Les Payne the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist embarked in 1990 on a
nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm
X-all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family classmates street friends cellmates
Nation of Islam figures FBI moles and cops and political leaders around the world. His goal
was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an
unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is
this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist a work
whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with
purpose as if the dead were truly arising to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting
Malcolm's life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American
history the book traces the life of one of the twentieth century's most politically relevant
figures from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary. In tracing Malcolm X's life
from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem assassination in 1965 Payne provides searing
vignettes culled from Malcolm's Depression-era youth describing the influence of his Garveyite
parents: his father Earl a circuit-riding preacher who was run over by a street car in
Lansing Michigan in 1929 and his mother Louise who continued to instill black pride in her
children after Earl's death. Filling each chapter with resonant drama Payne follows Malcolm's
exploits as a petty criminal in Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious
awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts penitentiary. With a
biographer's unwavering determination Payne corrects the historical record and delivers
extraordinary revelations-from the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder Fard Muhammad who
preceded Elijah Muhammad to a hair-rising scene conveyed in cinematic detail of Malcolm and
Minister Jeremiah X Shabazz's 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK to a minute-by-minute
account of Malcolm X's murder at the Audubon Ballroom. Introduced by Payne's daughter and
primary researcher Tamara Payne who following her father's death heroically completed the
biography The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality
of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.
