I asked him how the book was
progressing and he said he was just about there, and putting some
finishing touches on it.

Those finishing touches and much of the earlier process is a
magnificent achievement. When I heard the news that he had joined the
ancestors on March 19, 2018, I was stunned and suddenly, like Manning
Marable and Malcolm himself, he would not be around to deal with the
celebration nor to respond to those who might question his
conclusions. His daughter, Tamara, who worked with him all along on
the project, summed it all up when she said her father not being able
to experience the exultation was “bittersweet.”

Tamara was more than qualified to place the last period in the book.
As she notes in the book’s introduction among her many tasks were to
track down informants, and later transcribe the interviews for her
father’s use. “Meeting Malcolm’s associates and family members
over the years and watching Les Payne’s investigative techniques at
work have been a unique reward of a lifetime for me,” she wrote.
“My many discussions with him about how this work was taking shape
proved to be invaluable in the finishing of the manuscript. As the
co-pilot and co-navigator, I could confidently and successfully
complete this part of the journey.”

Fortunately, most of the 600-page “journey” was complete, and only
needed Tamara and other editors to ready it for production. This was a
prodigious undertaking and Les went about it dutifully, painstakingly
rounding up the coterie of folks—none more indispensable as
Malcolm’s brothers, Wilfred and Philbert—whose recollections are
vividly recounted from chapter to chapter. Wilfred, Malcolm’s eldest
brother, shared family information with Les—an eight hour long
interview—that is at the crux of the book’s early chapters, much
of it heretofore never revealed. Readers are given day-to-day details
of Malcolm’s family, its lineage, the spirited interaction between
the siblings, their father’s death, and the later initialization of
the mother that ruptured them forever.

Les is almost surgical in this retelling and in his chapter “The
Anchor is Lost,” he offers a grim summary of the terror and
tribulation the family endured. “Down through the ensuring
generations, the Little family would appear to be haunted by the
specter of death and disaster: home fires, prison, manslaughter, and
arson, combined with race terror, feuding, mental breakdowns, even
murder,” he recounted. “It was as if some curse of Shakespearean
proportion had befallen this American family of pioneers out on the
Great Plains—and most especially young Malcolm and his offspring
down through the decades.”

From Omaha, where Malcolm was born May 19, 1925, to Milwaukee and to
several locations in Michigan, Les charts the movement of the Little
family, and his research not only complements Malcolm’s
autobiography but expands and corrects episodes, with a deeper dive
into the social and political landscape that stifled the Littles and
other Black Americans struggling against racism, bigotry and
discrimination. In doing this, there are extensive riffs and sometimes
Les devotes far too much time to a particular tangent, so much so that
Malcolm’s narrative is subsumed. An example of this occurs in his
summary on the history of the Ku Klux Klan, which while rewarding goes
on much too long, and even then without noting the actual
circumstances that led the unmentioned Nathan Bedford Forest to
founding it. An additional quibble—and that essentially is what they
are—occurs in his discussion of the early years of the Nation of
Islam in Detroit. Les cites John Muhammad, Elijah’s brother, but the
pivotal person in the creation of the group was John’s wife
Burnsteen Sharrieff Muhammed, who still awaits a full exposition of
her crucial secretarial and organizational skills. There are a few
other errors of fact that will surely be corrected in the paperback
version, but they are minor compared to the major sweeping, almost
epic majesty that Les accomplishes.

Les devotes quite a bit of space to Hartford, Connecticut that
includes his own coming of age there and the establishment of the NOI
mosque in the city. This is one of the longest and most insightful
interviews that contextualizes Malcolm’s genius, Les’ vision, and
the recall of a mosque member. At this moment the hallmark of Les’
process, literary style and historical perspective is fully displayed.
It is here, too, that the book’s title is graphically explained. The
chapter on Hartford closes with Malcolm’s letter to Elijah in 1956,
proudly proclaiming “The East Coast has many rough spots (due to the
newness of the Muslims). But overall the dead there are rising.”

Along with an epilogue, the book has a folios of photos, a full
account of Malcolm’s assassination and a few revelations, as well as
an appendix with Malcolm’s responses to a questionnaire supplied by
the Islamic Centre of Geneva, Switzerland.

Some dyed-in-the-wool Malcolmites are sure to wish he had done more on
the last year of his life, in which his political maturation was
reaching a pinnacle, and perhaps more on some of the latest
developments and debates surrounding Malcolm’s short but eventful
life, including the CIA’s involvement. But those concerns would
entail another volume, and that, lamentably, cannot be done by Les. He
has made his monumental contribution to Malcolm’s canon and as he
often joked with me, what more can they expect “from two Black boys
from Alabama.”

_Herb Boyd is a journalist, educator, author, and activist. His
articles appear regularly in the _New York Amsterdam News_. He teaches
black studies at the City College of New York and the College of New
Rochelle_

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