ABSTRACT

There was likely more anticipation for the release of Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention than any Black autobiography or academic book ever. Because of our almost sole reliance on Alex Haley’s account, there are literally lost years of Malcolm X’s life that we know very little about. Malcolm X is often cast as an historical counterpoint to the more peaceful and less radical rhetorical aims of Martin Luther King and the larger civil rights movement. Indeed for many seeking to contain racial tensions, he was also a cautionary tale of an alternative approach to the struggle for equal rights. What follows is a meditation, because it struck me, while reading, that Malcolm X has become a Black folk legend of mythological proportions. He looms large in contemporary efforts to fashion a racial identity that contends with the legacy of the movement generation of the sixties and contemporary racial topographies.