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An Outcast Turned Icon's Enduring Impact on America
by Mark Whitaker
Book Reviewed by:In The Afterlife of Malcolm X, Mark Whitaker charts the ways that Malcolm X's views have been interpreted and mobilized to create new movements since his assassination in 1965. Many readers will know the general arc of Malcolm X's life: In prison as a young man, he discovered the Nation of Islam (NOI), a Black nationalist religious movement led by Elijah Muhammad (see Beyond the Book). Once out of prison, he quickly moved up the ranks of the organization and became its charismatic spokesman, speaking eloquently about the views that many people saw as radical and threatening: namely that, contra Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists, Black freedom could not come from racial integration or nonviolence, but only from Black independence and Black people being able to defend themselves against white America.
But in 1964, Malcolm broke with the Nation of Islam and created his own Black nationalist movement, in a dramatic departure born partly from a personal rift with Elijah Muhammad and partly from a "hunger to be a constructive player in the civil rights struggle and not just a caustic critic." (Muhammad wanted to keep the Nation of Islam a tax-free religious organization.) He converted to mainstream Islam, promoted Pan-Africanism and brotherhood with people of color across the world who were struggling against colonial rule, and said he had "rearranged" some of his previous beliefs, including those of the NOI about white people being the source of the world's ills. But there was a target on his back; the Nation of Islam wanted him dead for defecting, and he knew it, but he still kept accepting speaking invitations, traveling, and gathering followers for his new movement. This is where Whitaker begins his book, just before Malcolm's death—Malcolm afraid of the Nation of Islam, knowing death is imminent, but convicted in his beliefs and their importance.
The drama of Malcolm's life and death is fascinating: the infighting and jealousy and shadowiness of the Nation of Islam; the question of who ordered his assassination; the botched detective work into his murder and even more botched trial that convicted two innocent men; the involvement of the FBI, who were spying on Malcolm, admitted to fueling the feud between Malcolm and Muhammad that led to Malcolm's death, and withheld evidence from the NYPD that could have saved those two men from wrongful conviction. Whitaker has pulled together a rich, expansive tapestry of the characters and relationships involved. These characters even involve reporters, like Peter Goldman, a white journalist who was close to Malcolm and wrote extensively about his assassination (and then later struck up a friendship with one of his convicted killers and helped exonerate him); the publishers of his bestselling, posthumous Autobiography; his alleged killers and their lawyers; and more. Those who know Malcolm's life mainly from his Autobiography may be surprised at how much there is to learn about these other players and how interesting it is to see different sides of Malcolm from their perspectives.
But The Afterlife of Malcolm X also traces the influence Malcolm had on people who were not directly involved in his life and death, and indeed, some who never even knew him, extending his tapestry further and further out, through decades and generations. The first wave of influence that Whitaker discusses, the Black Power movement, was started by people who had met Malcolm in life and were rocked by his death, including Stokely Carmichael, the future leader of the SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee); and Huey Newton, who saw Malcolm speak in 1963 and started the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale in Oakland a few years later (taking their name from a flyer made by Carmichael with a panther on it; Whitaker masterfully connects these myriad historical threads). Malcolm's call for armed defense influenced the Black Panthers' mission, which was to end police brutality by creating armed Black self-defense groups to defend their community from police. This is one of the most compelling sections of the book, perhaps because of how directly, and closely in time, the Black Power movement is linked to Malcolm's life. Even readers who know a lot about this historical moment will be interested in the connections Whitaker draws between Malcolm; Carmichael; the Black Panthers; Ron Karenga, the Black cultural nationalist who created Kwanzaa; and, of course, the FBI, who labeled the Black Panthers as a threat to domestic security, undermined their movement, and had a hand in the deaths of multiple members.
Not all of the other figures and cultural-political movements—including the birth of rap, Black Lives Matter, Spike Lee's oeuvre, and Obama's presidential campaign—that Whitaker discusses shine as brightly as that first category of influence. By the time he gets to our present movement, featuring an Afrofuturistic opera about Malcolm X and the life and death of his most recent biographer, things feel stretched a bit thin. But Whitaker does, admittedly, pull the reader along the decades smoothly, and many sections are incredibly compelling and even moving, like the chapter about Malcolm's friendship with Muhammad Ali and its ugly end after Malcolm broke with the NOI. The section about Malcolm's influence on Clarence Thomas, the Black conservative Supreme Court justice, is another standout. As his political beliefs were forming, Thomas has said, he found himself connecting with Malcolm's calls for Black self-reliance and his critique of the "false promise of racial integration"; Whitaker describes the line that can be drawn from those beliefs to some of his conservative opinions, like being against affirmative action, and quotes Thomas' former law clerk, who wrote that "Thomas' opinions thunder with [a] strong black-nationalist voice." Other scholars have said that Thomas' embrace of Malcolm X "rested on a gross distortion of what Malcolm really stood for," especially considering that some of his opinions, like opposing gun control and abortion, disproportionately harm Black people. Page by page, Whitaker builds a larger story about Malcolm's impact on American culture and politics, and about his evolving, multifaceted legacy.
In a way, The Afterlife of Malcolm X doesn't feel completely cohesive. A large part of the book is about the struggle, over decades, to free the two innocent men who were convicted of Malcolm's assassination and find his real killers. It feels strange to set these sections next to, for example, a chapter about the making of Spike Lee's movie Malcolm X, or next to an intricate history of his multiple biographers. But it does mostly work, because Whitaker is writing not just about Malcolm but about the ways that he has been reinterpreted, rediscovered, and reinvestigated over the years—the way his legacy will never be set in stone, and his position at the center of an interconnected web of figures and movements that spans decades, political beliefs, and races.
This review
first ran in the May 21, 2025
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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