Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative
journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to
interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X-all
living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street
friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops,
and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to
transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into
an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate
fact from fiction. The result is this historic biography that
conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose
title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his
Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly
arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting Malcolm's
life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger
backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of
the twentieth century's most politically relevant figures "from
street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary." In tracing
Malcolm X's life from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem
assassination in 1965, Payne provides searing vignettes culled from
Malcolm's Depression-era youth, describing the influence of his
Garveyite parents: his father, Earl, a circuit-riding preacher who
was run over by a street car in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, and his
mother, Louise, who continued to instill black pride in her
children after Earl's death. Filling each chapter with resonant
drama, Payne follows Malcolm's exploits as a petty criminal in
Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious
awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts
penitentiary. With a biographer's unwavering determination, Payne
corrects the historical record and delivers extraordinary
revelations-from the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder "Fard
Muhammad," who preceded Elijah Muhammad; to a hair-rising scene,
conveyed in cinematic detail, of Malcolm and Minister Jeremiah X
Shabazz's 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK; to a
minute-by-minute account of Malcolm X's murder at the Audubon
Ballroom. Introduced by Payne's daughter and primary researcher,
Tamara Payne, who, following her father's death, heroically
completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and
riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the
African American freedom struggle.
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