Book of the week: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

(Viking, $30)

Few figures of the 1960s have enjoyed a greater “upturn in posthumous fortune” than Malcolm X, said Andrew Anthony in the London Guardian. Since his assassination by members of the Nation of Islam in 1965, the man who’d been that sect’s leading minister has been “exalted” by a much wider population than ever embraced him during his lifetime. The gripping autobiography he created with writer Alex Haley secured that legacy. Yet that posthumously published work has also “deterred a more stringent analysis” of Malcolm’s life and work. Finally, though, the biography that his cultural impact demands has been written. Historian Manning Marable, who died just last month, left behind a “meticulous, comprehensive, and fair-minded portrait of Malcolm X” and the “turbulent period” in which he lived.

The early years of the boy born Malcolm Little turn out to have been no less grim than Haley depicted them, said David Remnick in The New Yorker. Fatherless by age 6, Malcolm was often dizzy with hunger as a child, and his mother was a “barely functional depressive” before she was institutionalized. But when Marable’s Malcolm turns to burglary and drug dealing in his teens, he’s neither as bad nor as apolitical as the autobiography’s young outlaw: He was fluent in Marcus Garvey’s separatist teachings long before he attached himself to the Nation of Islam in prison. Haley’s “profoundly comforting” story portrays Malcolm as a man redeemed by twin transformations—first to ascetic discipline and, in his final year, to a disavowal of the racial hatred he’d spread since the late 1950s. Marable shows instead that Malcolm’s philosophy was a tangle of competing ideas that he never fully sorted out.

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Marable, to his credit, doesn’t judge his subject by this “failure to forge a coherent philosophy,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic. After all, “the prejudices of a man” born into a racist culture shouldn’t be regarded as his “most pertinent” feature. In any case, the most important idea that Malcolm embodied was “more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain.” By asserting the rights of black Americans both to defend themselves and to forge a future “by their own hand,” he allowed them to be “reborn” as full human beings. “Virtually all of black America, in some shape or form, has been touched by that rebirth.”