Manning Marable - Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Table of Contents

ALSO BY MANNING MARABLE

Barack Obama and African-American Empowerment (edited with Kristen Clarke)

Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African-American Anthology (edited with Leith Mullings)

Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (edited with Vanessa Agard-Jones)

Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake Americas Racial Future

Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 19452006

W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat

Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis (edited with Kristen Clarke)

The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life

Freedom: A Photographic History of the African-American Freedom Struggle (coauthored with Leith Mullings)

Black Leadership

Black Liberation in Conservative America

Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Radicalism, and Resistance

Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives (edited with Keesha Middlemass and Ian Steinberg)

Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy (edited with Eric Foner)

The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology (editor)

Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics

The Crisis of Color and Democracy

African and Caribbean Politics

Black American Politics

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society

The Autobiography of Medgar Evers (edited with Myrlie Evers-Williams)

Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary Experience of the African-American Experience (editor)

Dispatches From the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African-American Experience (editor)

Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race,

Class Consciousness, and Revolution

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Manning Marable, 2011 All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Copyright 1964 by Alex Haley and Malcolm X. Copyright 1965 by Alex Haley and Betty Shabazz. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

Insert p. 2 (top): Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos p. 2 (bottom): Frank Scherschel / Getty Images pp. 5 (bottom), 15: Bob Adelman / Corbis p. 6: Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis p. 8: Keystone / Getty Images p. 10: Orlando Fernandez, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress p. 12: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress All other photographs: Bettman / Corbis

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Marable, Manning, 1950

Malcolm X : a life of reinvention / Manning Marable. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-44527-3

1. X, Malcolm, 19251965. 2. Black MuslimsBiography. 3. African AmericansBiography. I. Title.
BP223.Z8L57636 2011
297.87092dc22 2010025768
[B]

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No one has made more sacrifices to realize the completion of this
work than Leith Mullings. For more than a decade, she has been
my constant companion and intellectual compass as I have
attempted to reconstruct the past.
This work is hers.

PROLOGUE

Life Beyond the Legend

I n the early years of the last century, the neighborhood just north of Harlem, later to be named Washington Heights, was a sparsely settled suburb. Only the vision of a businessman, William Fox, led to the construction of an opulent entertainment center on Broadway between West 165th and 166th streets. Foxs instruction to the architect, Thomas W. Lamb, was to design a building more splendid than any theater on Broadway. By the time all was finished, in 1912, an expensive terra-cotta facade adorned the front walls, marble columns stood guard at the entrance, while carvings of exotic birds graced the foyer: it was these colorful motifs, inspired by the great nineteenth-century artist John James Audubon, that prompted Fox to name his pleasure palace the Audubon. On the buildings first floor, Lamb designed a massive cinema, large enough to seat twenty-three hundred people. In subsequent years, the second floor was reserved for two spacious ballrooms: the Rose Ballroom, which could accommodate eight hundred patrons, and the larger Grand Ballroom, holding up to fifteen hundred.

Within a few decades, the neighborhood around the Audubon began to change, becoming increasingly black and working class. The Audubons management catered to this new clientele by booking the most celebrated swing bands of the era, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Chick Webb. The Audubon also became the home for many of the citys militant trade unionists, and from 1934 to 1937 the newly formed Transport Workers Union held its meetings thereaccompanied by the occasional violent confrontation. One night in September 1929, for example, a four-hundredstrong party sponsored by the Lantern Athletic Club was disrupted by four gunshots. Two people were badly wounded.

During World War II, the Audubon was rented out for weddings, bar mitzvahs, political meetings, and graduation parties. After 1945, however, the neighborhood changed yet again, as many white middle-class residents sold their properties and fled to the suburbs. Columbia Universitys decision to expand its hospital at West 168th Street and Broadway into a major health sciences campus generated hundreds of new jobs for the black influx, while the Audubon adapted to economic realities by shutting down its cinema and subdividing the space it had occupied into rentals. However, both the Rose and Grand ballrooms remained.

By the mid-1960s, the building had surrendered most of its original grandeur. The main entrance for the ballrooms was small and drab. Customers had to climb a steep flight of stairs to the second-floor foyer, then maneuver past the managers office and on into either the Rose, at the buildings left (east) side, or the Grand, which faced Broadway. The larger room was about 180 feet by 60 feet, its north, east, and west walls housing about sixty-five separate booths, each of which could hold up to twelve people. Farthest from the buildings main entrance, along the south wall, was a modest wooden stage, behind which was a cramped, poorly lit antechamber where musicians and speakers would muster before walking out to perform.