Jared Ball - A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X

A LIE OF REINVENTION

Black Classic Press

Baltimore

A L IE OF R EINVENTION:
C ORRECTING M ANNING M ARABLES M ALCOLM X

Copyright 2012 Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs
Published 2012 Black Classic Press
All Rights Reserved.

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Cover photograph credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, reproduction number LC-DIG ppmsc-01274.

Cover and book design by Nathaniel Taintor
Editing by D. Kamili Anderson

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012940681

ISBN: 978-1-57478-051-2

Printed by BCP Digital Printing, an affiliate of Black Classic Press, Inc.

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CONTENTS

For Dr. John Henrik Clarke,
who stood with Malcolm
when it was not popular.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

Along with many others, I believe that Manning Marables Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is a severely flawed and problematic biogaphy. Instead of it being a a definitive work as some have called it, it is a contradictory political reshaping and distortiona lie reallyof the life and times of Malcolm X. Its problems are multipleexcessive use of innuendo, glaring omissions, questionable sourcing, undocumented speculation, misdirected conclusions, and an unexplained and inexcusable lack of key primary sources, for example (and maybe especially) Malcolms wife and family. The product of these many problems, we believe, is essentially a LIE . Such a lie demands a strong critical response, from scholars, activists, and others in the Black community, especially publishers like Black Classic Press, who have benefited so richly from Malcolms example and legacy.

Searching for an editor to assemble a critical response led me to Jared A. Ball, who enthusiastically agreed to take on this task with the assistance of his comrade and co-editor, Todd Steven Burroughs. Halfway into the project, we decided that A Lie of Reinvention would be a perfect counter-title to Marables A Life of Reinvention . We also agreed that our title would speak directly to the problems cited above.

To be clear, with our title selection, and with the book itself, we are not asserting that Manning Marable is a liar. We do not make such a claim. Nor do we direct any ill will or disrespect toward Marable or his publisher, Viking Press. Instead, this book is purposely titled and published because of our intent to provide a necessary correction of Manning Marables Malcolm X .

JARED A. BALL

An Introduction to a Lie

(Malcolm X)

Our honor was threefold after receiving a call from W. Paul Coates asking us to compile a book of critical responses to Manning Marables Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention . The first honor, of course, was being invited to work with Black Classic Press, a truly legendary publishing house. The second honor was that Todd Steven Burroughs, my coeditor, and I had both become involved early on in the debate that arose soon after the publication of Marables book, which, unfortunately, was coupled with his untimely death. The third honor was that Pauls offer gave us an opportunity to take up what we believe is our generational duty: to accept responsibility, at minimum, for editorially defending and extending the legacy of Malcolm X and the ideas with which Malcolm most seriously grappled. The unenviable alternative, as we saw it, was to quietly accept or worse to openly support Marables false reinvention of the man and his ideas.

More than merely viewing Marables reinvention of Malcolm as false, we have, beginning with our choice of book title, unapologetically laid down our claim that it is a lie. Marables book, we contend, is the carefully constructed and intentional political reshaping of a man who was as important a conduit for and exemplar of African American politics as the world has ever seen. As each of our chapter contributors point out, Malcolm Xs political importance, beyond that of the man himself, compels both a need of those in power to distort his memory and our need to respond vigorously to such attacks.

Margo Arnold, for example, maintains that Malcolm is recognized as a revolutionary by what she calls our Black Radical Collective Consciousness, and that Marables book has given members of that collective the blues. She claims that it is that revolutionary consciousness the consciousness that first produced Malcolm Xwhich demands a collective rebuttal to attempts such as Marables to deny him and, in turn, to deny all Black people his legacy.

That is why we, the editors and contributors to this volume of critical essays, charge that Manning Marable and Viking Press have produced what is, for them, a politically necessary version of Malcolm X and his governing radical ideas. By so doing, we argue their final product serves as an attempt to discredit a Black radical traditionspecifically, Black Nationalismand to set Malcolm up, by the books end, as some sort of race-neutral, multicultural, mainstream-leaning, liberal Democrat.

This conclusionand Marables seemingly infinite flaws of scholarship, citation, and basic accuracyhas led contributor William Strickland to suggest in his essay that Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention disqualifies itself as a work of historical scholarship. Similarly, Marables multiple blunders cause contributor Raymond Winbush to describe A Life of Reinvention as speculative non-fiction at best and leads contributor Patricia Reid-Merritt to ask, and investigate, just who was Manning Marable and what must have been the perceived social and personal benefits of his deliberately producing a controversial book which casts doubts on the motives, character and sincerity of one of the most revered figures of the Black freedom movement (emphasis mine). As contributor Greg Thomas concludes, what Marable has produced is not a book at all but rather an operation or a maneuver.

Compare the dangerous reinvention imposed upon Malcolm X by Marable to what a number of other contributors to this collection suggest is better described as Malcolms radical evolution. With nuance and intellectual sleight-of-hand, several of our contributors maintain that Marables work serves to diminish the threat that Malcolm posed to the state and to its long- and still-standing hostility toward political radicals. None other than Mumia Abu-Jamal, for example, refers to A Life of Reinvention as tragic, in large part for its total omission of any serious discussion of the role played in Malcolms demise by the US Governments infamous Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Abu-Jamal has contributed a revision of his earlier views about the Marable book in an essay written for this volume. As he writes in that essay: