In the summer of 1991, as Spike Lee was making the last revisions to the shooting script for his Malcolm X biopic, poet and Black Arts icon Amiri Baraka staged a rally in Harlem to protest Lee’s involvement with the project. Insisting that Lee had neither the directing chops nor the political understanding to bring Malcolm’s radical message or story to the screen, Baraka declared, “We will not let Malcolm X’s life be trashed to make middle-class Negroes sleep easier. Based on the movies I’ve seen, I’m horrified of seeing Spike Lee making Malcolm X.”
Mocking Baraka as self-appointed “High Minister of Black Culture and Ethics,” Lee shot back, “Where’s [Baraka’s] book on Malcolm X? When Malcolm was on this earth, Amiri Baraka was LeRoi Jones, running around the Village being a beatnik … I was 7 years old so I had an excuse. I had to be home by dark.”
Former Newsweek editor and NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Mark Whitaker recounts this dispute in his enthralling new book, The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America. Though numerous Black artists, intellectuals, journalists, and other public figures weighed in on the topic, Whitaker’s retelling gives the last word to Autobiography of Malcolm X co-author Alex Haley: “Probably no scriptwriter alive could write a script that would satisfy the diverse groups who feel an ownership of Malcolm.”
In the last year of Malcolm X’s life, after his rancorous departure from the Nation of Islam (NOI)—a movement that his tireless preaching, debating, mosque-building, and captivating charisma had expanded exponentially—Malcolm X was a nationalist in search of a nation. Even as he made Hajj to Mecca, converted to Orthodox Islam, worked to build his new Organization for Afro-American Unity, and forged alliances with post-colonial African leaders to bring human rights charges to the United Nations against the United States, Malcolm X was broke, burned out of his house, hounded by the NYPD and FBI, and marked for death by the NOI.
When his assassination came during a speech at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, one man was arrested on the scene but crucial evidence was swept aside as ballroom employees moved the speaker’s podium to the basement and moved on to the routine business of preparing the venue for the next event.
Whitaker’s book tells the remarkable story of how Malcolm X’s memory refused to die. He explores “the extraordinary impact that Malcolm X has continued to have on American culture and politics since the assassination—a mark that in the sixty years after his death arguably far surpassed what he was able to achieve in less than forty years of life.”
Whitaker told an early chapter of this story in his 2023 book, Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement. That book recounts how the 1966 reissue of The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a $1.25 paperback not only became the bestseller Alex Haley believed it would be, but transformed Black consciousness and inspired revolutionary Black leaders like Black Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and newly elected Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman Stokely Carmichael, who took the veteran Civil Rights organization in a radical new direction.
Much like Peniel E. Joseph in Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, Whitaker exposes the threads that connect Black Power and the Black Arts movement, both of which emerged shortly after Malcolm X’s death and largely in response to his efforts to raise Black consciousness. Whitaker does a masterful job of identifying the many Black activists and icons who were transformed by their exposure to Malcolm X’s story and recorded speeches and sermons, from athletes John Carlos at the Mexico City Olympics and NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to militant hip-hop artists like Public Enemy and KRS-One, who sampled his speeches and incorporated his ideas to stunning effect. Whitaker also draws into Malcolm X’s after-orbit such varied and seemingly un-Malcolm-like Black political figures as Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas, both of whom have invoked the nationalist preacher’s inspiration and acknowledged their debt to him even as their politics and beliefs diverge dramatically from one another’s and from Malcolm’s own teachings as we generally understand them.
The assassination of Malcolm X remains an essential and inescapable part of the story and Malcolm’s legacy. “Who Killed Malcolm X?” is not only the title of a 2020 Netflix documentary series but a question (along with who ordered his murder and whose actions or inaction enabled it) that has obsessed biographers, investigative journalists, and “Malcolmologist” devotees for decades. Whitaker doesn’t set out so much to solve the riddle as to chronicle the search for clues and what has driven and frustrated the often single-minded souls who have inched ever-closer to the truth over the intervening decades.
In a wide-ranging interview exploring a book that expertly narrates “the story of the story” with often breathtaking breadth of insight, Mark Whitaker and I discussed The Afterlife of Malcolm X and why Malcolm X remains all around us and ahead of us 60 years after his death.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One of the things that was really surprising and gratifying to me reading The Afterlife of Malcolm X was that you started the story with Peter Goldman. Goldman’s The Death and Life of Malcolm X was my introduction to Malcolm X, and I feel like that book had as much of an impact on me as The Autobiography, because I read it first. I was always curious about who he was and what his relationship to Malcolm X had been. Was he someone that you knew at Newsweek?
Mark Whitaker
Peter Goldman was a legend at Newsweek. I started working for Newsweek as a college intern in the late Seventies, and by that point, he was not only the number one writer on Civil Rights, but also on politics. I believe he holds the record for the most number of Newsweek cover stories, and that’s what we at Newsweek knew him for. I was aware that he had written a book about Malcolm X, and when Spike Lee’s movie came out in ’92, I wrote a cover story for Newsweek called “The Meaning of Malcolm X.” Like a lot of us, I had read The Autobiography as a teenager and it had a deep impact on me, but I hadn’t really thought that much about Malcolm X. But then in the reporting that we did for that cover story, it became clear that his legacy was still very much alive in much of Black America, and he was being rediscovered at that point by the hip-hop generation and fans of Spike Lee’s movies and because of the X caps and so forth.
I’ve kind of been following Malcolm ever since. I wrote a review of Les Payne’s book when it came out in 2020. But it was really only when I dug into this project that I realized what a seminal figure Peter—Goldie, as we call him—was in all of this. He knew Malcolm, interviewed him five times in depth before the assassination, and was one of the few white reporters—along with maybe M. S. Handler from The New York Times, Mike Wallace, eventually, and a few others—that Malcolm came to trust. Then he writes this book, which was really the most important and best book about Malcolm that came out after The Autobiography, long before Manning Marable’s biography and Les Payne’s and other books. Then, along with William Kunstler, he gets involved in trying to get the case of the two men who were wrongfully convicted for the assassination reopened in the late Seventies, unsuccessfully. But he plays a role in uncovering all this new evidence about where the actual assassins came from in Newark.
And then he writes several new editions with new information that’s come out of the book, and then he’s around to actually see the exoneration of Muhammad Aziz in 2021 at the age of 90. So he saw the whole story. And Manning Marable credits him in his acknowledgements and in the footnotes of his book. The filmmakers of Who Killed Malcolm X? talked to him. He didn’t really want to be an on-air consultant for them, but they do acknowledge him at the end of the film.
He’s an amazing writer. He really captured what made Malcolm so exceptional, but [his time with Malcolm] also changed his thinking. It made him see the whole race issue from a different perspective.
So anybody who’s studied Malcolm over the decades knows about Peter Goldman, and yet I don’t think that he’s really gotten the credit that he deserves. From a historical perspective, but also as someone who knows Peter and has a lot of respect for him, if this book serves to give him the historical credit that he deserves for his role in this story, that makes me very happy.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
At the time I was discovering The Death and Life and The Autobiography in 1987, the first Eyes on the Prize documentary series had just come out, and cemented our notion of the canonical Civil Rights Movement, ending in Selma. Malcolm X was very much outside that. He’s not even mentioned. I think one point that your new book and Saying It Loud make clear is that the movement continued to grow and change and evolve away from where it was in 1965 after Selma, and that Malcolm and his legacy were instrumental to all of that.
Mark Whitaker
I think it was true then, and it continues to be true now that there’s this kind of official nostalgia for the golden age of the Civil Rights Movement that’s associated with King, starting with Brown v. Board, the Montgomery Bus boycott, going all the way to Selma. Then what happened after that, which I write about in Saying It Loud, starting in 1966, really changed everything but is less studied, less appreciated, the complexities of it. And that’s kind of what I was trying to get at there.
The interesting thing about Malcolm is he becomes a folk hero in Black America—a posthumous folk hero—almost immediately. And his legacy continues to grow starting in the Sixties with the impact on the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts movement, athletes, and the beginning of Black Studies. He begins to fade a little bit in the Seventies, but then he’s rediscovered by a new generation, the hip-hop generation in the late Eighties, and Spike Lee, who grabs hold of the opportunity. He actually starts to call new attention to Malcolm in Do the Right Thing (1989), and then he insists on directing the Malcolm X movie and so forth.
But it’s never official, it is never top-down. It’s never people pushing for a Malcolm X holiday the way they did for King or a Malcolm X Day in schools and so forth. It’s always young people, first largely Black, but then later white folks as well, who keep rediscovering him, keep elevating him, keep finding new stuff to be turned on about.
There was a time, starting in the Sixties, and then since then, when critics said that you can’t completely trust The Autobiography because Alex Haley—once Malcolm wasn’t around to see the final draft—created a version of Malcolm that tried to make him seem more mainstream and more like King. Now you have historians and biographers like Peniel Joseph and Jonathan Eig who are saying, “Actually, King was more like Malcolm, becoming a little more radical in the last few years of his life,” and also [suggesting] that they seem potentially to have been on the road to some kind of relationship and alliance in the last year before Malcolm was killed. Just from a historiography point of view, that’s kind of fascinating when you think about how [King and Malcolm X] were portrayed as antagonists and polar opposites when they were both alive, overwhelmingly by the press and by scholars. And that’s completely changed now.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
As you discuss in the book, it was certainly the case in 1989, when Do The Right Thing came out and Spike Lee put quotes from the two of them on the screen at the end of the movie, and nobody knew what to make of it.
Mark Whitaker
I think that was a big moment. James Baldwin had written this piece in Esquire in the early Seventies, saying that they had more in common than people appreciated. [Do the Right Thing] opens with Smiley carrying around the one photo of Malcolm and King together, and it’s a motif throughout. He keeps wandering around like the Wise Fool in a Shakespeare play trying to get people to buy reproductions of that photo. And then at the end, Spike just stands back and scrolls those two quotes, which to this day people are still debating, “What was he trying to say? [By showing Malcolm’s message as King’s scrolls off,] is he saying that Malcolm’s message trumps King’s message?” I like what Wesley Morris said when he talked about it, which was that it was sort of a dialectic. The consciousness of Black America and America in general has to encompass both of these points of view. They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
In the book you show how long and how deeply Spike Lee engaged with Malcolm X, and his determination to get the story of his life and death right. One thing that seems to preoccupy Lee in the movie was Malcolm’s knowledge that he was letting events carry him to his death—as in the double-dolly shot technique Lee uses on his approach to the Audubon Ballroom—and the question of whether he was afraid to die.
Mark Whitaker
One of the things that King and Malcolm have in common is that they both understood that they were prophets. That was their role, and it’s been said about both of them. [Abraham] Heschel called King a prophet after his murder. Peter Goldman talks about how that’s essentially what Malcolm was. If you go back to the religious texts of old, the role of the prophet is to speak inconvenient truths while they’re living that nobody wants to hear—even at the price of being scorned—and then ultimately to be killed or to die young in the process. Their prophecy [is then] appreciated only after their death. King was brought up, obviously, very much in the church. Malcolm was more self-taught, but both of them certainly understood that [being prophets] was essentially their lot or their mission in life. It made them fearless. But it also meant that both of them were living constantly with not only the fear, but the certitude that eventually they would be killed. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that because King, in Memphis, the day before he was killed, said, “I [may not] get there with you,” and Malcolm, for much of 1964 and in 1965, was telling anybody who would listen, “I’m a dead man.” He would say it sometimes to Mike Wallace or whoever with a little bit of a glint in his eye, but he wasn’t kidding.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One topic that comes up in the book is how, over the years, Alex Haley has been accused of trying to make Malcolm seem more like King. You make it clear that Haley understood before anyone else did that The Autobiography of Malcolm X was going to be big, the same way that later he knew Roots was going to change the world. It seems like he didn’t feel the need to go about the writing in a purist way because the important thing was to get it there.
Mark Whitaker
I think that’s true. I have some of it in the book, but if you look at the correspondence between Haley and his agent, Paul Reynolds, and then with [Kenneth] McCormick who was running Doubleday before they ditched the book after the assassination, it’s very clear. He says, “This is going to be a big seller.” He definitely saw the potential. And as far as whether he may have taken license with the story, ultimately you’ve got to give him credit for producing the book that has had the influence that it had. It wasn’t Malcolm’s impulse to tell his personal story, and Haley had to spend months getting him to start talking about his childhood and so forth and so on. From an author’s point of view, that was the right call. The book would not have had the impact that it had if it was just a polemic. And we know from these so-called “missing chapters” that fascinated people for years. Finally one of them was bought by the Schomburg. You can go up there and read it, and it gives you a sense of what the book would’ve been if Haley hadn’t pushed so hard to make it more personal. It’s interesting, but it would not be the classic that it is.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
The Autobiography looms so large that every book about Malcolm X has to contend with it, and to some degree deal with the extra-factual nature of it. Manning Marable spends much of his book trying to unravel what’s true and what isn’t. Your book takes a different approach from any previous work because you’re not writing Malcolm X’s story; you’re telling the story of the story of Malcolm X, as it’s been taken up and repeated and interpreted and evolved over the years.
Mark Whitaker
One of the reasons that Malcolm is both fascinating, but also difficult to pin down is that he was so many things in terms of how he evolved, from the hustler phase to the doctrinaire Nation of Islam phase to the searcher phase in the last year of his life. He’s completely honest about that, not only in the way he’s presented in The Autobiography, but also in the interviews that he gave in the final year. He was completely transparent about the fact that his mind had changed and he felt guilty about some of the things that he had said and positions he had taken before that. He’s not one thing or the other. If you’re a conservative, you can see a conservative message there of self-help and self-improvement and distrust of integration.
If you are, on the other hand, into revolutionary struggle, you can see a call to arms and the whole basis of consciousness-raising and making Black folks understand their history and feel proud, which then leads to Black Power and has an impact on the Women’s Movement and the Gay Rights Movement and so forth and so on. It’s all there.
Because I wasn’t trying to retell the story of his life like Manning Marable or Les Payne, it freed me from having to offer a new revisionist take on his life or trying to somehow correct The Autobiography or other biographies. Because my book is really the story of the story, I was able to show how the study of him has evolved over time, what the strengths and weaknesses were of each one of those books, and how each one was in conversation with the others. So thank you for noticing that. Honestly, I think that there may be other people who just respond more to the direct impact on the major cultural and political figures in the book, but I was also trying to write, in the context of a narrative story, also a kind of a historiographical study of the evolution of scholarship on him.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
In the book you say that one thing that has kept Malcolm alive and relevant is that he was “the father of the soundbite.”
Mark Whitaker
I’ve been thinking a lot about what people are saying today about the style of communication that’s needed in our politics and how it needs to be more authentic. It needs to be more direct. Well, that’s the way Malcolm spoke. I interviewed Anthony Davis, who composed the opera [X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X], about writing arias and music for the Malcolm character. Of course, he’s someone who has gone back and forth his whole career between classical music and jazz. He said that he associates King with Coltrane: lofty, soaring, spiritual. Whereas Malcolm’s voice reminds him of Miles Davis: much more conversational, piercing, humorous.
But in addition to the way in which Malcolm’s message seems very contemporary, his style of communication seems very contemporary today. The way he dressed still seems very contemporary. You can see where young people who had never heard of him, if they just discovered him on YouTube or TikTok, would think this guy is cool in a way that I don’t think they would at this point with King.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
You mentioned the appeal of Malcolm X to conservatives, and you have a very interesting chapter about Clarence Thomas and his identification with Malcolm X. I read reviews of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas when that book came out, and my impression from a distance was that his surprising attachment to Malcolm X was all about this obsession with Black people taking personal responsibility. For Clarence Thomas, this is an excuse for letting white people off the hook, which is clearly nothing Malcolm X would have ever done. But as you explain in the book, Clarence Thomas’s relationship to Malcolm X is in fact much more complex than that.
Mark Whitaker
It’s ironic, because obviously he’s been hypocritical about this in many ways, but at least philosophically, what he connected with Malcolm on was this distrust of integration, basically saying that white America—or America in general—has never been ready for true integration. And that was kind of the promise and the promised land of the Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King. We’ve made some progress in that direction, but much less than I think a lot of people hoped for in the Sixties. Yes, workplaces are more integrated, along with TV shows, media, and so forth. But you look at where people live, where they worship, the populations of jails, and then just the recurring backlash every time there seems to be another push for getting to another level of racial progress. We’re in the midst of another wave of that right now. You can say, “Well, how can Clarence Thomas believe that and be married to a white woman and be hanging out with all these rich white millionaires and so forth?”
So, he doesn’t necessarily walk the walk. But I do think that if you look at a lot of his decisions and other things he said, he does have this skepticism about just how ready white folks are. He clearly believes that Black folks are better off being educated in historically Black colleges and universities than necessarily trying to be the token in elite white universities. Some of that comes from his own experience at Yale and so forth. This is why I probably started going down that road of talking about the conservatives who admire Malcolm X with the same point of view you did. But what really changed my mind was reading some of Thomas’s opinions and then hearing about it from the point of view of his clerk, Stephen Smith, who teaches at Notre Dame.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
Throughout the book, you give a very revealing and convincing account of how our understanding of the assassination of Malcolm X has evolved, how many times people have returned to it, and how difficult it’s been over the decades to sort out fact from fiction. We have three men convicted—one who confessed and said the other two didn’t do it—and two who maintained their innocence and were very recently exonerated after serving long prison terms. Between the books from Goldman and Marable and Payne, the Who Killed Malcolm X? documentary, and the investigative work of Abdur-Rahman Muhammad and others, how close do you feel that we are at this point to knowing the truth about the assassination? Do you think we’re as close as we’re going to get to knowing what happened and who was behind it?
Mark Whitaker
I think that there’s one additional shoe that has dropped but has not been fully explained. We know now that the FBI had a lot of evidence that the assassins came from Newark at the time, or certainly within days and weeks afterwards, that they never even shared with the NYPD or with the prosecutors in the case. The simplest explanation for that is that a lot of those people were informants—including perhaps William X. Bradley, who fired the shotgun that killed him. What a lot of people—including Malcolm’s daughters—still believe is that it went beyond that.
The FBI either knew specifically about the murder plot beforehand or may have played a role in it. And to this day, the FBI and the federal government have resisted coming completely clean about that. More stuff has come out in FBI files starting with the Church committee. And then as a result of various requests, a lot of the stuff about William X. Bradley was protected until he died. But then the filmmakers managed to get their hands on it in the late phases of making that film, and that then got picked up in the reinvestigation of the murder by Cy Vance’s office. But when the lawyer for Muhammad Aziz, after getting this huge settlement from the city and the state, filed a suit against the federal government, they moved immediately to shut it down. And they’re having the same response now to Malcolm’s daughters and their lawsuit.
So that continues to be a mystery. Having said that, I still find it a little implausible that, institutionally, the Chicago headquarters of the Nation of Islam would have cooperated with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Definitely, there were NOI members who were informants on the payroll of both the FBI and the NYPD. But because there was such a deep distrust of white people, you have to get your mind around the idea that these FBI agents in their fedoras are sitting there at the table with top-level NOI people plotting Malcolm’s murder. I just find that hard to imagine. As I say at the end of the book, the day of the official exoneration [of Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam] was one moment of accountability after a very long period. But there’s a reason I say that’s not necessarily the end of the story, because who knows? We still don’t know for sure.
NONFICTION
The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America
By Mark Whitaker
Simon & Schuster
Published May 13, 2025
