A couple of weeks ago my wife and I accompanied my brother to Hartford to attend the induction ceremonies for the Hartford Public High School Hall of Fame. Needless to say, I was not being inducted, but my brother, the best swimmer HPHS ever saw, was. I can claim credit only for having started the family tradition of engaging in competitive swimming and also for having gotten my brother into the Hall by contacting the folks running it.
But this post isn’t about my brother.
Everyone attending had an assigned table at the Chowder Pot. We were assigned to a table with members of the family of Les Payne. Mr Payne is deceased, so he was represented by his wife, son, and daughter. From what I gathered, he was a reasonably good athlete, but what put him over the top was his career in journalism, which included a Pulitzer Prize for reporting, and, most recently and posthumously, a Pulitzer Prize for The Dead Are Arising, The Life of Malcolm X. His daughter Tamara assisted him in the 18 years of research that went into the book. The family told us about the book, and I, in turn, told them about my son’s book. I downloaded their book and they ordered my son’s at the same time.
I’ve just finished it, and I highly recommend it. As I mentioned earlier the Paynes, father and daughter, researched it for 18 years, and the fruits of that research are evident. They tracked down and interviewed people that interacted with Malcolm X from back when he was just a child and throughout the rest of his life, as well as combing through official records. Indeed, some of their sources were people who confessed on their death beds to things they’d denied or hidden for years.
The book is by no means a hagiography. Malcolm’s warts are fully exposed, as is the origin of the Nation of Islam, which like so many of our home grown religions (see Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and I’m sure there’s more) was founded by a charlatan and grifter and which became, in many respects, particularly after Malcolm left it, a criminal enterprise.
The book also gives, so far as I am aware (and I’m no expert) the most exhaustive and detailed description of Malcolm’s murder, which was planned and executed by the Black Muslims, while the FBI and local police, fully aware of their intentions, stood by and did nothing to stop it. Two men who were innocent of the murder served years in prison for the murder, while two of those actually responsible never served a day and were never charged with anything. No honest attempt was ever made to find those responsible. That’s the way things were in J. Edgar Hoover’s America.
As an old Hartford boy, I enjoyed the chapter on Malcolm’s speech at the Bushnell, which Mr. Payne attended with his white college roommate. It was apparently an eye opening experience for him, for as his daughter relates in the introduction, he said that he went in as a “Negro” and came out as a proud black man. I was personally unaware that Malcolm spent a lot of time in Hartford helping to establish the local Black Muslim chapter, but then, I guess I would have been. I was a kid at the time, and I doubt that he was covered extensively, or at all, in the white media. I’m also guessing that Payne chose to emphasize Malcolm’s Hartford experiences given his connection to the city and access to some of the Hartford folks who worked alongside Malcolm.
The book is a great biography, but more than that, at least for a white reader, it is an excellent and thorough elucidation of the experience of black people in the time periods that it covers. So for all those reasons, plus the fact that it was written by an HPHS alum (“HPHS! Say it louder, we’re the best”) I highly recommend it.
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