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Malcolm X’s Centennial, Reinvention, & Electoral Politics
To honor Malcolm X’s 100th birthday, British professor Kehinde Andrews recently spoke with Dr. Jared Ball, co-editor of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X.
Dr. Ball’s book was a reply to Marable’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, published in 2011. Marable purported to have shocking new information that went beyond the mythologized image of Malcolm provided in his autobiography. Marable claimed Malcolm exaggerated his criminal history, had an unstable marriage, and had a homosexual relationship with a white businessman.
Dr. Ball didn’t think the biography was a testament to Malcolm reinventing and improving his life. He saw the book as “a carefully constructed ideological assault on history, on radical politics, on historical and cultural memory, on the very idea of revolution.”
Professor Andrews asked Dr. Ball what Malcolm would say about today’s electoral politics.
An unusual question given Malcolm’s tenure in the Nation of Islam, which suggests that he lacked advanced political ideas. Malcolm was appointed minister in 1953 before being expelled from the organization in 1964. As a dedicated minister in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm advanced the teachings of their leader, Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad was a separatist who advised his followers not to engage…
