Malcolm X was a master of reinvention, a country bumpkin who became a zoot-suited entertainer who became a petty criminal who became a self-taught intellectual who became a white-hating black nationalist who became a follower of orthodox Islam who became an international figure championing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people.”

In his revealing and prodigiously researched new biography,
“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” Manning Marable - a professor at Columbia University in New York who worked on the book for more than a decade and died on April 1, on the eve of its publication - chronicles these many incarnations of his subject.

Mr. Marable suggests that Malcolm exaggerated his criminal youth in his famous “Autobiography” to create “an allegory documenting the destructive consequences of racism ,” and to underscore the transformative power of the Nation of Islam .

As Mr. Marable sees it, the “Autobiography,” which was written with Alex Haley (later of “Roots” fame), was in some respects “more Haley’s than its author’s,” a work in “the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography” rather than “a manifesto for black insurrection.”

Mr. Marable provides a compelling account of Malcolm X’s split with the Nation of Islam and how personal tensions between him and the Nation leader Elijah Muhammad escalated after Muhammad impregnated a woman who had had a longtime romantic relationship with Malcolm X.

Along the way Mr. Marable lays out a picture of Nation members’ determination to do away with the charismatic Malcolm X, who had formed a new group . When surveillance records become fully available, Mr. Marable asserts, “it would not be entirely surprising if an F.B.I. transcript surfaced documenting a telephone call from Elijah Muhammad to a subordinate, authorizing Malcolm’s murder,” but he does not come up with proof on that count .

It is Mr. Marable’s contention that the man who actually fired “the kill shot, the blow that executed Malcolm X” went free, only to serve prison time later for other crimes. He says this man is one Willie Bradley, who was later inducted into the Newark Athletic Hall of Fame for his high school baseball achievements.

Mr. Marable speculates that Mr. Bradley “and possibly other Newark mosque members may have actively collaborated on the shooting with local law enforcement and/or the F.B.I.,” but again fails to provide evidence .

Mr. Marable corrects some popular assumptions: for instance, Malcolm X was introduced to the Nation of Islam not by a fellow prisoner - as depicted in Spike Lee’s movie “Malcolm X” - but by family members.

Some people quoted in this volume depict Malcolm X as being fatalistic in the last days of his life . But he also came to recognize, in Mr. Marable’s words, that “blacks indeed could achieve representation and even power under America’s constitutional system.”

In his “Autobiography” Malcolm X wrote: “ As racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth ? the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.”


MICHIKO KAKUTANI
BOOK REVIEW