MALCOLM LIVES! The Official Biography of Malcolm X for Young Readers, by Ibram X. Kendi
In my suburban, largely Black high school in 1980s New Jersey, we sang “Life Every Voice and Sing” at assemblies. We decorated the walls with wheat sheafs during Kwanzaa.
And what seemed like every year, we read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” This was our embattled teachers’ effort to teach us a Black history they knew full well the world would not, and it left me with certain indelible images: Malcolm’s searing conked hair; his hands hungrily tearing apart a roast chicken in Jeddah (“Muslims were doing the same thing all around me. … All ate as One, and slept as One”); his advice that leaving a bathroom light on all night can deter would-be burglars.
Now, with his vital, brilliant “Malcolm Lives!,” Ibram X. Kendi (the National Book Award-winning author of “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America”) has rendered the story of Malcolm Little, a.k.a. Malcolm X, a.k.a. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, who would have been 100 on May 19, for young readers. And while he adjusts his voice slightly for age — Kendi writes, like Malcolm spoke, with a piercing clarity — that is his only accommodation.
Kendi embraces Malcolm in all his messy, glorious complexity, showing this audience an evolution of humanity and political philosophy that many adults still fail to appreciate.
The book begins exactly where the autobiography does: with night riders surrounding the Little family’s Omaha home and smashing its front window with a rifle. Malcolm was not yet born (his mother was pregnant with him at the time), but this violent act would propel his family across a succession of towns in the Midwest where his parents, followers of the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, continued to be hounded by the Ku Klux Klan.
Young readers will emerge from this scene with a question that has stumped parents through the ages: Where is racism from? Kendi, astonishingly, provides a factual answer: “Powerful Portuguese writers constructed race in the 1400s to justify the enslavement of peoples in Africa,” he explains. “They stamped slavery and inferiority onto dark skins. They stamped freedom and superiority onto white skins.”
It is an answer worthy of Malcolm himself, a voracious reader who delighted in bringing historical facts to bear during his devastating debates. (He once took time out of a day jam-packed with interviews to brush up on aardvarks.)
As Kendi tells the story of Malcolm’s life, from early childhood to his time in a white foster family to his relentless fight for social justice, he honors that love of history, drawing arcs from the past to the present to show how Black history has always been central to Black liberation: The refusal of the Lansing, Mich., Fire Department to come to the Littles’ torched home was a harbinger of New Orleans’s treatment of Black victims of Hurricane Katrina; the Klan’s 1925 march down Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. was a forerunner of its 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va. Malcolm’s campaign against police brutality “inspired people who spoke out against the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Tyre Nichols,” and “inspired those three Black women who first said: BLACK LIVES MATTER.” If they have not yet heard the saying that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, young readers will understand it in practice.
Kendi also shows how easily Black history can be erased. Smalls’ Paradise, the storied Harlem club where young Malcolm befriended jazz giants, is now an IHOP. At the Boston intersection that was home to the Roseland State Ballroom, where Malcolm lindy-hopped the night away, “you see people pumping their gas at the Shell station,” “holding coffee and treats coming out of Dunkin’.”
Kendi rectifies this erasure with photos — of the historical marker at the site where Malcolm’s first childhood home once stood; of the interior of Smalls’ Paradise; of the ominous costume of the Black Legion (an even more secret terrorist group than the Ku Klux Klan, into which former Klansmen were recruited when Midwest Klan membership began to decline).
In addition, Kendi shares plenty of his own thoughts and feelings, acting as a bridge for the reader. Malcolm’s foster parents “would speak horribly about Black people with Malcolm right there. Call them N-words with Malcolm right there. Unbelievable? Believe it.”
Kendi reveals some news, too: The con man who brought Islam to Black followers in America “was … (record scratch) … a white man!” And he provides a word for how Malcolm devoured Charlestown State Prison’s library: “Anyone can know a lot. But it takes a smart person to desire to know a lot. … That is an intellectual.”
Best of all, Kendi’s asides make Malcolm’s most famous speeches electrifying. With a few brief sentences, he conjures suspense and thunderous applause. Young readers won’t ever be able to hear Malcolm speak in person — but don’t be surprised if they head over to YouTube, or suddenly join a debate club.
After finishing “Malcolm Lives!” I went back and reread the original autobiography as it was told to Alex Haley. Some of his views I had wisely dismissed out of hand. (Let’s trust that Malcolm would have evolved on women.) But from state violence to economic inequity to the erasure of Black history, many of the issues he brought to the fore have proved depressingly enduring — a development that would have surprised him not at all.
One thing is different now, however. The man we know as Malcolm X — adamant, uncompromising, funny, compassionate — has equipped us to face these challenges. He lives. And with Kendi’s biography, a new generation of readers will never forget it.
MALCOLM LIVES!: The Official Biography of Malcolm X for Young Readers | By Ibram X. Kendi | (Ages 10 and up) | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 400 pp. | $19.99
The post Ibram X. Kendi Introduces Malcolm X to a New Generation appeared first on New York Times.
