On Manning's Reinvention of Malcolm X

Look at the back cover of the book, its "endorsers" and you can predict! AB

AmiriBarakaBooks.com

Sent: Wed, April 20, 2011 6:12:23 AM
Subject: Re malcolm x

From: blackbanjotony@hotmail.com

Though long awaiting this work and having had brief exchanges with Manning on
this subject over the past 35 years, the coming out of this book caught me so
deep into banjos that I didnt realize it was out until a DC journalist
Facebooked me about the rejected _Root_ review.

Several things impress me, or rather unimpress me, about the debate on it. The
first is that little of the debate in the linked pages and other things searches
on it bring up are about Malcolm X and his role in African American liberation,
although many purport to do so. Most seem to dance about one non-political
aspect of the life of Malcolm X in a period when he led a completely different
life and identity, a period when Malcolm wrote he had a mentality that he
considered a degenerate reflection of the oppression of Black folk. None of the
commentary focuses on Malcolm as a political person in a way that for better or
worse Manning no doubt centered.

What seems required is for folk to seriously read this book and forget the minor
and personal controversy and think about how the book faithfully or unfaithfully
serves the truth of Malcolm X. An abundance of books in which Malcolm expresses
his ideas clearly, particularly in the last years of his life are available for
reference and reflection. New evidence based explanations of the realities of
the last years of his life are also available in Taylor Branch's work and in the
release of his FBI files.

Manning is not the first to criticize Haley's role in "The Autobiography of
Malcolm X." What he says is just the tip of the iceberg. That book is accepted
as gospel by many people, but during his last months Malcolm made quite clear
to people around him that he wanted to change the direction of the whole project
and disagreed with Haley, particularly about how the Nation of Islam was
treated. Initially, he had felt that he needed to make no or few criticisms of
the Nation, but to set his own way, even though he knew even before he left the
Nation that his differences were irreconcilable and that the Nation's leadership
was organizing his murder. However, he came to realize that this was a mistake
and that for his own protection both physically and politically, he needed to
expose the corruption, political conservatism, and moral depravity that
characterized the Nation. Manning's assertion that Malcolm wanted that book
to be much more political in the sense that he became much more political and
radical matches what Malcolm was telling people about it in the period just
before his murder. This stuff is documented--as opposed to my memory of
talking to various people in NY about this in the late 1960s--in George
Breitman's book on Malcolm X, Evolution of a Revolutionary. It can also be seen
in the set of speeches and interviews from Malcolm's last year exposing the
Nation and its crimes and corruption available from Pathfinder.

Returning to our debate and not trying to enter it, let me beg for a seriousness
about it. It is also necessary to provide Malcolm and history with the
respect due a real fallable person who is the product, not of divine
revelation, but our gritty human life. Malcolm has become a saint, now distant
enough in actual memory of most folk for people to demand anything but
perfection and to see his life as anything but hagiography

One respect is owed Cornel West. He has written clearly about how his reformist
political perspective and the revolutionary ideas of Malcolm X are in conflict
and why he believes Malcolm was wrong. Few people attempt to do that,
disrespecting Malcolm and in turn disrespecting themselves. Instead,
discussion of Malcolm X even by scholars often ends up folk trying to prove
that Malcolm believed and stood for whatever the scholar believes.

I Rather than the plaster saint he has since been depicted as, people I have
met who knew Malcolm and interacted with him in the mid 1960s in New York,
Africa, and Europe remember him as an extremely humble, self critical person
with a sense of humor, and a longing to relax and enjoy himself when removed
from the spotlight, a person always open to learning from struggles going on
around the world, and fromt he hard school of real life, a person whose
responsibility and seriousness in big things came from a sense of obligation by
what he believed he had done wrong in the past, and a person with nostalgia and
some interest in reclaiming some of the joys he had left behind.

If whatever great school that produced his character made him such a person, let
us show his memory and ourselves the kindness to discuss him as that imperfect
human that he was, and not try to pound the sainthood that some seem to need
into him.

I hope that discussion takes place after thoroughly and critically reading his
book, after consulting Malcolm's own speeches and writings, and in a spirit of
science and objectivity, rather than of demonology or hero worship.