Malcolm as Revolutionary and Icon

Malik Miah

The Afterlife of Malcolm X:
An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America
By Mark Whitaker
448 pages, Simon & Shuster, May 2025,
$31 hardcover.

I DIDN’T KNOW what to expect when I opened to read this book. I’ve read most books written about Malcolm X, beginning with The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, who interviewed Malcolm extensively and completed the book after his death.

Since Malcolm X’s February 21, 1965, assassination, I listened to his recorded speeches. How much new research was still unreported or not written about Malcolm X?

The author sets out to explore Malcolm X’s legacy and explain Malcolm’s impact after his untimely assassination. Although there are some details that earlier chroniclers may have missed, this is not a biography. It is an examination of the large footprint and influence that Malcolm left behind as early as three to five years after his death.

Mark Whitaker has compiled a major study of Malcolm X’s influence beyond the Black left, exploring his enduring impact on culture, politics and civil rights. Malcolm’s views remain relevant today to Black activists (Black Lives Matter, for example) and to those seeking fundamental changes in the capitalist system and race relations (self-determination).

In the Trump era of state violence and authoritarianism, it is important to listen to and study what Malcolm X said nearly 60 years ago before he was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York.

A Radical Evolution

Malcolm X was born as Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He became Malcolm X after he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI), but died as El-Hajj Malik Shabazz. after converting to orthodox Sunni Islam in his final year of life.

He is now viewed by the mainstream media and politicians as a sanitized American icon much as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. Jr. — independent of his actual views and vision.

At the time of his assassination Malcolm X was still seen as a dangerous outsider. White America especially found him alienating, and mainstream African American leadership, including civil rights groups and Christian church figures, found him divisive.

Even many of his admirers found him too radical. Although Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our own shining Black prince,” he never received mainstream acceptance. More in death, Whitaker explains, than in his life, Malcolm’s influence has come to leave a deep imprint.

In 1999, during Bill Clinton’s second term, the U.S. Postal Service made a stamp in Malcolm’s image.

Far-reaching Legacy

Mark Whitaker, a former and the first African American editor of Newsweek, tells the story of Malcolm X’s far-reaching posthumous legacy. It stretches from founders of the Black Power Movement such as Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) and Huey Newton (co-founder of the Oakland based Black Panthers Party) to hip-hop pioneers such as Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur.

It also includes leaders of the Black Arts and Free Jazz movements from Amiri Baraka to Maya Angelou, August Wilson and John Coltrane. They credited their political awakening to Malcolm, as did some of the most influential athletes of the time, from Muhammad Ali to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and more.

Spike Lee’s movie biopic, which is worth viewing again, and the Black Lives Matter movement, reintroduced Malcolm X to new generations of young people — Black and white, Asian and African.

Whitaker notes that across the political spectrum, Malcolm X has been cited as a formative influence by both the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama — who venerated Malcolm’s “unadorned insistence on respect” — and the rightwing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was drawn to Malcolm’s messages of self-improvement and economic self-help.

In new detail, Whitaker also retraces the long road to exoneration for two men wrongfully convicted of Malcolm’s murder. It includes confirmation of the role of the FBI and New York City’s police in elimination of Malcolm and other Black leaders.

Malcolm in his final days noted that only the CIA and U.S. government could monitor his overseas trips to the Middle East and Africa. The NOI could not do that.

Ahead of His Time

Malcolm was ahead of his time as a Master of Modern Media before the Internet and social media. He was delivering what would become arresting sound bites, viral videos and memorable memes before those concepts existed.

Whitaker notes that his elegant fashion sense — conservative dark suits and thin ties; the distinctive glasses, with their horn rims on the top and wire rims on the bottom — evoked the look of the bebop era then and remain in vogue among artists and intellectuals even now.

“In the days before Instagram and the proliferation of style as politics, Malcolm understood the power of images,” cultural journalist Vikki Tobak pointed out in an essay about a photograph of Malcolm taken by Eve Arnold for Life magazine in 1960.

Wearing a fedora rakishly tilted over his head, Malcolm sat as Tobak described, “in profile, stoic, refined and stylish, his hand draped loosely on his neck to frame a ring on his finger bearing the star and crescent moon.”

Behind the Assassination

Stretching over this long-time span, Whitaker explains, has also been a murder mystery: Who really killed Malcolm X?

The book traces that detective story, which began with the capture of a young Black New Jersey resident named Talmadge Hayer minutes after the assassination, as he fled after dropping a .45 caliber pistol inside the Audubon Ballroom.

In the days after, two enforcers from the Harlem NOI Mosque known as Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson were also arrested. In the middle of the murder trial, Hayer abruptly changed his testimony to swear that the other two weren’t involved, but all three were convicted nonetheless and sentenced to life in prison.

In the end, Butler and Johnson — who while behind bars embraced orthodox Islam and changed their names to Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam — languished there for a combined 42 years before they were paroled.

Only in 2020 was the case officially reopened by Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, after the D.A.’s office was approached with exculpatory evidence unearthed by the makers of a documentary on Netflix.

In the film, a Black freelance journalist named Abdur-Rahman Muhammad is portrayed as identifying holes in the original prosecution case and piecing together proof of who the real killer was and how he had hidden in plain sight.

In a 22-month investigation, a special task force appointed by Vance found that numerous pieces of evidence that would have supported Butler’s and Johnson’s claims of innocence were deliberately suppressed, in order to protect the identity of FBI informants and undercover agents working for a secret intelligence unit of the NYPD.

While not definitively answering the question that has loomed over the assassination from the beginning — were the FBI or NYPD somehow in on the Audubon hit? — the probe also offered shocking new proof of how much the feds and New York police knew about the threats to Malcolm’s life before leaving him largely unprotected on the day of the murder.

In November 2021, Vance stood before a New York County Supreme Court judge and submitted a 43-page motion requesting that the convictions of Aziz, now 83, and Islam, who had died in 2009, be vacated.

When the judge declared the two men officially exonerated, the courtroom erupted into loud applause. Documentarian Abdur-Rahman Muhammad and his producers were there to witness the emotional scene, and to join Aziz for a celebration outside.

“I felt that I was able to get some semblance of justice for Brother Malcolm X and his family, first and foremost,” Muhammad proudly told reporters, “And second of all, justice for these two men.”

Yet that version of the murder story, Whitaker explains, wasn’t complete, either. All along, much earlier and less-remembered credit for keeping the questions surrounding Malcolm’s murder alive belonged to another, more unlikely sleuth. Peter Goldman was a shy, soft-spoken white reporter from the Midwest who developed a personal connection with Malcolm while he was alive, and wrote a deeply reported book about him after the assassination, long before the prizewinning biographies.

In the late 1970s, Goldman interviewed all three murder suspects in prison and tried, along with lawyer William Kunstler, to get the case reopened. Despite those efforts, the wrongful conviction saga would extend well into a new century — along with the stirring echoes of Malcolm X’s voice that reverberated across six decades of American history.

The Epilogue

Three days before his assassination, Malcolm gave a speech at Barnard College, the women’s university affiliated to Columbia University in New York. He had just returned from London where he met with African leaders about the struggle of Blacks in the United States.

As Whitaker explains in the “Epilogue,” Malcolm told the crowd that he hadn’t come “as a person representing the religion of Islam.” His travels had made him see a bigger picture than the racial battle in the United States.

He explained. “It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem.” He added. “Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressors, the exploited against the exploiter.”

Malcolm continued explaining his calls for Black pride in terms the white Barnard and Columbia students could understand — by appealing to their own sense of racial identity. “No matter how dark you are, you’re proud of your white blood,” he teased. “Why, some of you are darker than I am.’”

More than two years before Martin Luther King, Jr would come out against the Vietnam War, Whitaker adds, Malcolm at the Barnard event linked the fight against racial inequality to that war. “If you don’t want bad things to happen, you better put pressure on your parents to put pressure on [President] Johnson,” Malcolm urged the students.

In his last year of life Malcolm had evolved way beyond his politics in the Nation of Islam. He rejected NOI’s concept of Islam as he became more orthodox. He built his own Islamic group, Muslim Mosque Inc (MMI) but also a secular civil rights group, the Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU).

Malcolm X began to see the Black freedom struggle as part of the worldwide struggle of the oppression of all colors and the working class.

It is why in 1964 he spoke at The Militant Labor Forums in New York. The forum was organized by the Socialist Workers Party and its newspaper, The Militant. He appreciated the SWP’s willingness to help him bring his message to a wider milieu.

George Breitman, a founder of the SWP authored the book >i?The Last Year of Malcolm X and edited other speeches and writings of Malcolm X for the party’s publishing house Pathfinder Press. I knew George and we had many discussions about the Black struggle and his views of Malcolm X.

As Whitaker shows throughout his book, all Black leaders were seen as a threat to the U.S. ruling class. J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the FBI, created the COINTELPRO program and openly declared that its job was neutralizing these leaders. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were at the top his hit list.

Malcolm X will continue to be studied. The Autobiography of Malcolm X remains a top-seller read by young Blacks and others. Mark Whitaker’s book is a significant contribution of Malcolm’s life story and impact in the “Afterlife.”

July-August 2026, ATC 243