Malcolm x biography questioned
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Malcolm X: Digging Up Artifacts, Stories, and Questions about the Truth
When I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I was 18 years old in a high school elective called Reading and Writing Human Values. It was X’s anger that appealed to me. Trying to wrap my head around America’s injustices while studying the average history class’s non-violence mantra of the Civil Rights Movement was always too difficult. As a result, I often did not do the work that was assigned in that context. But Malcolm X rang true. His anger and frustration reflected my own, even if I, as a white male, am a perpetrator of the structures he condemns.
Because it was such a powerful experience for me, I especially enjoy reading this book with students in our American Historiography class. However, this class focuses not only on X’s racial struggle, but also on the truthfulness of his account. Asking questions about a writer’s goal in telling a story leads to conversations about what elements of the text
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Fifty years ago, a 39-year-old man named Malcolm Little was murdered by a team of five assassins in a ballroom in New York City. The shocking event took place in front of a crowd of four hundred people. As news of his murder spread around the world, millions grieved while thousands of FBI and CIA agents and New York City police officers joined the leaders of a Chicago-based religious cult in celebration.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Who killed Malcolm X?
The murdered man was best known as Malcolm X. The cult he had recently left in protest was the Nation of Islam, familiar to the public as the Black Muslims. In the years since that event, considerable evidence has surfaced that the assassination was carried out at the behest of Black Muslim leaders and employed killers from a Black Muslim mosque in New Jersey — and that the FBI and the NYPD were at least familiar with the plans in advance, if in fact they didn’t actively participate through numerous informers t
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Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
2011 book by Manning Marable
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is a biography of Malcolm X written by American historianManning Marable.[2] It won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History.[3]
Pulitzer.org described this as "an exploration of the legendary life and provocative views of one of the most significant African-Americans in U.S. history, a work that separates fact from fiction and blends the heroic and tragic."[3] In the book, Marable concludes that Malcolm X exaggerated his early criminal career, and engaged in a homosexual relationship with a white businessman. He also concludes that some of the killers of Malcolm X are still alive and were never charged.[4]
Reception
[edit]Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention was nominated for the National Book Award,[5] and The New York Times ranked it among the 10 Best Books of 2011.[6] It was one of three nominees for the inaugural Andr