At the outset, it is impossible to deny the vital role that the volume A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marrable’s Malcolm X (2012, Black Classics Press), edited by Drs. Jared Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs, played in the formation of this article.
In 2011, Manning Marable, a legendary Marxian African American Studies scholar at Columbia University with longstanding allegiances to social democratic projects such as Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, died after a long struggle with a degenerative pulmonary condition. Three days after his passing, Viking Books, an imprint of the publishing conglomerate Penguin Random House, issued the hardcover edition of his long-awaited biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a title that went on to earn numerous accolades and the Pulitzer Prize. This volume has now gone on to be adapted into a documentary on Netflix, Who Killed Malcolm X?
Continue reading at CounterPunch!

Leave a Reply