Louis Hilton Reads: The Dead Are Arising
From time to time, I will use this platform to share some of my favorite books. Historical fiction and nonfiction are my favorite books to read, particularly biographies about iconic people and civil rights heroes.
Today would have been Malcolm X’s 98th birthday. In honor of Detroit Red, I have selected The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne, as my first Louis Hilton Read. This book went on to win a number of awards, including the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction (my copy, pictured here, was purchased before they won those awards.)
My copy of The Dead Are Arising, with some of my other favorite historical and biographical texts of 2020.
The Dead Are Arising by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Les Payne and his daughter Tamara Payne is a once in a lifetime text. The title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm used as a call to action. When he successfully convinced his followers to fight racism, he would say that the dead were truly arising. The book took over 30 years to write. Tamara Payne - her father’s primary researcher - finished the book upon Les Payne’s sudden passing in 2018.
Les Payne, who was inspired by Malcolm, wanted to provide a holistic portrait of Malcolm’s life. As a result, he set out to interview any individual who knew Malcolm X; to me, they nailed it. The book was thoroughly researched and the dozens of interviews they conducted with family and friends provided great insight into his life and influences. I had the pleasure of hearing Tamara Payne speak when my favorite bookstore, Source Booksellers in Detroit, conducted a virtual talk when the book was released in Fall of 2020. I loved hearing her talk about the origin of the book and her writing and research process.
I’m sure you’re thinking, what makes this book so special? I, like many, have read the Autobiography of Malcolm X. However, I believe The Dead Are Arising provides a more in depth view of Malcolm’s life and work, providing a sort of supplement to the Autobiography that fact checks the historical autobiographical text. For instance, who knew that Malcolm’s parents were revolutionaries in their own right!? How is that not more widely known!? His parents were devout followers of Marcus Garvey. Malcolm’s father traveled and organized on behalf of the Garvey movement, and his parents even started their own chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Omaha, Nebraska. This is not mentioned in his seminal Autobiography, even though it certainly sheds some light on his early influences and why he chose the path he did. Raised by Garveyite parents there is no wonder he chose to devote his life to the cause of liberation.
I highly recommend this book for the background it provides on one of the midwest’s most significant people, but I also encourage people to read this book for the historical facts. Here are a few that struck me:
The largest Klan presence outside of the South was in Indiana, Colorado and Michigan.
President Woodrow Wilson enforced segregation even at the federal level. He allowed the Treasury Department and Post Office to segregate Black civil-service employees from whites by physical makeshift wooden partitions.
Prior to Harlem and other places in New York, Black people mainly lived in the Wall Street area downtown. In 1910 Harlem was only 9.89% Black.
Housing Discrimination at the federal level was rampant. The book details that “ 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 middle class.” Essentially the federal government typically gave Black people money to rent homes and white people money to own them, no doubt leading to systemic wealth inequality.
Next on my Malcolm X list is to dig into my copy of Manning Marable’s, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, another Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Malcolm’s life.
Until then, I highly recommend The Dead Are Arising. It’s well written, easy to digest, and provides a revelatory account of Malcolm X’s life story and purpose.