Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography Controversy:
A Response to Critics (long)
 
African World
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.;
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
 
The Black Commentator
July 7, 2011 – Issue 434
 

On the day of Manning Marable’s death, April 1, 2011, I received an additional piece of disturbing information.  A friend of mine informed me of a discussion he had just had with a Black activist-writer who, in hearing about Marable’s passing, went into what could only be described as a rant against Marable.  Marable’s body was hardly cold, and this individual, who knew Marable, was castigating him to my friend, claiming that Marable was everything but a child of God.  It was at that moment that I knew that Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (hereafter referred to as MX) would ignite a firestorm in some quarters of the Black Freedom Movement.  Within days, despite the overwhelmingly positive response to the book, this firestorm emerged.

In approaching the controversies that surround MX it is important to ask two questions prior to responding directly to critics:  (1)what did Manning set out to do? (2)did he succeed?  We will take these one at a time before commenting on some of the issues raised by various critics and what lies beneath them.

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