A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X

A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X
EditorsJared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs
SubjectMalcolm X
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherBlack Classic Press
Publication dateMay 2012[1]
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePaperback
Pages308
ISBN978-1574780499

A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X is a 2012 collection of critical essays in response to the biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011) by Manning Marable. The collection was edited by Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs.

After A Life of Reinvention received effusive mainstream praise as the "definitive" Malcolm X biography—it was called "magisterial",[2] "a comprehensive portrait", "a masterpiece";[3] and won the Pulitzer Prize for History and was named a National Book Award finalist—a number of scholars wrote sharp critiques, arguing that the biography was poorly researched, that it distorted Malcolm X's life and legacy, that it contained unsubstantiated sexual accusations,[4] and it diluted Malcolm X's political militancy.[5] In a 2012 interview, Ball labeled the biography "a carefully constructed ideological assault on history, on radical politics, on historical and cultural memory, on the very idea of revolution."[6]

Background

Soon after A Life of Reinvention was published in early April 2011, a backlash arose on the Black political left.[7] Todd Steven Burroughs posted a scathing review of the book on the "Drums in the Global Village" website.[8] Jared Ball appeared on radio programs and organized public events where Marable's biography came under attack.[9] At a July 2011 panel discussion about A Life of Reinvention, held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Burroughs announced during the Q&A section that he and Ball were already working on a collective rebuttal to the biography.[10]

The effort by Black scholars to quickly "set the record straight" about a prominent Black revolutionary was likened to the rapid response to William Styron's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).[11] In that instance, historian John Henrik Clarke compiled the 1968 anthology, William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, to counter Styron's harsh depiction of slave revolt leader Nat Turner.[12]

Contents

In "A Note from the Publisher", W. Paul Coates of Black Classic Press accuses Marable's biography of "excessive innuendo, glaring omission, questionable sourcing, undocumented speculation" and points to an "inexcusable lack of key primary sources", specifically Malcolm X's wife and family, who were not interviewed by Marable.[13][14] Coates clarifies that the word "Lie" in the title is

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 Marable's Malcolm X.[13]

Jared Ball's opening chapter, "An Introduction to a Lie", summarizes the arguments of the book's fifteen contributors, which include activists and scholars such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, A. Peter Bailey, Amiri Baraka, Eugene Puryear, and Raymond Winbush. Ball reiterates a point made in several essays that Marable—a Columbia University professor who died within days of the biography's publication—was "an elite academic working with an elite publishing house" whose goal was "to craft a version of Malcolm X that would appeal to the 'broadest audience possible'" and "to produce an ideological media product that represents the political perspectives and worldviews of those who rule."[15]

Patricia Reid-Merritt writes in her essay that Marable "would have his readers believe that the socially undesirable characteristics that Malcolm X developed in his early life as 'Detroit Red' remained a permanent part of his personality", and that up until his assassination he was "a chronic liar" and a "hustler/trickster who managed to capture the imagination of Black America".[16]

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua disputes the biography's assertions about the sex life and rumored infidelities of Malcolm X. Cha-Jua states that Marable took a passage from The Autobiography of Malcolm X—which describes an acquaintance of "Detroit Red" named Rudy who "would undress himself and an elderly White man and then sprinkle talcum powder on the old guy, who 'got off' from the experience"—and converted it into a declaration that Malcolm X was Rudy and that he regularly engaged in "paid homosexual encounters".[17] Cha-Jua also challenges the sourcing of Marable's allegation that Malcolm X and his wife Betty Shabazz were serially unfaithful to each other.[17] These salacious details in A Life of Reinvention were seized upon in the press coverage and reviews of the book.[17]

In an essay titled "Speculative Nonfiction", Raymond Winbush argues that Marable relied uncritically on FBI files "and utilized speculation and innuendo as source material."[18][19] Moreover, Winbush faults the author, as does Rosemari Mealy in her essay, for omitting the voices of important women in Malcolm X's life. Marable said he began researching the biography twenty years before it was published, which means he could have interviewed his subject's older half-sister Ella Little-Collins who died in 1996 and was a formative influence on her brother's religious and political beliefs. Marable also did not interview Betty Shabazz who died in 1997.[20]

A. Peter Bailey, one of the people Marable interviewed with first-hand knowledge of Malcolm X, cites instances where his interview comments "were forcibly bent to fit Marable's biases, so much so that he [Bailey] claims the published remarks bear 'no relationship' to what he actually said."[21][22]

Amiri Baraka, Kamau Franklin, Eugene Puryear, Christopher Tinson, and Todd Steven Burroughs all condemn "Marable's posthumous liberalizing of Malcolm X",[23] and the downplaying of his Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist ideas.[24] In the essay, "An Ivory-Tower Assassination of Malcolm X", Franklin asserts that Marable misrepresents Malcolm X's 1964 "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech, "downgrading it from a threat of revolution if Black demands were not met immediately to a call for a bloodless revolution for democratic rights".[25] Franklin also reproaches Marable for attempting "to portray the election of Barack Obama as part of Malcolm's political legacy."[26] Puryear writes that "the takeaway [from Marable's book] for most readers, unfortunately, will be that Malcolm was evolving toward a form of liberalism or that he potentially was never a revolutionary at all."[27] William Sales criticizes Marable for minimizing the radical aims and objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which Malcolm X established in the last year of his life.[28]

Reception

In a review of A Lie of Reinvention, Monroe Little says "the quality of scholarly analysis is uneven. While a few of these essays are well done, far too many were a disappointment to this reviewer."[18] He adds:

I concur with many of the criticisms the contributors leveled against Marable's so-called magnum opus, but there is too much repetition and not enough depth to most of the critiques. Just as troubling, however, are aspects of A Lie of Reinvention that undercut its purpose such as the mean-spirited, ad-hominum denunciations of Marable by more than a few of the book's contributors. Indeed, A Lie of Reinvention probably tells us as much about the failings of the contemporary Internet-dominated public culture and the decline in civil discourse, even among scholars and intellectuals, as it does about Marable's failings as a historian and biographer.[18]

Little concludes that the overall critique is "Lilliputian when it could have been Olympian."[29][30]

Black Classic Press released a Kindle edition of A Lie of Reinvention in July 2013, and reissued the paperback in March 2015.

References

  1. ↑ "A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X – J. Ball and T. Burroughs". Black Classic Press. Archived from the original on February 12, 2012. Retrieved May 28, 2012.
  2. ↑ Sales Jr., William W. (Summer 2011). "Manning Marable's Reinvention of Malcolm X: The Biography That Hype Couldn't Save". The Black Scholar. 41 (2): 26–33.
  3. ↑ Perry, Imani (April 24, 2011). "Beyond the legend". San Francisco Chronicle. pp. 69–70 – via Newspapers.com.
  4. ↑ Thomas, Greg (2012). "Counterrevolution...in the Flesh: The Sexual Politics of Manning Marable in Viking Press's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. p. 126. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  5. ↑ "Jared Ball & Other Scholars Confront the Lies About Malcolm X in Manning Marable's Book". Hip Hop and Politics. October 14, 2012. Podcast featuring an interview with Jared Ball.
  6. ↑ "Attempted ivory tower assassination of Malcolm X: an interview wit' Jared Ball, editor of A Lie of Re-Invention". San Francisco BayView: National Black Newspaper. October 21, 2012.
  7. ↑ Ball, Jared A. (April 14, 2011). "Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention or the Reinvention of a Life?". Black Agenda Report.
  8. ↑ Burroughs, Todd Steven (April 19, 2011). "Book Review: The Fault Lies Not In Our Stars, But In Our Biographers". Drums in the Global Village. Archived from the original on November 29, 2011.
  9. ↑ Ball, Jared A. (April 8, 2011). "Marable's Malcolm X a 'Fraud?'". www.voxunion.com. Coup Radio. Archived from the original on November 2, 2011.
  10. ↑ "Panel on Manning Marable's Malcolm X". C-SPAN. July 23, 2011. Burroughs speaks at the 59-minute mark in this C-SPAN video.
  11. ↑ Polk, Khary (Summer 2013). "Malcolm X, Sexual Hearsay, and Masculine Dissemblance". Biography. 36 (3): 568–584. JSTOR 24570210. Indeed, the blowback from Marable's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X has spawned a cottage industry of sorts; at least two edited collections, reminiscent of John Henrik Clarke's William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), were released in 2012. Besides A Lie of Reinvention, Polk was also referring to the 2012 anthology, By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented, edited by Herb Boyd, et al.
  12. ↑ "A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X - Jared Ball and Todd Burroughs". Black Classic Press. Retrieved June 30, 2026. Publisher's webpage for A Lie of Reinvention.
  13. 1 2 Coates, W. Paul (2012). "A Note from the Publisher". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  14. ↑ Reid, Calvin (May 22, 2015). "Printing and Publishing at Black Classic Press". Publishers Weekly. In this interview, Black Classic Press publisher W. Paul Coates said he worried about the impact of Marable's work on the popular understanding of Malcolm X's life: "This is emotional to me.... We were forced to respond to that book. It is full of errors and is lacking sources to support much of what Marable claimed to be fact."
  15. ↑ Ball, Jared A. (2012). "An Introduction to a Lie". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  16. ↑ Reid-Merritt, Patricia (2012). "What Measure of a Man? – Assessing the Personal Growth and Social Transformation of Malcolm X from an African-Centered Social Work Perspective". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. p. 32. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  17. 1 2 3 Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita (2012). "A Life of Revolutionary Transformation: A Critique of Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. pp. 165–67. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  18. 1 2 3 Little, Monroe (Fall 2013). "What Manner of Man?". The Journal of African American History. 98 (4): 586–94.
  19. ↑ Winbush, Raymond A. (2012). "Speculative Nonfiction: Manning Marable's Malcolm X". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  20. ↑ Mealy, Rosemari (2012). "An Incomprehensible Omission: Women and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz's Ideological Development in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention – A Brief Criticism". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. pp. 120–21. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  21. ↑ Ball 2012, p. 9.
  22. ↑ Bailey, A. Peter (2012). "Dealing with a Few Reinventions in Manning Marable's Book on Brother Malcolm". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. pp. 154–55. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  23. ↑ Ball 2012, p. 15.
  24. ↑ Burroughs, Todd Steven (2012). "Coda: Objectivity vs. Memory". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. p. 295. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  25. ↑ Franklin, Kamau (2012). "An Ivory-Tower Assassination of Malcolm X". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. p. 70. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  26. ↑ Franklin 2012, p. 78.
  27. ↑ Puryear, Eugene (2012). "It's Not That Complicated—Malcolm X Was a Revolutionary: Confused Terminology, Concepts Mar Marable Biography". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. p. 196. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  28. ↑ Sales, Jr., William A. (2012). "Jared Ball Interview with William Sales, June 3, 2011". In Ball, Jared A.; Burroughs, Todd Steven (eds.). A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classic Press. p. 216. ISBN 978-1574780499.
  29. ↑ Little 2013: "A Lie of Reinvention is heavy on criticism; and yet for all that this book tries to accomplish, there is a certain disappointment. It does fill in certain gaps in Marable’s research, corrects some errors, and challenges some conclusions. It does address problems with Marable's scholarship, but overall its attempt to correct Manning Marable's A Life of Reinvention is Lilliputian, when it could have been Olympian. The readers deserve more—and so does Malcolm X."
  30. ↑ Franklin, V. P. (Fall 2013). "Introduction: Reflections on the Legacy of Malcolm X". The Journal of African American History. 98 (4): 562–64.
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