The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-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 over 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 twentieth 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.The Dead Are Arising