The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

To correct this condition, the black man could either work on the outer manifestations of discrimination—as did Martin Luther King—or change himself from within, through transformation. Malcolm took the latter course, both in teaching and in his personal life on this planet. He underwent a dramatic conversion, from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.

King offered racists the other cheek, Malcolm the back of his hand. Freedom was so important to him that Malcolm counseled risking all, except one’s sense of self-respect, in the fight. Nonviolence, he taught, unduly narrowed an oppressed people’s options.

“The American negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium for conveying bolshevism to America,” President Woodrow Wilson reportedly told his personal physician, Dr. Cary Grayson. “The French people have placed the negro soldier in France on an equality with the white man,” Grayson wrote in his diary, adding that President Wilson stated, “And it has gone to their heads.”

The Omaha police later verified that the kingpin of the local Irish crime syndicate, one Tom “Pick-Handle” Dennison, had in several other instances paid whites in blackface to attack white women, not unlike Agnes Loebeck, in order to embarrass Mayor Smith and city hall.

This Hollywood portrayal of the Klan as noble saviors of white America was so popular that President Wilson, a native Virginian with ingrained racist views, screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House; it was the first movie ever shown there and a political nod to Southern racist supporters.

During the night of fireworks on November 15, 1915, this band of fierce and fearsome Georgians reconstituted the Ku Klux Klan as a secret organization of native-born “Protestants, white, gentile Americans.”

Garvey, agreeing that European colonialism was the dominant world force at the turn of the century, advocated that indigenous peoples in Africa, India, and the rest of Asia should rise up and reclaim their occupied homelands from the illicit white settlers—and leave them Europe, with the United States and the West Indies apparently to be shared with indigenous people of the American landmass.

British colonization of Jamaica had been a key trigger for Marcus Garvey’s program when, at the age of twenty-seven, he founded the UNIA and expanded it as a bulwark against white rule and racism in the West Indies, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere.

As with all such accounts owing to memory, there are instances of exaggeration in this book and a vagueness on names, times, and dates; however, the Autobiography is verifiably solid in recording that, in addition to holding down a job washing dishes in a local eatery, the popular Malcolm did indeed engage in numerous school activities.

The blistering war in Europe had somewhat softened U.S. military policy against black citizens. Prior to 1941, the military’s racism was so virulent that, for example, the Naval Academy refused to let its lacrosse team play a Harvard team unless Harvard banished its lone black player from the field.

The U.S. government essentially ran a two-tier program, encouraging a permanent Negro underclass of renters while operating the FHA-backed suburban home ownership program to stimulate a dramatic growth of the white middle class.

As a Black American I do feel that my first responsibility is to my 22 million fellow Black Americans who suffer the same indignities because of their colour as I do. I don’t believe my own personal problem is ever solved until the problem is solved for all 22 million of us.

An old African proverb states: “Educate a man and you educate an individual; educate a woman and you educate an entire family.”

DEAD ARE ARISING IS THE CULMINATION OF A TWENTY-eight-year journey. Les Payne’s curiosity and his skills as an investigative reporter and writer are on full display.