“I have a dream that one day every valley will be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed . . . So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire . . . from the mighty mountains of New York . . . from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado . . . From the curvaceous peaks of California . . . let freedom ring from Stone Mountain Georgia . . . from every hill . . . of Mississippi . . . when we let it ring . . . from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing . . . thank God almighty, we are free at last.” Speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered on August 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC / “I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.” So argued Malcolm X in his “Ballot or the Bullet” speech delivered at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, just months after King's “I Have a Dream” Speech. Malcolm X explained that he was not an American. Rather, he considered himself to be “one of the 22 million black people who are victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.” Consequently, Malcolm X spoke “not as an American, or a patriot, or a flagsaluter, or a flag-waver” but instead “as a victim of [the] American system.” Malcolm X viewed the American landscape as a nightmare. He did not see a Promised Land; America - at least for African Americans - was not a bright “City on a Hill” illuminating the world in all its glory.

Elijah Muhammad rarely granted press interviews. His reluctance to indulge reporters was at least partially due to a history of unflattering news coverage of his organization, the Nation of Islam, which was routinely characterized in the media as racist, extremist, and un-American. Moreover, Muhammad's modest formal education and advanced age - he was in his early sixties when his group became the object of dubious press scrutiny in 1959 - further discouraged active engagement with news organizations that were largely in the hands of whites hostile to his message. His last significant encounter with newsmen took place in January 1972 in the comfort of his Chicago mansion. It was a far-reaching exploration of topics, ranging from matters of theology (he reaffirmed a decades-long commitment to a racially exclusivist iteration of Islam) to his own reaction to dissenters within the Nation (he summarily dismissed their influence as negligible). A press inquiry about one apostate in particular did elicit specific comments from Muhammad, even though the individual in question had died several years earlier. When asked about Malcolm X, a former national minister of the Nation, Muhammad appeared roiled by the query. “I would not lose any time with a man that has been talked and talked about for years,” Muhammad shot back, before veering away into other subject matter.

In August 2008, S. Shankar wrote in the Hindu newspaper, “Now the world is full of Barack Obama, but 50 years ago another young, charismatic Black American filled the world in his own way.” That precursor was Malcolm X, who had filled the world with his indictment of US racism and empire. Shankar invoked his memory to argue that the rise of Obama did not signal, as some would have it, the arrival of a “post-racial” American society. Obama had just captured the nomination of the Democratic party (months before his election as the first African American president in US history). To Shankar, the federal government's shocking negligence in the face of the massive suffering wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed the persistence of racism in American social and political life. “In celebrating Obama, there is no need to forget either Malcolm or Katrina,” Shankar concluded. That Obama transcends race is an article of faith among his supporters; his approach could not be further in temperament from Malcolm's confrontational stance on racism. To be sure, when Malcolm was alive, Southern white extremists could brutalize blacks with impunity. Still, Shankar's comparison reminds us that Obama is a product of the history of the black freedom movement in the United States. That history belongs to the world, due in no small part to Malcolm X's travels to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and the importance of his Islamic faith to his rejection of the Nation of Islam's antiwhite doctrine. The African American struggle for equality, which for some, like Shankar, was embodied by Malcolm, inspired people all over the world, throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

“As a child of the Civil Rights movement, I find it amazing to wake up and find that a black neoconservative Supreme Court justice named Clarence Thomas has suddenly become the symbolic guardian of racial justice in America. And as if that weren't amazing enough, it turns out that Clarence Thomas's erstwhile hero is, was, or has been none other than Malcolm X.” Patricia J. Williams, “Clarence X, Man of the People ” / There are at least two ways of considering the relationship between Malcolm X and conservative traditions within African American political and intellectual culture. One involves assessing the ways in which contemporary black conservatives have attempted to write Malcolm X into their intellectual canon, claiming him as one of their own. This approach focuses largely on what might be called the politics of appropriation and draws us into debates - among liberals, leftists, conservatives, nationalists, and others - over who and what can be rightfully regarded as part of Malcolm X's historical legacy. Second only to Martin Luther King, Jr., he is one of the most appropriated figures in African American culture; in being made to stand for so much to so many, his image runs the risk of being reduced to an empty signifier. Yet, many continue to return to this particularly iconic figure for sustenance, insight, and, invariably, legitimation. That some contemporary black conservatives would also assert the right to drink from this replenishing well is hardly surprising.

This essay explores the legacy of Malcolm X as it is reinterpreted among contemporary young people with an emphasis on his influence on African American Muslim youth in university communities through rap music. Islam has been the iconic religion of hip-hop (rapping, dejaying, breakdancing, and graffiti art) since the beginning of this complex youth-music culture in New York City in the 1970s. Previous studies of Malcolm's influence on hiphop have focused on his early years as a hustler and later as a member of the Nation of Islam with an interpretation that resonates with the urban street-reporting themes of drug dealing and incarceration in gangsta rap. However, analysis of the aspects of Malcolm X's Pan-African internationalist insights and programs in the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity that are reinterpreted by contemporary rappers and MCs (masters of ceremonies) sheds light on the progressive potential of the music and the complex interrelationship between Islam, hip-hop, and black nationalism in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The university-based hip-hop audience with regard to the influence of Malcolm X is important for several reasons. Malcolm's Autobiography is now part of the canon of some university curricula and therefore Muslim and non-Muslim youth in university communities have become sophisticated, critical readers of his religious and political philosophies.

Now that we have entered what some pundits have called a post-racial America - one in which race should matter less but often matters even more - the best-selling memoirs of James McBride (Color of Water) and Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father) may eclipse the Autobiography of Malcolm X in college courses and in bookstore sales. One of the reasons for this possibility is that white American mothers figure prominently in the lives of these black men, thus it could be argued that their autobiographical selves make the case for their Americanness in a way unavailable to Malcolm X. Framed another way, McBride's and Obama's direct connection and lineage to the white world may render them more sympathetic, more appealing, to white Americans than black male autobiographers whose backgrounds do not embody such perceived symbolic cache. Moreover, when he was the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, President Obama's biracial story cultivated even more interest among white Americans. But if we were to jettison Malcolm's Autobiography from our collective memory, we would remove a foundational and innovative text in an ever-evolving African American autobiographical tradition. A most powerful voice that spoke honestly and, yes, erringly, about the role of black men in American society, Malcolm offered intriguing and at times controversial notions of what constituted appropriate black male behavior. The Autobiography is a bridge between Richard Wright's Black Boy and the perils of life under Southern and Northern Jim Crow and the forerunner to literary contemporaries like McBride, Obama, and Nathan McCall (Makes Me Wanna Holler).

In the early stages of this project, I told a colleague that I had been asked to write an article about women and Malcolm X. She didn't directly respond to this news but her expression was a talking book which seemed to ask: Is there really anything more for a black feminist to say about Malcolm X? I understand the premise of the question. After all, black feminists and womanists have already sculpted the dominant theoretical narrative on Malcolm X. For example, in the 1980s and 90s, black feminists wrote a series of essays generally praising his political insight and excoriating his misogyny. Michelle Wallace, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and Barbara Ransby, among others, depicted Malcolm X as a race leader who was either the precursor to the core of misogyny at the center of Black Power politics, a warrior among the various leaders of the civil rights and black nationalist organizations of the 1960s, or a religious figure whose ministerial vocation and penchant for truth-seeking may well have enabled him, had he lived, to become a champion for women's empowerment. Women writers in the Black Arts movement such as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Sonia Sanchez saw Malcolm X as a black hero and praised his love for his people as well as his strength, courage, and intellectual integrity. More recently, scholars such as Tracye Williams and Farah Jasmine Griffin have argued that black women can love what Malcolm X stood for but they must still challenge the sexism reflected in his teachings and in the movements he inspired.

Afrocentricity, as an intellectual idea, owes much of its popularity to the political trajectory charted by Malcolm X. This is not to claim that he was an Afrocentrist for clearly there were elements of Malcolm's life that were not strictly Afrocentric. Indeed the Afrocentric paradigm, as conceptualized by Ama Mazama, declares that Africans' liberation “rests upon the ability to systematically replace European ways of thinking, being, consciously replace them with ways that are germane to the African cultural experience.” One could argue that Malcolm's attachment to Islam in many ways mirrored that of other Africans to Christianity and that the latter was problematic from an Afrocentric perspective. Although Malcolm was clearly on the road toward a full appreciation of the subject position of Africans within our own history, he was not sufficiently knowledgeable of historical processes to incorporate information about the role of Africans in African or world history in his discourse. He was, on the other hand, devoted to seeking the rise of a black nationalist consciousness, which in itself was a major step toward the idea of mental liberation. Afrocentricity is a paradigmatic intellectual perspective that privileges African agency within the context of African history and culture transcontinentally and trans-generationally. This means that location is essential to any analysis that involves African culture and behavior whether literary or economic, political or cultural.

It is possible to judge Malcolm X a failure. His many admirers can point to no law that he changed, to no sustainable movement that he established, nor even to a lunch counter that he desegregated. He never led his followers in large-scale collective political action, never organized a mass protest march, and never was associated with the passage of any piece of legislation designed to improve the condition of African Americans. What Malcolm did do was talk, and both during his lifetime and since, this talk has been criticized as taking the place of real political action. Whitney Young, for example, the head of the National Urban League, once complained that Malcolm “never got anybody a job or decent housing. . .but you could find his name in the TV Guide program listings more times than Johnny Carson's.” Such assessments stem from assumptions about the function of public address that must be modified before we can appreciate Malcolm's unique contributions to political culture. Because his legacy consists primarily of all those words, in order to assess it in any meaningful way we need first a more robust way to assess the impact of those words. Malcolm did his political work by filling the newspapers and airways with ideas, not by crowding the streets and jails with bodies. As A. Peter Bailey, who worked closely with Malcolm, put it: “When someone asks, 'what did he leave, there are no buildings, no this, no that,' I say, 'Minds. He left minds.'”

The scholarly literature that engages Malcolm X, either specifically or within the context of a broader argument or investigation, is voluminous. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive; it consists primarily of a selection of the materials cited in this volume, together with books by the contributors and a small number of supplemental sources. The list has been divided under headings to make it easier to locate resources on particular aspects of Malcolm's life and legacy, though the interdisciplinary nature of the scholarship renders these categories somewhat fluid. The first headings contain primary materials - Malcolm's speeches, biographies of Malcolm, memoirs of those who lived and worked with Malcolm, and of course the Autobiography. The next sections are scholarly books and monographs, book chapters and essays, and materials related to film adaptations. After that are sections of more general or background information on the Nation of Islam, the 1960s civil rights movement, and African American culture. Within each category the entries are listed alphabetically by author or title; and except where indicated, entries for books, book chapters, and essays are intermixed.

Malcolm X's story hit cineplexes in 1992 as a biopic with a documentary inflected style. Framed in neon marquee lights, the Hollywood film prompted many to return to, or first encounter, the iconic racial spokesperson, both infamous and celebrated. The film was the latest installment of what scholars describe as the mythmaking enterprise of Malcolm X. It also provided a large-scale, familiar forum to consider the legacy of the American civil rights movement and its core debates between integration and racial autonomy. Indeed, the prospect of bringing Malcolm X to Hollywood ignited longstanding tensions between black nationalism and mainstream America, radicalism and respectability, and prophets and profitability. These tensions reflect problems of genre and visual culture, as much as biography and politics, because as Thomas Doherty avers, “For the young Malcolm Little, as for black Americans everywhere, the classical Hollywood screen was an inventory of negative stereotypes and a 35mm projection of white power.” The film, with its surrounding hype, became a platform for high-stakes scholarly and political discussions. The effort to bring Malcolm X to Hollywood had begun in 1968 when Columbia Pictures asked famed writer and civil rights spokesman James Baldwin to adapt The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Film producer Marvin Worth bought the story rights in 1967 from Alex Haley, the collaborator on the 1965 autobiography, and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's widow.

Malcolm X's autobiography, written in conjunction with Alex Haley, is a gripping narrative of identity transformation. It is the extraordinary story of a young black child, Malcolm Little, adopted into a white household, who then becomes the ghetto hustler, Detroit Red, who in turn converts to the Nation of Islam and becomes Minister Malcolm X, and who finally breaks with the Nation of Islam to become El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, an international human-rights activist. The overall metamorphosis has a clear positive direction: each transformation seems to transcend the former, each brings with it new lessons, and the emergent Malcolm X could be likened to a butterfly escaping a cocoon. From the point of view of studying the identity and development of Malcolm X, the Autobiography is as seductive as it is gripping. It seduces the reader into conflating the Autobiography with the actual life and identity of Malcolm X in three ways. First, autobiographies have inherent rhetorical power because they are first-person accounts. For example, autobiographies have historically been used as a mode of truth telling by people who have experienced a psychotic episode, a spiritual conversion, or slavery. In the case of Malcolm's Autobiography this power is greatly heightened by the vivid writing style, which convinces the reader of the authenticity of the first-person account.

Malcolm X is important because his experiences are typical of the experiences that transformed African Americans in the twentieth century - the move from rural peasantry to industrial proletariat to postindustrial redundancy - all of which prepared them for a truly revolutionary role. He is one of the two most important black leadership figures in the second half of the twentieth century. Along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X clarified the alternatives facing black people in the postindustrial period. Malcolm's intervention into the movement was primarily ideological. Tens of thousands of black people were energized by him to take action. He rearticulated their moods, feelings, and sensibilities in ways that helped them gain greater clarity as to who they were, what their problems were, and how they might go about building a movement to liberate themselves. He did this not through innovative thinking and ideas but through a down-to-earth rearticulation of the black radical tradition. / Exponent of the black radical tradition: ideology, culture, and class / The black radical tradition had roots in nineteenth-century Pan-Negro nationalism, twentieth-century Pan-Africanism and Garveyism, and the class struggle approach of the African Blood Brotherhood. Malcolm X came to understand more perfectly this black radical tradition in the last eleven months of his life.

The present chapter is not concerned with Bede's intellectual achievement, but, rather, with the political, social and economic circumstances of his life. Much of what we know of these circumstances comes from his own historical work. Bede's prose is lucid, and his style engaging. Such qualities have helped to secure a warm home for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the hearts of readers in every generation since his own. Early England and its Church are generally seen through Bede's eyes. Necessarily so: he is the chief source. But the simplicity and apparent candour of his style may deceive. In his historical work Bede deployed outstanding abilities to support strong convictions and homiletic intentions. With him, as with others like him, it is nearly as important to attend to what he does not say as to what he does. For example, mark that in the moving, almost elegiac, autobiographical passage in his Ecclesiastical History (V. 24) he fails to tell us who his father was. It is a fair guess (though unprovable) that his father was an aristocrat. Bede moved in the highest company. He sent a draft of his Ecclesiastical History to King Ceolwulf for comment. He was on visiting terms with Ceolwulf's cousin, Egbert, bishop (soon archbishop) of York; and it was to Egbert that he wrote the letter of detailed reformist rebuke which gives his harsh judgement on the Northumbrian Church. These relationships suggest that he was near to a circle of men in power.

Wearmouth-Jarrow is famously a single monastery in two places. This is what both Bede's History of the Abbots (chs. 7, 15, 18) and the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith (chs. 11, 16, 19, 25) tell us on numerous occasions. However, the fact that the point is repeated in both these texts suggests either that it was not common knowledge, or that it was not universally accepted. It is not difficult to see that in certain respects the description of the two houses as forming a single monastery is misleading, hiding a rather more complex reality. St Peter's, Wearmouth, was after all founded in 674 and St Paul's, Jarrow, around seven years later in 681/2. Moreover, the fact that the two houseswere founded some years apart meant that their standing in canon law was initially distinct. Thus, when Benedict Biscop secured a privilege from Pope Agatho in 678/80, it only covered the foundation at Wearmouth, since the sister-house was not yet in existence (HA, ch. 6; LC, ch. 16). Ceolfrith, therefore, had to secure a separate privilege for Jarrow, which he did from Pope Sergius in 701 (HA, chs. 16, 18; LC, ch. 20). There was, therefore, a period when the part of the monastery based at Wearmouth held a papal privilege, while Jarrow did not. One might assume that the distinction between the two houses evaporated after Ceolfrith had secured a privilege for Jarrow.

Readers of the Ecclesiastical History may be tempted to skip the opening chapter, which seems to be more about obsolete geography than about history. Yet this prologue tells us much about Bede's conception of science and its place within his wider enterprises of learning. First, the island of Britain is carefully measured in its length, breadth and coastal circumference. Then there follows a catalogue of the island's natural endowments: its plant and animal life, its hot and salt springs and its minerals. Britain literally exudes health: its waters have medicinal properties, and the jet from its mines repels serpents. Finally, the northerly latitude of Britain makes for exceptionally long summer days and winter nights. One could say, then, that Bede frames his vision of English identity by measured space, measured time and an inventory of the natural world. These two signposts - nature and measurement - also mark off the frontiers of Bede's science. They are the substance of his two early treatises On the Nature of Things (c. 703) and On Times (703), and they are woven together in his magisterial The Reckoning of Time (725).