The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne, Tamara Payne

Overview

An epic, award-winning biography of Malcolm X that draws on hundreds of hours of personal interviews and rewrites much of the known narrative.

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to create an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic, National Book Award–winning biography, which interweaves previously unknown details of Malcolm X’s life—from harrowing Depression-era vignettes to a moment-by-moment retelling of the 1965 assassination—into an extraordinary account that contextualizes Malcolm X’s life against the wider currents of American history. Bookended by essays from Tamara Payne, Payne’s daughter and primary researcher, who heroically completed the biography after her father’s death in 2018, The Dead Are Arising affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631491672
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	34,687
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Les Payne (1941–2018) was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist. He served as an editor and columnist at Newsday and was a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists.

 

Tamara Payne acted as Les Payne’s principal researcher. She lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction Tamara Payne xv

Part I 1925-1939

Chapter l Born Against the Current 3

Chapter 2 Storms of Racism 24

Chapter 3 The Anchor Is Lost 58

Chapter 4 Pulling the Family Apart 88

Part II 1939-1946

Chapter 5 East Lansing Red 113

Chapter 6 Lighting Out for His Territory 144

Chapter 7 Chased Out of Seventh Heaven 164

Chapter 8 Luck Runs Out 192

Chapter 9 Learning to Fight with Words 216

Part III 1946-1963

Chapter 10 Birth of the Nation of Islam 235

Chapter 11 Building Temples in the East 265

Chapter 12 Hartford: "The Dead There Are Rising" 284

Chapter 13 "Meet with Them Devils" 313

Chapter 14 Malcolm, the Media, and Martin Luther King 376

Part IV 1963-1965

Chapter 15 The Split 421

Chapter 16 The International Stage 436

Chapter 17 The Week Before: A Dry Run 457

Chapter 18 The Hit 468

Chapter 19 Back at the Mosque 502

Epilogue 517

Appendix: Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X): Some Questions Answered 525

Notes 539

Selected Bibliography 573

Index 583

Editorial Reviews

★ 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.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 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

Library Journal

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews