The Dead Are Arising

Les Payne, a Pulitzer winning investigative reporter and Newsday editor, spent nearly thirty years interviewing everyone still alive who had known Malcolm X, siblings, classmates, ministers, rivals, undercover officers, and when Payne died suddenly in 2018 his daughter Tamara, his principal researcher, finished the book. The Dead Are Arising is the result, and it does what only that kind of reporting can: it rebuilds Malcolm's life from eyewitnesses rather than from the Autobiography's own mythmaking. The early chapters recover the Garveyite parents, the Nebraska and Michigan childhood terrorized by white vigilantes, and the hustling Detroit Red years, correcting the received legend at point after point with the testimony of the brothers and sisters who were in the room. Two reconstructions anchor the book's reputation. The first is a 1961 meeting in Atlanta, ordered by Elijah Muhammad, at which Malcolm sat across a kitchen table negotiating with the Ku Klux Klan about land and mutual enemies, an episode Payne rebuilt minute by minute from participants and which crystallized Malcolm's growing disgust with the Nation of Islam's leadership. The second is the fullest account yet assembled of the assassination at the Audubon Ballroom, naming the Newark mosque killers, tracing what the NYPD and FBI knew and withheld, and indicting the official version decades before the courts caught up. The portrait that emerges, of an incorruptible man remaking himself to the end, is neither hagiography nor takedown. The book won the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and it now stands beside the Autobiography as its indispensable check.