“This collection of essays by Black scholars and activists, edited by Jared Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs, is a critical response to Manning Marable’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Though lauded by many, Marable’s book was debated and denounced by others as a flawed biography, full of conjecture and errors and…
Read more
Elombe Brath (1936-2014), whose writings from two decades have been collected here in a fundraising vehicle for the memorial foundation bearing his name, was the heir of Harlem’s street orators—those men who gathered at streetcorners before and after World War II and talked about the Africa inside. Armed with a century of books, pamphlets and documents, these people educated African villages across America about the relationship between history, culture, politics and society from the perspectives of the most powerful people who had ever been colonized.
Read more
The Judas Factor: The Life and Death of Malcolm Shabazz Limited 25th Anniversary Edition. Karl Evanzz. Xis Books, 541 pp., $25.99. Reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs Context can be a witch, to be polite. Yesterday, May 19, Malcolm X would have been 93. The fact that that day is marked solemnly around the…
Read more