The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne, Tamara Payne Narrated by Dion Graham

Overview

An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author's interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative.

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly 30-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X—all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become more than a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction.

The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting Malcolm's life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of the 20th century's most politically relevant figures from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.

In tracing Malcolm X's life from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem assassination in 1965, Payne provides searing vignettes culled from Malcolm's Depression-era youth, describing the influence of his Garveyite parents: his father, Earl, a circuit-riding preacher who was run over by a street car in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, and his mother, Louise, who continued to instill Black pride in her children after Earl's death. Filling each chapter with resonant drama, Payne follows Malcolm's exploits as a petty criminal in Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts penitentiary.

With a biographer's unwavering determination, Payne corrects the historical record and delivers extraordinary revelations - from the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder Fard Muhammad, who preceded Elijah Muhammad; to a hair-rising scene, conveyed in cinematic detail, of Malcolm and Minister Jeremiah X Shabazz's 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK; to a minute-by-minute account of Malcolm X's murder at the Audubon Ballroom.

Introduced by Payne's daughter and primary researcher, Tamara Payne, who, following her father's death, heroically completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/27/2020

Pulitzer winner Payne (1941–2018) spent nearly 30 years researching and writing this monumental biography of human rights activist Malcolm X. Completed by his daughter and researcher, Payne’s richly detailed account is based on hundreds of interviews with Malcolm X’s family members, childhood friends, cellmates, allies, and enemies, and meticulously tracks his journey from Omaha, Neb., where he was born Malcolm Little in 1925, through his teenage pot dealing in East Lansing, Mich., and street criminal days in Boston and Harlem, to his emergence as the Nation of Islam’s “most gifted and successful proselytizer and demander of justice,” and his assassination in 1965. Along the way, Payne folds in incisive portraits of such major figures as Marcus Garvey, whose teachings on racial uplift Malcolm X’s parents followed; Moorish Science Temple leader Noble Drew Ali, whose follower, Fard Muhammad, founded the Nation of Islam; and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Payne also documents the radio dramas and jazz music Malcolm X listened to, reveals how a clandestine meeting with the Georgia Ku Klux Klan in 1961 contributed to his break from the Nation of Islam, and interviews two men wrongly imprisoned for his murder. The result is an extraordinary and essential portrait of the man behind the icon. Agent: Faith Childs. (Sept.)

Library Journal

★ 08/01/2020

This book is a monument to investigative reporting and to daughter Tamara's devotion to her Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist father (1941–2018). Les Payne (The Life and Death of the SLA) dedicated 28 years to examining the life and death of Malcolm X (1925–65), including how he became who he was as a public and private person, and how he died as a victim of a murderous conspiracy. With meticulous day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute detail, Payne retraced the steps of the seventh son of Marcus Garvey adherent and itinerant preacher Earl Little, from childhood pranks to the petty hustle of drugs and street crimes who became a Black folk hero as a born-again revolutionary moralist insistent on unflinching self-respect. Gathering information from exhaustive interviews with family, friends, acquaintances, allies, and foes, and with archival research and revelations from the FBI, NYPD, and other public agencies, Payne corrects and fills gaps in Malcolm X's 1964 autobiography with Alex Haley. VERDICT This gripping read delivers penetrating explanations and fresh insights into previously unexamined dimensions of Malcolm X and his becoming and being El-hajj Malik El Shabazz within the context of Black life. Highest recommendation.—Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2020-06-16
Comprehensive, timely life of the renowned activist and his circuitous rise to prominence.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Payne died in 2018, leaving it to his daughter, Tamara, to complete this book, on which he had been at work for 30 years. The catalyst was an introduction through a school friend to one of Malcolm X’s brothers, who told him stories of young Malcolm Little (1925-1965) in childhood. Malcolm had grown up bookish and popular, even among the white children with whom he went to school in Michigan, but he also acted out during adolescence, a trajectory that ended behind bars. (The detectives who arrested him, appreciating the fact that, as one said, “He wasn’t fresh at all,” gave him a couple of packs of cigarettes.) While incarcerated, Malcolm experienced the intellectual reawakening that put him on the path to becoming a political activist and Muslim. Payne delivers considerable news not just in recounting unknown episodes of Malcolm’s early years, but also in reconstructing events during his time as a devotee of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, in whom he believed “as deeply as his parents back in Michigan had believed in Jesus of Nazareth.” One instance was a meeting with the Ku Klux Klan that Malcolm brokered, finding a sole bit of common ground in the fact that both groups abhorred the notion of mixed-race marriages. Indeed, as Payne writes, for a long time, Malcolm was a committed advocate of black separatism. It was only while on a hajj to Mecca, where he saw blond-haired, blue-eyed Muslims as devoted as he was, that he abandoned his former teachings and broke with the Nation. Payne’s accounts of the consequences of that rupture and Malcolm’s assassination at the hands of a “goon squad” with ties to the FBI and CIA are eye-opening, and they add a new dimension to our understanding of Malcolm X’s last years.

A superb biography and an essential addition to the library of African American political engagement.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178749593
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,112,642

Videos