Simon Pearson

The Many Lives of Malcolm X

May 16, 2025

Malcolm X was not just a man but an ongoing process. A revolutionary for us all—even children—his journey from rage to clarity shows how radical truth is learned, lived, and handed down.

On Ibram X. Kendi’s Malcolm Lives and Mark Whitaker’s The Afterlife of Malcolm X

“History is boring when it is dead. And interesting when it is alive. ‘His teaching lives on,’ the marker states after describing Malcolm’s death. His teaching lives on all around us today.”
from Malcolm Lives by Ibram X. Kendi

On 21 February 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in front of his wife and daughters at the Audubon Ballroom. In the moments that followed, he became both martyr and myth. Two recent books—Malcolm Lives by Ibram X. Kendi and The Afterlife of Malcolm X by Mark Whitaker—set out to explore that legacy, one by animating the radical’s life for a younger generation, the other by tracing the long shadow his death has cast over American politics and culture. One breathes new life into Malcolm’s radicalism. The other shows what was done with his corpse.

I have always found Malcolm X to be one of the most powerful political orators of the twentieth century: a speaker of astonishing clarity and force, whose words still crackle with urgency decades after his death. His was a legacy brutally cut short. By bullets, by state neglect, by betrayal. But kept alive through speeches, that Oxford Union debate, documentaries, and books. These two books carry that legacy forward in distinct ways: one by teaching the life, the other by chronicling the afterlife.

Kendi’s Malcolm Lives is pitched to a youthful readership, but it reads like a political education in the classical sense: not a biography so much as a conversion narrative. In brisk, short chapters, Kendi walks us through Malcolm’s transformation from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red to Malcolm X and finally to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. The text is grounded in Kendi’s familiar framework of antiracism, yet it is less sermon than story. We see Malcolm’s father murdered, his mother institutionalised, his dreams dismissed by racist teachers. We follow him through Harlem and Boston, through prison and into the Nation of Islam, and eventually out again. But what Kendi really wants to show is that Malcolm did not simply awaken to truth one day. His radicalism was not innate. It was made. Tested. Sharpened. Broken. Rebuilt. “Malcolm lived an antiracist life,” Kendi writes. “He changed again and again, each time toward more truth, more justice”

Whitaker’s book begins where Kendi’s ends: with the murder. The Afterlife of Malcolm X is a rich, wide-ranging cultural and political history of what Malcolm became in death. Whitaker charts the ever-morphing image of Malcolm X across the past six decades, from the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X to the Black Power movement, from Spike Lee’s film to Black Lives Matter, from Public Enemy to Clarence Thomas. At times it feels like reading a collective Rorschach test. For the left, Malcolm is the icon of righteous rage. For hip hop, a source of style and authenticity. For liberal classrooms, he’s become an approved radical—the kind you name a sports hall after.

Whitaker is particularly sharp on the contradictions of Malcolm’s image. He notes, for instance, that Malcolm was adopted by both John Carlos, who raised a Black Power fist at the 1968 Olympics, and by Clarence Thomas, who now wields power on the US Supreme Court. He charts how “X” became a fashion logo, how The Autobiography was both a radical text and a publishing phenomenon, and how even a liberal consensus could occasionally tolerate Malcolm when he was reduced to a soundbite “by any means necessary” and not the man who said it

If Kendi’s book seeks to revive Malcolm’s soul, Whitaker’s is a dissection of his body politic. The most moving moments in Malcolm Lives come when Kendi compares Malcolm’s transformation to his own. He recounts listening to Malcolm’s speeches while driving between graduate school and home, realising, “we were both around twenty-three when we really started reading.” This is not mere identification. It’s pedagogy by way of autobiography. Kendi’s Malcolm is a mirror for youth: angry, confused, smart, searching. It is only by passing through each stage, Red¹, Satan, Malcolm X, that the man emerges.

Whitaker, by contrast, is less interested in becoming Malcolm than in understanding what America needed from him. His most fascinating chapters are not about Malcolm’s life but his resurrection: as a Black Power icon, a hip hop sample², a Spike Lee joint. He shows how the Black Arts Movement turned Malcolm into poetry and theatre, how albums sampled his speeches, how his style, the sharp suit, the horn-rimmed glasses, became shorthand for revolutionary chic.

And yet, Whitaker never lets the reader forget the danger of canonisation. Malcolm was killed, and not only by men with guns. He was killed, in part, by what this society does to its most radical voices: isolate, discredit, package, sell.

Together, the books form a kind of dialectic. Kendi revives the man. Whitaker unravels the myth. Kendi teaches the politics that shaped Malcolm. Whitaker traces what politics did with him. For Kendi, Malcolm is a model for how to grow into radical truth. For Whitaker, Malcolm is a cipher: absorbed into every faction, claimed by every creed.

If the comparison tilts in favour of Whitaker’s book, it is not because Kendi fails. Kendi has written exactly the book he meant to: concise, moving, instructive. It is a biography for political use. For children. But The Afterlife of Malcolm X is an ambitious, methodical work of cultural history, and its reach is broader. It does not merely honour Malcolm. It asks: Who needed him? Who betrayed him? Who benefited?

In one of his final speeches, Malcolm said: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.” Kendi gives us the man who learned to say that. Whitaker shows us what America did with the words once he was dead.

And that is why these books must be read together. Alone, Kendi’s text risks slipping into moral uplift. Alone, Whitaker’s risks burying the politics under the archive. But together, they reveal a fuller truth: that Malcolm X was not only a man but a process, and one still unfinished.

“For Malcolm’s admirers, his has remained that most compelling of all voices: one that seems to speak not just to you but for you.”
from The Afterlife of Malcolm X by Mark Whitaker

Footnotes

Malcolm was known as “Detroit Red” due to his red hair ↩︎
https://www.whosampled.com/sample/300794/Public-Enemy-Party-for-Your-Right-to-Fight-Malcolm-X-1964-Boston-Radio-Broadcast/ ↩︎

Book Review, Books, Malcolm X, United States of America

The Many Lives of Malcolm X

Footnotes

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