“Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade,” Malcolm X said in his landmark 1965 The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “This impression,” he said, “is due entirely to my prison studies.”
Malcolm Little dropped out of high school in the Boston area at age fifteen before completing ninth grade. Known on the streets as “Detroit Red,” he pursued sundry hustles. In late 1946, he was caught for a string of home burglaries in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and received an eight-to-ten-year prison sentence. When he was released on parole in 1952, he was Malcolm X.
If the storyline seems familiar, that is because it has been well told, first by Malcolm (with Alex Haley), later by filmmaker Spike Lee, and more recently by the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographers Manning Marable and Les and Tamara Payne.
However, by focusing only on the early years of his life, independent scholar Patrick Parr adds new depth to our understanding of Malcolm’s rise from the depths of the criminal justice system to the world stage. Parr’s Malcolm Before X is an important addition to the literature on both black nationalism and the US criminal justice system.
Parr’s initial chronology is a bit unorthodox. The book opens with Malcolm leading a crew of small-time burglars in Roxbury. (That the circle included white women would contribute to Malcolm’s harsh sentence.) Rather than move forward to prison, Parr circles back to the figurehead’s ancestral roots in Mali. A whirlwind tour through Grenada, Georgia, Canada, Philadelphia, Omaha, and East Lansing brings us back to the Massachusetts prison system.
At Charlestown State Prison, Malcolm famously meets the figure who first lit an intellectual fire under him: John Elton Bembry, known on the inside as “Bimbi.” In his autobiography, X describes Bembry as the Charlestown prison library’s…
Auteur: Theodore Hamm
