INVESTIGATOR KARL EVANZZ + EDITOR A PETER BAILEY COUNTERING MANNING MARABLE ON MALCOLM X (MF GALAXY 078)

MARABLE CLAIMED ALEX HALEY WAS AN FBI INFORMANT WORKING AGAINST MALCOLM X, THE MISSING CHAPTERS OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Malcolm X is an icon of Pan-Africanism. Born May 19, 1925 to a Pan-Africanist family active in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Malcolm survived the racist murder of his father and his own descent into crime and prison. He emerged as a minister for the Nation of Islam, one of several organisations born from the US government’s destruction of Garvey’s UNIA.

While committed to the NOI’s religious doctrine, Malcolm X developed a secular, revolutionary, political ideology that combined Garveyism with the Original World liberation struggles raging against imperialism throughout the 1950s and 60s. So respected was he that after he broke from the NOI in 1964, Malcolm X formed the united front Organisation of Afro-American Unity and won observer status on behalf of African Americans at the newly-formed Organisation of African Unity. While Nation of Islam assassins murdered him in Harlem on February 21, 1965, extensive evidence points to involvement of the United States government as Karl Evanzz details in his monumental work The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X.

On today’s episode of MF GALAXY, we’ll hear from Evanzz and also from Malcolm X associate A. Peter Bailey, who was the editor of Malcolm X’s newsletter The Blacklash, later the editor of Ebony magazine, and eventually the co-author with Malcolm X’s nephew Rodnell Collins of Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X. I spoke with Evanzz and Bailey in 2005 for the 80th anniversary of Malcolm X’s birthday. They’ll offer their responses to the then-unfinished final work by Manning Marable, later published as the controversial Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. 

Marable claimed, among other things, that Alex Haley, the author of Roots and co-author of Malcolm’s Autobiography, was collaborating with the FBI against Malcolm X’s interests. We’ll also hear Evanzz and Bailey on three chapters deleted from the Autobiography, whose contents Marable claimed were explosive.

Karl Evanzz is one of the planet’s leading Malcolm X scholars and also the author of The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad. He was once an online editor at The Washington Post. Both men spoke to me by telephone from Washington DC in May 2005.

But first we’ll an excerpt from a February 21, 2005 Democracy Now! interview with Manning Marable, former head of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He authored a dozen books, including How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. We’ll then hear Bailey’s and Evanzz’s reactions.

For links to Malcolm X books, including a discount ebook offer for The Judas Factor, and a video of editor Jared Ball discussing his book A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X, visit mfgalaxy.org.

And to hear the half hour patrons-only extended edition of this focus on Malcolm X, visit mfgalaxy.org to click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes:

• Malcolm X discussing his political ideology and why he urged people to keep their religious life private
• Karl Evanzz on Malcolm X’s final political evolution and how he thinks some biographers have misrepresented it.
• The disturbing case of an attempt to auction an item literally stained with Malcolm X’s blood for $50,000, and
• Director and cinematographer Ernest Dickerson discussing the aesthetics and effects of the 1992 Spike Lee feature film Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington, for which Dickerson was director of photography

Malcolm X.com - The Malcolm X Estate Homepage

Buy the ebook of The Judas Factor for under $3

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

Pathfinder Press Malcolm X books

Malcolm X: The Man and His Times, edited by John Henrik Clarke

Third World Press

Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall

Jared Ball on Correcting Manning Marable

Finally, if you’d like to hear the tables turned on me, listen to Invaders from Planet 3 podcaster Robin Shantz asking me questions about science fiction, Dune, my own novels, politics, religion, movies, and TV.

INVADERS FROM PLANET 3 Episode 7: Interview with Joe Haldeman