The Dead Are Arising, Tamara Payne
The Dead Are Arising, Tamara Payne
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The Dead Are Arising
The Life of Malcolm X

Author: Tamara Payne, Les Payne

Narrator: Dion Graham

Unabridged: 18 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 10/20/2020


Synopsis

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 dozens 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-beforeseen 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 following 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kevin

“The French people have placed the negro soldier in France on an equality with the white man, and it has gone to their heads.” ~Woodrow Wilson, 1919 Malcolm X was a brilliant, courageous badass who saw American Christianity as an obstacle to equality and justice... “[Malcolm] launched a frontal assaul......more

Goodreads review by Murtaza

Like many people around the world, The Autobiography of Malcolm X had a powerful impact on my own life and upbringing. For a certain sort of person, Malcolm X remains something close to a saint. He was a symbol of both resistance to oppression and inextinguishable human potential. For people who lov......more

Goodreads review by Meike

Now Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2021 Winner of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2020 Les Payne worked on this book for almost 30 years, and it shows: This account of Malcolm X's life, completed after Payne's death by his daughter and primary researcher Tamara, finds an organic and often poetic......more