c-span: and what about students today and when you teach your history? do they--do they care? are they interested? >> guest: yes. again, it's back to my ideas there are different ways that people understand what it is to be human. there are always going to be people who understand that by looking at the past. they just have--it's just a cast of curiosity. and, yes, they always find them... c-span: now what courses will you teach them? >> guest: well, i'm teaching a course now on the impact of the enlightenment on american nation building. that's a--a seminar that i'm teaching. i teach the introductory course in 17th- and 18th-century america. i teach upper-division courses on the revolution and the writing of the constitution. that's, you know, a mix, but almost always 17th and 18th century. c-span: you say you've been at ucla since 1981. >> guest: mm-hmm. c-span: what's changed in 19 years of teaching at ucla? >> guest: i don't know that the teaching has changed. thethe quality of interaction of

of the students has changed, and it's justi l--i really love it. ucla is an extraordinarily diverse campus. i mean, we're just every ethnic group, every religion, every race. and i--over the 18 years, 19 years, i have seen the students become more and more at ease with each other. it's--it truly is wondrous to watch their interaction. there was always i--a lot of mac ..

in a society in the second great awakening and i don't think -- it left us interlocking groups of churches in america that persist to this day. c-span: you told us you wouldn't want to go back and live in that period, but of the things you learned about period, what would be your favorite to capture something that happened back then or the way they lived back then and they don't now. >> guest: i think the association is zero getting people together and forming a society to determine america's national character or get rid of

liquor or whatever, just the idea that these people move forward with human rights much as what happens the next decade. i think that voluntary spirit is wonderful because it did create the social integration that i think is sometimes lacking in the world today. c-span: to you have another book and you? >> guest: i don't know. c-span: if you have time would you write? >> guest: you will find out. c-span: this is the book called inheriting the revolution, the period back there the first generation of americans born in this country somewhere between 1776 to 1800. thank you very much.

we asked what are you reading this summer. here's what you have to say.

a tribute to his story and manning then andrew roberts now on booktv panel discussion on the life and work of african american history scholar manning marable who died on april 1st, 2011. this is just under two hours. >> welcome to the central library. i'm the ceo of the library of baltimore. we are very, very pleased to have all of you tonight for this

special evening and we just want to say a special hello to c-span's book tv viewers who might be tuning in. when we of originally brought manning marable we could as you imagine very excited to have him here in baltimore and to hear him discuss his much anticipated landmark book. we were heartbroken when we heard he became ill and then later passed away just days before the monumental book was released but we still want to honor him and his book and his wife. so thanks to a lifelong supporter and a board member we arrived at this agent to night and we are honored to have the people we have on our panel tonight. we know it's going to be a great

tribute but before we get started, we have a very special guest we want to invite to come up to say a few words, manning marable's stepdaughter. [applause] >> to the rest of my family i'd like to welcome you to this wonderful event. i'm happy to see so many of you here to honor him and his legacy. she would be pleased to know how many people cared about him, inspiration and work and truth in his scholarship. his last project was a ten year labor of love. when i had the time to go back to new york my first question was about his health and the second was always malcolm?

she would share the latest interview or archival discovery with such admiration in his voice. he couldn't help to be as excited as he was about everything. it disappoints me he did not make it here to see his book but he finished it and while we have to read it without him he would be happy we can at least into that. thank you for coming. [applause] >> thank you so much. we really appreciate you being here tonight with us. and now i'd like to introduce the moderator of tonight's tribute. many of you hear him every day on the radio. he is part of the library family and he is one of our most active board members. please welcome mr. mark steiner. [applause]

>> good evening everybody. and welcome to the i'm glad you all showed up this evening. this is important to add on to what the library said when we realized that manning marable past, somebody i knew as a great human being, interesting intellect, powerful figure we decided we couldn't just let the day go and we needed to get a panel together to talk about this work. and for me it was especially important. malcolm x was a figure that we will talk about in this book. very few people who have a poster stand on both iran and the united states of america, so the juxtaposition of malcolm x and the power and pain of his legacy. for me when he passed away and i

called carla right away to see if we need to continue with this with the panel we came up with because as a young man of 18-years-old when malcolm x's assassination of a jump on greyhound bus to go to new york to stand outside the truth had his funeral and was among the thousands and thousands most amazing days as malcolm was driven to the cemetery for his last walk to read this book some call in magnum-opus and some call it a tragedy. some thinks it destroys his legacy and some thinks it makes it a larger and greater. we will assess that tonight and i want you to know there's a microphone there and in the next two hours at least in the second hour if not earlier we will invite people to come out and join this conversation at the microphone asking one thing though since there's so many people here and we have a panel with lots to say that you don't

go to the microphone and dillinger the ten or 15 minute discourse. we have with us speak of ifill, assistant professor at the university school of law, author of -- [laughter] >> thanks to her michael eric dyson professor of sociology at georgetown university and known across the nation. [applause] the professor of political science and african studies at johns hopkins university. [applause] >> melissa peery associate politics african-american studies princeton but now tulane university. [applause] let's jump in the heat of the

battle and talk about the sect of chickens of this book and is the argument about the significance of this book. clearly it's adding something huge to the discussion. i wrestle this book and reading it twice but before those ideas to see if you agree or disagree i'm just curious starting with sherrilyn ifill, what is for you a strong significance of malcolm xa life of reinventions? >> thank you, marc. first the sycophants of courses that manning marable wrote this and that himself represents an example from many of us who became scholars who entered the academy of how one can live as a relevant scholar, scholar relevant to the lives of african american people who focus on bringing truth and great detail this is my kind of book 80 pages

of footnotes. [laughter] i love it and i remember that the night that the news came out manning marable passed away and was in ann arbor michigan where i've never been before about slavery and reparations at university of michigan and the woman hosting me was the person who told me about. she teaches at the university of michigan in the law school and the afro-american studies department and immediately began to tell me about how specific the eight men toward her as a young scholar in new york nobody was telling me this story because it is a tremendous reach and influence. the seeds that he planted as a mentor are just extraordinary. so before we jump into talking about malcolm x. i want to see it for me a good deal of the significance is that he wrote it

and i would say it is also significant that unfortunately he died before the book was released, but that this evening and others like it are important. i can remember when the mother of emmett till died. she also had a book she had written and she died a week before the book came out, and most of you have probably never read the book because of course she wasn't a life to the publicity. it's a powerful the important book about what happens to mothers, the journey of a mother when her son is killed come something powerful for the community so i want to say tonight is also important and it's our job to carry this forward in terms of the significance briefly then for me and i actually think that this book is in some ways long overdue because it provides missing details that in your intellectual spirit you just

know they have to be missing from what you know, those of us who were not -- did not personally know malcolm x. but know personally people who knew him that were missing from the story, and that is really the day-to-day struggle of what it takes to evolve as a leader particularly an african-american male leader who has integrity. it is a journey, it is not a many pieces of his journey that are missing. they've been filled in many different works in the different ways but i've always found these huge gaps in terms of malcolm x.'s turney and many of them are filled with this book and are important because of the iconic position that he holds and ensure we can talk about more of this leader. i will stop there. >> michael eric dyson. >> well, i'm honored to be here tonight on such a distinguished panel, and of course in memory

of manning. i wish he could have been here himself to talk about his book. he would have loved this audience and the vibrant reception to which his book has been accorded. and of course it's been controversial as well and manning was fully prepared for that in my conversations with him. he loved malcolm x like very few other people, he loves the meaning of the man, he loved his historical significance, his revolutionary potential and practice and had to face up to the fact as a historian and intellectual and scholar he had to tell the truth the best he could as best he understood it and i think the power and the beauty of this book is that it's rendered in such accessible and eloquent prose that it engages in a broad spectrum in the

continuum of scholarly data. it takes account of heretofore if you will and access to data about malcolm x and turns interviews and tuck werries and in terms of some of the fbi files and it tries to wrestle with the complicated story of an iconic figure who meant so much to the varying and sometimes competing and contradictory constituencies. so, manning had a very difficult job to do similar to spike lee doing his film with the fire would and the heat of various constituencies trying to figure out what are you going to make of this man that we love and even more so because this is a scholarly text to grapple with us at accounts of malcolm x. i think it is an enormous work. i believe it's a magnum-opus, his magnum-opus and that says a whole lot because he wrote a

great deal of brilliant things that have to be dealt with. from some of his earlier stuff out capitalist of underdeveloped america down to his work on black politics and it's an extraordinary career that he had a vocation for trying to bring lucidity and clarity to complicated and difficult troops, so i love this book and was privileged to read it before it was published. it's a brilliant, insightful, invigorating, edify and comprehension of as outsized and immoral human beings has emerged who are constantly did buy some of manning's findings have to to remember he calls and the greatest black figure to emerge in 20th century. it doesn't get deeper than that. so a lot of the stuff has come out, some of it has been exaggerated, some of it has been generated from people's own

sense of insecurities and frailties and quite frankly homophobia and the fear of dealing with the truth of an evil thing human being. and i celebrate this book. i think that the essence is that it delivers younce professor ifill said, as complicated a vision of a man who needs to be understood and it his own autobiography that manning has now challenged in a powerful way malcolm says they won't let me turn the corner and so many people still have him in a bear hug that refuses to let him breathe freely the error of his own evolution so i celebrate this and look forward to talking to you about it. >> like the rest panel i want to take a bit to talk about manning. i don't -- we often black box the act of cultural production, the act of writing a book, the act of writing a song, the act

of painting a picture, and i think we do that for a number of reasons, but like the there's a whole bunch of reasons why we might want to unpack that process so why does it play a role here? manning marable suffered from psychosis and it's important to talk a little bit about the disparities so it's something that affects what people more than white but they get far worse. so manning had to have both lungs replaced and he wrote this book while dealing with the fact. so we don't talk about the active production, the act, the type of grinding it takes, like i wrote a little book that's coming out, these guys wrote several. every time you're dealing with some kind of crisis the fact able to do it and anything like this in his career is really a

testimony. we have for rhodes as scholars. some are primarily mentors, some are premier li writers and some art teachers and some are institution builders. manning was all for. right? university colorado [inaudible] , colombia. he had a founded or developed a black studies program and did some of this stuff while i believe he was in his 20s so it's really important to talk about that process and how great of a scholar he was. now with that said, i think i'm going to be the role of the critic and that i believe that this work is the work scholars have to wrestle with in the legacy going forward, however even as eight humanizes him there are questions that are

shunted aside or not effectively dealt with, and it diminishes the importance of an extremely important work. and i will talk a little bit more, but i think he does not give enough attention to the black nationalism, the evolution, and even as a nation of islam has incredibly problematic and a number of dimensions he doesn't effectively deal with the reasons why the nation of islam was as effective as it was in mobilizing people. so the book ends up doing a great deal, and it is an excellent way to end a career. i am so sorry that he is not here to participate in this. but with that said, there are some questions and hopefully we will be able to wrestle with those and scholars can do that going forward. >> hi, too, will take a manning

moment, only because as if really loved him and i really loved him mostly because he was incredibly snarky and i just i like nice people but i still preferred people who are snarky and will make the sort of observation and people important scholars giving lectures in a room with manning and catching his expressions. so certainly having known him in these places i know he wouldn't want it to be a love fest because part of how he shows he loves you was through criticism and through the clear ride careful intellectual engagement so i appreciate your bringing that as well. just a few things i think

important about the book from my perspective. i take some disagreement with your presentation how we represent the nation of islam. one of the things i like best about the book is my sense that he presents at least theologically as she is discussing indonesian without any case mark or sense of foolishness he engages the theology of the nation of islam with as much respect and as much care as a historian of any religious tradition. for example if we read books about people who are important leaders within the christian tradition, no one mocks the idea that by the way, she believed in this religion where this guy got up after three days of being dead and walked away. but pretty frequently when you've read work on the nation, they do make fun of creation, if

they do mocked the fundamental undermined theological preset and manning not only restrains himself but presents i think in some ways even though we know the rejections that are going to come later in the book of malcolm himself the second thing this book did for me i know a lot of people are angry the text takes away the hero that is now the mix for so many people will come back to the men second. >> you read this and alex is not looking right, you should feel very good about him. >> that has been done that there is a way in which it is happening here. the work he has to do to be

constructed the autobiography. some orders to reconstruct the autobiography interestingly enough he takes this into the black box of the riding that you're talking about and of course as we know it's not always pretty because particularly when you are writing to feed yourself, so i think you have to take that in wheys that were challenging now. the third thing i felt was important as we talk about manning's passing and then i read the book and i read this section of the assassination and i read it very quickly because i found it very painful to read particularly in the context of manning's passing, something about the way, the speed with which the narrative picks up and the intensity of it, but i read it again yesterday, that section in the context of the killing of osama bin laden.

not because in any way i think malcolm x or osama bin laden had anything to do with one another but only in the sense of americans blot, that desire to about the murder of the opponent, and i wanted to go back and think about the assassination again in the context of it being a very american moment, so we think of him as the black nationalist critiquing america but it's still tall points caught up in a very american structure including the the nation and so reading that began in the context of the killing of bin laden and the final thing i will say in this introduction is oni am ready to give up alex haley for malcolm x, and not everybody is, and i think it is actually

okay that not everybody is. an old boys' charter school in of the inner city and there's no book that appears more frequently, the syllabus or personal bookshelf and the autobiography of malcolm x. i don't think i've ever seen of bookshelf with fewer than 15 copies and he has never taught a class to the kids without teaching the autobiography and the work in political science is this idea that mall, is both through the film and the autobiography a kind of magical you rub him to get your manhood fix and do a malcolm x incantation to represent your anger at the american state and the sense of what the organizing political possibilities of black manhood are, so it's that myth

is incredibly important and powerful and those important organizing work, but i'm ready for its without needing to demanded new deals be ready to give it up. i'm ready to give it up i wasn't ready to give it up and avoid. i suspected it wasn't quite right as but i wasn't ready to give it up and avoid and what his text does is allow us to defer up that mess without having to walk to a filleted. it gives something else that is contentious and will have to deal with, but at least another we can love in a very different kind of way. >> feel free to just leap into things and just making -- i want to pick up on some of the things you said and some of the things in this book that have come out of these notes that attach

themselves. let me begin where we just left off because for some people the heart of the matter for this book that is tearing people apart who care about malcolm x and care about this world in this way that have read this book and so, what's begin with alex haley. his book was a seminal work that moved millions of young americans, not just african-americans, mostly african-americans but moved human beings on the stand, this role of the planet and a sense of being an african-american and where you stood and what you had to fight for and a sense of being. having said fact, and i can read this, did he trash alex to hard?

some people criticize him by saying that he also liberalized the issue of malcolm x at the end of the book. not just from alex haley as someone argues what about the argument about the book no longer being noticed and this being relevant now? >> well, you know, i think that in light of what it three pettis said and after reading the book myself, surely you can't read haley the same way. that's for sure. you can't come to the same conclusion or see it through the same lens because manning makes clear the political and theological framework to term and what he excluded sounds like the bible. it's been biblical, right? but there's a lot of stuff if

using manning's stuff is deep on malcolm the stuff the new testament scholars bring when you are a beginning minister that tell you about the stuff the bible busters it's no wonder you even have any faith left which is beautiful because i believe in trying to deconstruct and demythologizing lot of the arnove the text that reveal more of the projections of authors and possiblities the imagined than an object of truth. so i think the autobiography tends to be useful but it has to be seen and a specific way, and i think once we read the autobiographical construction of malcolm's life he was the secretary so to speak but he was doing a lot more by throwing stuff in and keeping stuff out and fighting with publishers who wanted their own vision to prevail. it's not just haley and malcolm

it's also white publishing houses, liberal ideological and political frameworks and his own self mythologizing triet let's not just act like malcolm himself as a template of a if truth upon which we could then press our conceptions what his life was like. this is what man and helps us understand. he's exaggerating his itinerary for the purpose is to the redemptive power of elijah mohammed ago that gets turned on its head at the end of his life so when i think about the book i guess i don't get it because there was a famous preacher preaching once all on a very famous guy and the to seminary students were there and it was an easter sunday and he was chanting jesus got up on sunday morning and raised up and people like my god it's amazing and the two seminaries came up to him

after the easter sunday sermon and they said you know, reverend, you restored my faith, i'm in a seminary reading all this stuff and here you are talking about the reservation and he said he believed all that? [laughter] you could either say this guy who was cynical, she was lobbying or that even when you know that all the stuff you who read about the bible the end of the way in which it was shaped and jesus wasn't born when it said he was and the stuff you read part emmons work now before jury, the stuff in the bible written by paul wasn't written by paul and all that stuff, at the end of the day you may still have a faith that is sustained in the midst of the deconstruction, but the deconstruction of to give you a different sense of how the text was produced if we talk of the professor notion of the black box of production because talking about the black box assume there's been a crash, too

and the clash between our understanding of intellectual process these you bring the scholarship possible and the faith assertions and the professor is right on here that manning takes the cosmology and the theology of the nation of islam which makes just as much sense as any other religious assertion that's been put out there so i would end by saying i don't think you have to give up alex haley's book but you have to give up what you think about the book and when you thought it did and what malcolm said about himself. where do you begin? at the beginning. to begin by seeing that lives are lived in constant and repeated affirmation of ideas put constantly evolves. that's why frederick douglass had to write three autobiographies and had he lived he might have read more.

we have to give up what we think about it and then begin to use that taxed differently with all the stuff that manning brought to us. [applause] i was going to also suggest that this sort of like a discussion about the bible because of the way people respond but i guess i want to suggest it's not like a discussion about the bible because i think part of our problem is we read books like they are religious text. religion in and of itself is irrational. you believe it even though you can't scientifically proved all the stuff you believe what you believe, and too often particularly when it comes to our heroes we read about them and internalize stories about them as though they are a religious figure and so we cut

off our critical faculties and become invested in perpetuating certain myths and it happened with martin for many years it's just we've been through the process and sometimes we don't remember how much people were invested in the mythology about martin luther king jr. who had to be humanized so we now recognize him as a man, and i think that that is the states that we are at now with this text, and i love it because as dr. dyson says the competing narrative, you can never fully understand any human being. we are also a product of narratives including about ourselves. when you started something called an autobiography we all know that we talk about ourselves a little bit differently than maybe how other people would talk about us, so you are reading a bayh yes text and i love frederick douglass but i'm sure if somebody else at

mets writing the story of -- [laughter] so, it is the failure of our foot book tv critical faculty and investment to be honest about this as african-american people we are very protective of our heroes, very protective of them but sometimes it is to the exclusion of wanting to accept them as men and women and here is why i like the book to read. precisely what melissa said is true about menachem becoming, but we do when we mythologize figures like mao mix and martin luther is weak scare off people from thinking that they can be leaders. we make it look like it is a mystical to word that you have to be born into it and have to be in prison and somebody has to anoint you, we make it all sound like magic and it's not magic. these are men and women and they

are human beings and everyone has the potential to be a great leader so i always feel when we begin to get texts that helpless human rights, i like the boring parts of the book. i like the day-to-day going down to number seven this is what is involved in a real life and as much as the more powerful than parts of the book those to me are very important because they describe for people and show people just the day to day the monday and interaction with different personalities and so forth the gwen to creating the story. it's in that way is much less obviously kind of mythic story in the autobiography of malcolm x but it's powerful if it suggests malcolm x is a human being that had great qualities

and potential because he certainly hadn't reached where he could have reached but he's accessible in ways i think makes him not accessible and to me that this powerful and a good thing. >> what you think could happen? when i was on the edge of a couple of weeks back we talked about this book a little bit and i was pleading with the biography of gandhi as well who raises issues about the life and the human conflict he had as well as malcolm and margin or any of us here have every day in our lives. so what does it do what you just described, what does it do when we take -- it happened in the 60's what happens when we take the iconic figures of our

existence and some have argued humanize them and of a trilogy about martin luther king and face as well so what happens to us as a people when that happens because -- what happens when books like this come out and they talk about things that make people's stomachs twist? >> it seems to me that there are many possibilities. one is the most in powering which is the more we recognize of the humanities of those who did great things, the more we feel capable ourselves of doing great things. it is to go back to the seminary example, it is the other possibility of the story of jesus that he's human and if you

can hold on to the human part it can make the story feel more in powering and so holding on to the failing part, but part of what i would suggest also is that some of what we are talking about here is about the failing but a lot of what we are talking about when it comes to malcolm are not necessarily failing they are simply identities, practices, ways of being that are not in line with our conception of who this person is and that is somewhat different. in other words, to steal somebody else's idea even if it is for the tradition to do so that's a problem, that's an actual sort of ethical moment you need to pause and we need to engage what does it mean to have done that and how can we understand those practices? when you engage in what appears to be a consensual sexual

relationship with someone of the same sex it is not a failing, it's a practice, and it's a practice we then have to reconcile our understanding of who malcolm little is because my understanding from reading the book is it really is manning's understanding to the extent that there was same-sex relations during the part of his life when he's malcolm little, so we have to try to comprehend that. now, the first time i read a revision of the understanding of himself was robin kelly's reading of this suit, so if you know they're brilliant reading he says look when he talks about himself in the autobiography he says i was without politics. i was just this guy out there doing this thing and it really

is elijah mohammed who gives me a political world view through this theological world view but she goes back and says wait a minute. politics. you cannot be a young black man walking around in an expensive suit in the city during world war ii when the people are supposed to be -- it's hard because we've been at the war and no one is supposed to sacrifice anything but in the context of world war ii, how you demonstrate you are part of a domestic war effort is to be self sacrificial and black folks in particular are always meant to be sacrificial in the american state even if there is no war going on. [laughter] so to be a young black man wearing an expensive suit in the context of world war ii and we learn from manning with such beautiful snark how she gets out of serving in the war an gets

around she just plays for crazy. and he kind of takes the whole question about the war put it to the side and make sure so all of those things are there but what robert gives us is look, you were political, you don't want to say that you were and maybe you couldn't see it but it was an incredibly political act to be a young man doing these things in this moment, so part of what i read in these things being called failings and i think a lot of them are around the relationship with betty and the kind of harshness with which he treats his lieutenants and a lot of them are around the anxiety about the question of same-sex although it's not fair to me that there's a fer de identity i don't know those are the feelings i think those are

revisions or understandings even how malcolm would have understood himself so do i think that he thinks he was on political essays and souter? yes but do i think robert kelley has something? absolutely. do i think malcolm x looked back on same-sex activity and had enormous shame and understood that as a deep feeling as a man. banning is giving a different vision with those practices were and relative to his wife going forward in this story of activism. >> woodring tipping is happening now in the process, so the first thing is you've got this competing visions than this hour original vision, you've got all this come a great deal of contention. but over time what is going to happen is you're going to reconcile that moment at least for me personally, i have been a

small democrat for a while, but it really shifted to me when i became authority because at that point i was older than both martin luther king and malcolm x when they were assassinated and i have kids, so i'm looking at this as a parent and there's no way in hell i would do what they did and sacrifice my children. no way i would do that. so, at that moment for me they become different figures, right? so we see what's going to happen is that these provisions are going to reconcile themselves and it won't be like -- it won't be like an easy metal but it will be a more human metal. there's a number of aspects about this new malcolm we may disagree with and fight over what the new middle gets us

closer to the small d democrat decision. >> border the peace is using we would fight over? >> i read the same-sex activity a bit different than melissa. i know we are on c-span's when trying to figure out a way to -- [laughter] >> it's clear to me that something occurred and it's clear to me that something was in part dictated by the marking that you had exchanging hands. it's not clear to me that what happened was a same-sex activity first and second i would need much more information in order to verify that in fact was and this is one of those areas that the citation, so there are 80

pages of footnotes, but a lot of that stuff isn't footnotes. and i think some of that stuff is something that needs to be footnotes if for no other reason than those who have a challenge can go back and verify. that is what the purpose is. >> but does anybody need -- i mean, let's take away the malcolm little moment and let's go just to the homoerotic practices of the nation. in this sense that it is -- >> just in the sense this is verified and the footnote of the part this sense we are just together, women over there so whether that is about the erotic engagement with one another's body is a separate question than whether or not it is a, social

political space that says the only body is ideas, persons, goals that matter are of men, and so part of the transition of malcolm is to move into an increasing willingness to embrace a leadership role which also seems to be in part engaged with the likelihood of human beings. so just saying look that he's got this whole narrative about his mother's mental illness, about -- of these things he builds of and what he gives us is malcolm does not like women and maybe this is sexual, maybe it's not a big issue is that he just thinks we can sit down and shut up and then malcolm turns into a person who has he is becoming more of a racial gender democrat, but the part of that is what also has to have ethical and personal likings

that it can't beat justin exclusively political but to me it's like the sexual and erotic is in part standing in for the political and theological. [applause] >> i've got to say that i found this -- i couldn't agree more about this issue of the kind of separating malcolm little from malcolm x and then seeing the journey not just about race but also about gender. >> i find precisely what you describe as this place in which there is a kind of focus on men and the idea and who they are to the exclusion of women in what a sense that that is the space in which most power is exercised in the united states and i daresay in other places that that is exactly the character of it that's what it looks like, that's what feels like and whether it is the nation of

islam, whether it's the democratic party or the republican party or any other be very powerful wall street powerful organization, political science department, law school. a very american story. i find this uncontroversial. what is the interesting part is precisely the part you are referring to at the end, melissa, and that is that the perfect example of how as we begin to develop ourselves of around this idea of racial justice to as we begin to open our minds and spirits to thinking about equality in terms that understand power that understands who was at the bottom and to set the top and the way in which race can be deployed to maintain that

stratification and so forth is the same way and context it opens our mind about a whole variety of other issues including a gender and that transformation, the beginning, though liking that melissa talked about at the beginning to see women as people, that is that incredibly important transformation that did become much more interesting for me because it suggests that this is also about the evolution of how we exercise power the power is sometimes most potent the most attractive, least controversial to those around you when it is exercised in a way that is exclusionary come that's harsh, that's cruel, hating, but that's the easy power. but the broad power that malcolm begins to talk about when he's away in cairo and traveling in says this is going to benefit the whole, that's how he

describes it, whole. when you start to pursue that power of malcolm and as martin was doing at the end of his life, then it's much more disruptive and dangerous to the status quo much more potentially disruptive and to me that part of the narrative is the part i find and the speeding up begins at the point of the assassination that's when the story begins to speak up in a way that started to make my stomach hurt because you know what's coming next. >> very briefly. with everything said i just want to add a couple things. first, we ain't got no temp records, no cadillac sales, and we never questioned that. we are never liked where's the proof malcolm was a pimp because

what manning does is to construct most of that. like you were in lansing when you were supposed to be in new york so there's more evidence to suggest he wasn't doing that stuff than the stuff we find problematic so what does that say about us? we are comfortable with the notion he could have been exploiting women as perry was saying and professor ifill, exploiting women and i do think given her burly and dichotomy or a least division between the failure and practice i would say it is a failure. i would put it in that category which means those field up that level. most of us that's a huge failure, right? but i think the brilliant insight about the politics and the politics of the construction what we have a problem with is that malcolm brushed up loosely

against the homoerotic not only as malcolm little but as the professor talks about within the context of an exclusively male preserve which is the nation of islam and we can talk about a bunch of of finance as well, fraternities and churches and boards and so forth, what's interesting is that we have no problem with him excluding women and using them and putting them on the street. no, god forbid that a homoerotic act which wasn't exploiting anybody because it was as we talk about it and then hustlers have done a lot of stuff they didn't existential the invest in. it was a practice for money, the commercial exchange, cash exchanged. i'm doing this because i want a happy ending or a great outcome. so the reality is we have a problem because it exposes where

we are deep homophobia the blocks us from a greater figure because more men can identify with him, a greater cross-section of struggling black men, american men in general can identify because we've struggled at so many points in the abuse of women and self abuse, engaging in all kind of nefarious practices with exchange for cash and commerce so that's one thing that needs to be expressed and opened up so that the evidence, the empirically verifiable evidence available is lacking in the area where the greatest assertion of manhood is come and let me in the bye saying on this point i'm not homophobic or ibm as a man who's a heterosexual born in a heterosexual -- if he was malcolm little and got converted and now he is malcolm x and is doing a different thing, the

whole .6 after reading is to prove just how deep the elijah mohammed was so why don't we throw this in that category? keogh stuff in deep because whatever he was throwing on the hustling with women and so on and thievery and stealing people's stuff showed that elijah mohammed could stand a man up and make him a responsible moral and ethical person even the white think the problem of course would be that again, and i think this is the professor difference between a practice and a failure we are not going to -- i don't want to throw homosexuality into a failure because people converted or still day and was the more transgender and bisexual so we don't want to see that to demonize that and how many men in the religious organizations that heat officially, the the logically things are gave themselves? so we have to acknowledge that as well. [applause]

>> i will just say being briefed -- [laughter] i'm a baptist preacher. [laughter] >> i brought that up because it was brought up before me. there was a number of places i felt should have been cited. i brought that up because it was brought up. >> a question we will get back to on the siting issues we talked about, and this piece on this book is interesting in the atlantic and which you were saying, michael eric dyson, is the fact that malcolm x was more of a street hustler like the rest of us need it more powerful for us to know where we could go which is an interesting way of looking at who malcolm was like on the west side of this town but let me read you a piece in this book.

this is malcolm x when he's going through africa. he just left the secretaries home, and i will just read this one paragraph. as malcolm sought to process the recognition of status, talking about the house and the deliberation that he's met throughout africa he reflected how he changed in the past few months. my mind seems to be more at peace since i left in september. my thoughts come strong and clear and easy to express myself. paradoxically he then added my mind is almost incapable of producing words lately and it worried me. what he appears to be saying is that his middle east and african experiences have greatly broadened his mind yet his

limited category of the black nationalism was insufficient to address the challenges he clearly saw confronting africa. malcolm since he needed to create new theoretical tools and a different frame of reference beyond race. now, to me that one says a lot. there's a lot of pieces to this we can parse out and 100 page essays or every of their sentence but let's start with one. >> of course as manning i'm sure would say if he were here that is done on in part. so part of what -- [inaudible] >> right. in other words i think that manning is too limited in his reading of malcolm's worthlessness certainly part is the limitation of the black nationalism, and as the professor brought up i think we have to grapple with manning's

anxiety about the nationalism so it gets written that way. one of the things i wish i could see president obama do more is speak in a different language and i know of the reason he doesn't but part of what i toomey was at stake in the whole burr certificate madness is the fact that iraq obama actually knows from whence he comes on the continent of africa.

it is precisely the thing that makes barack obama not enough for the right, because what the right wants us to experience and in fact what i think most of the white american construction for most of black history as we have to experience rootlessness. we are not supposed to nowhere burr certificate is. we are not supposed to nowhere re-air from. so when i read that i thought yes it is about the limitation of black nationalism but also about the limitations of american this, so we do this it is not civil rights but human rights. but the fact that literally english fails to have the discourse, the words, the vocabulary the construction of sentences necessary to reveal the depth of black suffering and

so, we see this malcolm at the end of manning's book who is like, i keep wanting him to stay. he is there and he whistled with dubois and he is with my and i just keep thinking, don't go back. don't go back. they are going to kill you when you go back. don't go back, just day. malcolm apparently knows it too, but he goes back anyway and in part because he is so american and because this is where the fight is over him, as much as america is insufficient and as much as we have no language it is also the only place that he cares about. it is the only place in may and that he is willing to die for. and so for me manning gives us what that struggle felt like. it is take this cup from a and yet and yet he goes back. [applause]

>> so, so when professor harris-perry talks, what it reminds me of is the beginning where he begins with a musical bar and it begins with a musical bar because black music is capturing something that the language doesn't so i think you are hitting the nail right on the head. where i would challenge that reading and it is important to understand that marable did have anxiety about black nationalism so when i'm reading that passage the first thing i'm thinking is there a are a number of ways to understand african berry and that is the difference between somebody in uganda, someone in egypt and the black masses. even in america in the 1950s that black nationalists understood african bearings. now he could make a claim that maybe there is a problem with conservative black nationalism which is a different variant that when he says nationalism as

a whole that is marable editorializing and bringing it back to gender, what i found most interesting and some of his passages on gender is he attributed malcolm's attitudes towards women to nationalism plan at the same time martin luther king stated that he could not work with strong black women. he didn't know how to do it. this is something that if we were to take black political ideology, it is not lack -- it is black integration is. for reasons we don't quite understand why. so that is one of those packages where i might know this is marable's editorializing that is why it is incumbent. the black academy is far more diverse than it was when manning started, far more diverse but what we really need are more straight up black nationalist scholars because black nationalism is the most misunderstood black ideology.

[applause] >> i know exactly the passage it was when he started reading because that passage dropped me as well and i would just say, my response to it was that this was a very american moment. if you have traveled outside the u.s., this is the first time you go to africa particularly as an african-american and is a conscious african-american so you have the whole framework of race and you know what you are talking about. you have a history of the whole thing. you are struck dumb actually when you are kind if confronted with the diaspora. i think this is not an unusual phenomenon. i think particularly as malcolm was an r-rated or, a speaker who sees both all the time and those of us who speak all the time have phrases that we call on.

everything he has said i've never heard before. seriously i don't know how he we does it but most of us humans, we have certain ways of speaking and we don't even realize that they are transitioning us from one thing to another. this is what we do particularly about the subjects we care about him that we write about that we are into. and somebody like myself who is a civil rights lawyer and worked on civil rights for many years the first time i spent time in africa i talked much less than i do here. is virtually struck dumb. and i was struck dumb or some of the reasons that melissa explains, but also because i had to hit the reset button on a whole series of issues that had to do with race, that had to do with my own identity and so forth. and in the process of hitting that recess but that is almost the computer is recalibrating a lot of what you know that you are not throwing out everything

you know but a lot of what you know now has to be infused through a different lens and has to be recalibrated and what immediately comes after that is the part that i like, that once that happens you actually have a lot to say. it is almost like you have a new language and you have a new way of talking. there is a new infusion and it is because if you are thinking. there is a new infusion in your thinking as well as your speaking. so when i read that, and this is one of those points in the book as well, where for all that malcolm's critique of america and this is what made melissa say so striking a moment ago about him coming back to america and this being the place he is willing to die for. it is how distinctly american he was and the story is. so that was another one of those moments where i felt like that was a moment that americans will experience or can resonate with andy at that moment also. and that is both for me the

tremendous power of the story but also the real tragedy of the story as well, that there is something about particularly the struggle for racial justice in america that has its air of the tragic to it he does as much as you make these connections other places you are american and it has got you in ways that even when you don't want to be had it has got you. and there is just something in that is very very powerful and also very tragic. [applause] >> do you have something you want to add? >> no. [laughter] >> i knew you were going to do that. >> but not to be brief. [laughter] i will say this. i think that's brilliant formulation about not just black nationalism is at a loss there

and a powerful point about the music, about finding other ways to express it and to say it and i think about what professor ifill talked about earlier as well in regard to the textuality of the moment, the textuality of speechlessness. so what happens is you know i think about every baptist preacher and this spirit shall interpret the groans and utterances and man, the african consciousness is malcolm at that moment. and nothing is capable. i think about the treman them, before god, this theologian and religious philosopher talked about the tremendous mystery and awe and i do think given what professor spence said that even though i have been critical of and remain critical of certain versions of racial fundamentalism which masquerade as black nationalism. black nationalism is so much more powerful and larger and

broader than what we have made it typically be. there is something about all of us in the face of the other unpayable reality of our blackness that when we embrace it without excuse or apology we are rendered mute in the face of it because it is an experience of all and i can second that. >> let me allow the audience to jump in now. if you want to identify yourself that would be great and ask your question. >> fred hampton used chalabi say get the people to say i am a revolutionary. he would get them to say that over and over and over again and one of the things that happened is historically we have diminished that period as them being somewhat misguided, frivolous and what fred hampton and the black panther party did

was you know if that was so diminished and not so powerful, how come they created -- and attacked all those people over and over and over again. because what they did, the black panther party, fred hampton, they did a critique of capitalism and even our greatest scholars who supposedly are progressive, they don't really do a critique of capitalism and that is one thing that happened with king and when you listen to all his speeches and malcolm. that is what they started to do and evolution was a critique of capitalism. once you start doing that is where the danger happened. our black scholars, they don't really do that. you know you talk about black nationalism but a critique of capitalism is very dangerous. >> it is a worthy comment in the context of talking about someone

whose politics were i think part of his policy was precisely because he understood his politics rooted more in a black radical socialist tradition. now, i will say this is -- how do we do this? how do we -- i was a graduate student and i was trying to get a job at the academy, and one of the most powerful things manning ever did was teach me how to get what i needed from this institution. financially. people don't talk about it at all. they just add gleick you just get a job and be happy and manning was like you asked for this venue and u.s. for this and the next day u.s. for this. i said whoa wait a minute. how can i simultaneously ask before a contract contract and have a commitment to question economic justice. manning smiled that smile if you knew him you would know and he

said melissa nothing is too good for the working class. and one of the things that i'm reminded of and i appreciate the challenge you just offered because i do think that there is, there is real intellectual danger in our connection to institutions that feed as and i do think one of the things that manning's text on malcolm suggests to us is -- part of the fight, the fight that leads to his death with a the nation is about having a roof over his head. if malcolm had had an independent, wealthy whatever who could have taken his wife and four children and put them in a home where they could have lived, all of them together, he actually would not have had to fight theologically, politically intellectually the way he did but he literally couldn't afford to live. i think one of the things things we also learn sometimes from some of the more critical texts on king including dies in's

incredibly important book on king is he is hustling. he is working. he is giving talks not because -- because that is what feeds him in the movement so i think there is no doubt we have to simultaneously recognize that we are even when you are the black elite you are working for class because you are for the most part not from, when they died they will be nothing. you may live in a big house and have a mortgage but there is this way in which on the one hand we are structurally structure but need to continue in an economic critique that fits with our political gender, social one but if he could be difficult so it reminds us of precisely that malcolm and manning were both up to. [applause]

>> one of the things it points to, so we now really study and are able to get a certain cachet to study racial inequality. but, if you go to hopkins and look at their history to see what they teach, i am willing to bet you wouldn't find anything on labor history. if you go to morgan you would find the same thing. i think what we do is in some ways those of us who and academy who are the beneficiaries of manning's work, what we have to do is reeducate ourselves to deal with class and i say that as somebody with black nationalist leanings. that is something incredibly important both enter racially and interracially. he left understand and work with the way class plays itself out in the black community. >> those are brilliant points.

i hope you hear them because those are important points. and i just would simply add to piggyback on what professor harris-perry said, martin luther king jr. had to borrow money to pay his taxes. because he was giving so much of it. the reason i think he is the greatest american and malcolm x along in that same certainly that same cohort is because the level of sacrifice was mind-boggling, and like professor spence said you have five kids you are thinking differently. you can understand is why. she is then positioned as a shrew and ahead she has to take care of the kids. and when he founded funny bought a crate of 19652 and half years before he died because he had gone to india and believe that people shouldn't own property. so when you start talking about the radical king, what a true

radical and believe not in possessing personal property but look he borrowed money from his daddy for texas and harry belafonte had taken out a 100,000-dollar policy and life insurance only to the five kids. this is what professor harris-perry is saying so if malcolm had a benefactor if he had been langston hughes so to speak and could get some of that white harlem dough, then he would have had a different perspective so even as we deconstruct capital, the point of karl marx the construction of capital didn't mitigate against existential assertion of the value and worth of capital, because karl marx said that. can you take care of my daughter? so i believe in either a, it individual reparations accounts. [laughter] and i believe in i.r.a.,

individual reparation accounts. you can't give us a great great great grandpa but you can redistribute wealth toward some of the contemporary people who are inheriting their ideas but it makes the more incumbent upon us to press the argument for word and to tell the truth about the suffering of the masses who don't even have the quandary we have because they don't even have a wage. they don't even have a salary so when we deconstruct it lets not talk about obliterating or eviscerating well. let's talk about an equitable distribution. [applause] >> good evening. i am from west africa, liberia and i am a middle school math teacher. i say that to say that i have been in this country for about 25 years. i went to school at baton rouge, southern university an all-black school, very proud of that experience and i did not read

alex haley's account of malcolm x. i think just by osmosis and being around people -- i think i know a lot about it but i would like to pose to points. one is, i kind of widely question the relevance of black nationalism as to the 60s. is it still relevant to have all these attributes and to be put out there, and if you have read manning's book as a black african, what the universal truth that i can take from that book, because i think the story is not just an african-american story. so what would be the universal truth that i could take from it? thank you.

[laughter] >> all right. it is totally irrelevant. [laughter] know, here is the deal. to be brief. at its best, at its best for me, what lack nationalism is about is finding best practices, best cultural practices that we can use to develop the tools to create or to reform and reshape our identity and the spaces in which we live in a way that works best for black people and that can in turn serve as a set of practices or a kind of body of work that can be used to change america in general. i would actually say that there is more of a need now for black nationalism than even in the

50s given the shape, the changing way we understand the black race. >> i would only have to add. >> we have been having this fight about nationalism for a decade so we don't have to replay this at the moment that i would say that i guess i could agree to those are the best aspects and for me the most dangerous aspects of it are the extent to which nationalism polices the boundaries of likeness so in making that claim about what is good for black people it then determines who are the appropriate black people for whom something should be good for. and so what frequently happens in practice and not in theory is a policing out of identities, of women, the claim by our colleague kathy colin in her brilliant book the boundaries of blackness. one of the reasons the black church is so slow and mobilizing around the hiv crisis in black

communities is because it required a focus on those elements of the community that were considered disreputable, i.v. drug users, those were men, those who may have sexual practices that people have anxiety about and so because the civil rights movement had been so fully engaged in making a claim on citizenship based on the respectability of black people so we deserved to be citizens because you are misunderstanding as we are actually bill cosby, right? so what it didn't leave room for was you have the right to be a citizen even if you are not till cosby so you have a right to health care even if are practicing these disreputable practices so i think on the one hand nationalism at its most broad is a core love for blackness and black people, a preferential option for blackness which so doesn't exist that having a preferential option for blackness.

you figure even if he is cheating you than the cheating of going to a black guy, right? [laughter] so there are all these -- are saying no i don't want to live in a white neighborhood. preferential option for blackness in a variety of voice but the danger is that it can also limit what we think and propria laxness is and certainly i think manning's book on malcolm does that in that it is trying to retain malcolm x as the core leader of african-american politics at this moment and simultaneously deconstruct who we think this blackbody is answered just it is more challenging, more typical than more complex and more the boundaries of its home likeness than we would typically allow to be. speeches real quick. we disagree on black nationalism and we don't disagree on black families. >> you said it was the most important thing.

[inaudible] >> thank you so much. i really appreciate all of the guys on the panel this evening so thank you for being here. my name is ied rashid. i'm originally from california but i've been in baltimore for about seven years. i am an alum from morgan state and i am actually an artist but i have a love for humanity and life in understanding people's stories. so that is what brought me here this evening. but, i come from, my grandparents left catholicism and went into the islam and then my father and mother embraced islam i guess after mohammad died. his son mohammed came about and i am a product of that.

i lived in africa is a young girl. my father stayed arabic and then the back to the country and now i am here living my life as a young muslim woman in america. and so, one of the things that i find interesting is that story of black nationalism and how when lame a part of that but then to understand the live show mohammad not mohammed not only produce malcolm x but mohamed ali and louis farrakhan so these are pretty significant figures in our times today that we all sort of looked to, and i am curious to know from the panel how you look to see how malcolm was directing the black community to essentially islam i guess and when i say islam, it is arabic. al islam means peace so i'm curious to know how you guys

feel about that and how malcolm -- i feel like them young muslim-american how he was directing to understand islam to study it and to understand, the understanding of jihad which means struggle in arabic that it means yes, struggle and how we all struggle and we all have our personal struggles but it is really within. it is not about pointing fingers and saying this person is harming you but we really have to do the work on the inside. so a pretty broad question but i'm very curious to know what you if you guys feel about mainly the question is how do you feel about malcolm leading the black community to learn and understand islam essentially? >> well, you know, my wife was in the nation of islam under

elijah mohammad as a young girl. she was 16 years old, and had left catholicism or was on her way. i know she was under catholicism and under the nation of islam book. have it snatched out of her hand and was reprimanded and then taken to a laysha mohammed himself. i said wow. that story could have turned out differently. in many ways that i don't even want to speak on. so, i began their fight for the reason that now as a mature minister and social activist -- she is, not me. right, well. soshi as a mature minister and brilliant social activist who passed through islam and through

catholicism and through christianity, but a post-christian christian so to speak, you know it is very interesting to me to see that the marks on her life i have been able to discern and understand have been extraordinarily positive and edifying. so malcolm x, but i think about malcolm directing black people toward islam i think about millions of other people who have subscribed and held fast to the faith. the problem of course is not in the islam in its theological verities that it produces in the same way as christianity. it is in the practice of it and perversion of it by the people who done messed it up. so i think that malcolm x's ambition, moral ambition, cannot the distinguished from what he learned from a laysha mohammed at his best. he did produce an minister

farrakhan in boston and then of course converted and of course mohammed ali and ali made the choice of staying with a the nation of islam. to be brief, it is the ideals and the theologies and i think would malcolm did was about love of black people and i'm going to say something is a baptist minister. your islamic faith because they were christians who claim they know jesus who are doing crazy stuff that i don't agree with that also i would rather side with people who claimed to be atheists but who were doing the work of elijah or jesus or the holy koran or the art art of motorcycle maintenance. whatever book establishes the predicate of your faith beautiful but i think in the end and here is where i ironically even though i've tried to be

critical of many elements of the fascist dimensions of black insular thinking and the way in which as professor harris-perry says that it polices the boundaries of blackness. you want us to be together and then you say except these people who are black. what the heck are you talking about? he can't all be together be done except the people are the people. cantankerous diversity in the midst of a mythology of unity what they used to call operational unity from black nationalism in the 1960s, or, or it means nothing. ultimately it means my blackness in my religion have converged into love and i think that the love is the ultimate sense, unless we can embrace and love blackness that every instance of that, not that we are not critical of the ways in which it has problem that ties our humanity. i think if malcolm was doing something for black people,

cool. but i think ultimately it must help us become more humane in the midst of our struggles and anything of religion included, that interferes with the process of radical dissemination of love in the instance of our distance or in community is antithetical to humans and i think ultimately to god. [applause] >> the only other thing i would say, and i'm glad that they have our own personal testimonies. [applause] [laughter] no, only that, only that there was this important opening of i think the black mind in the late 50s and through the 60s that had a lot to do with the civil rights movement and it would be really a mistake for people not to understand the significance of malcolm x and actually the

movement of, the rise of the nation of islam as part of that opening of the mind. i had two sisters that joined the nation of islam and they late 1960s as well. this was shocking. this was, you know, we were raised in a very christian family. this was an extremely shocking thing. and yet, what came out of it was a kind of respect, a kind of -- it made us curious. it didn't shatter the love and the relationship. for something that we didn't really know very much about. what we know about the nation of islam we knew because of mohamed ali and because of malcolm x. that that is what the new. we didn't have any other markers within our community to tell us something about the nation of islam and those two things that we knew, not the max and mohamed ali were regarded as positive. so it created this opportunity, it created this door through which we did again to open our

minds and we did begin to open our ideas about the range of black experiences that were out there. what is disturbing today, and i don't don't know if this is as truth of the question, what is disturbing to me today is that post-9/11 and the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we had an opportunity to further that opening of our mind. it was actually -- the blast should have opened our minds. the horror of this thing should have opened our minds, and should have made us ask questions and should have made us listen for real answers. and there was a brief moment -- there were two weeks when i thought it was going to happen and then it didn't happen. and in fact, it has really closed the american mind tight in many ways particularly about islam and the very things you were just describing and asking your question. and so, this is the moment in

which, and if you have been reading this book and reading about the nation of islam and rating particularly about malcolm's journey after his hajj and his feelings about islam and how it really centered, began to center his ideas about who we wanted to be in the contribution he was trying to make really just kind of call to mind is very disturbing moment that we are in right now where this is precisely what we need is to do exactly what the examination that michael eric dyson says we need to examine which is about trying to find this essential quality about love that unites this and yet this is the very moment in which we say no, no, no. we know that is the way and get there seems to be this willful desire to turn away from it so it is very poignant, reading about malcolm's journey as a muslim in this book at that precise moment that we are in this kind of feel that darkness of darkness and disinformation

about islam. [applause] >> we are going to take an earlier suggestion right now. we are going to take the next few folks in line there. each of you can make a comment and we will see what time we have left, okay? go ahead, sir. >> good evening. i have really enjoyed everything said so far. might make is michael lind and i'm a lecture at morgan state and being a lecture i teach freshman and sophomores. and what i have discovered as far as when this book came out and picking it up in first opening it and wanting to bring it to my class, actually took it to one class but quickly came to me was that i was teaching young people who only have the spike lee version and the denzel washington cinematic urchin of malcolm x and it is hard to have

what i call a complex conversation about the book when there was little to no prior knowledge. so, as i stated before, i can get rid of the spike lee, malcolm x, the alex haley malcolm x but the question is to a generation that doesn't even have the alex haley malcolm x and only has the denzel washington malcolm x, how do you believe this book will play into the younger people coming up and burning malcolm x for the first time, period? >> that is a really good question. >> maam, go ahead. >> i am an educator here in baltimore. my question is very similar to the gentleman who stood before us, before me rather.

i just want to preface my question with the following. on the way over here my children and i took delight rail and we saw about five young black males, teenagers being questioned by the police, the mta police. that is the transit release, and what bothered me is that four of them were let go but they had one sitting on the ground and he was told to keep his hands behind his back. he actually at the point of being asked to stand up, stood up without any kind of smugness and he followed all of their you know, come in so to speak. raise your hand, but may frisk you and all of that kind of thing. i say all of that to say that i'm one who totally embraces alex haley's interpretation of

malcolm x's life. i say that as one who has not read mr. manning's book on malcolm x but i fully intend to. but i just ask scholars and teachers what is the message that this current work, what is the message that this current work will bring to our young black males that alex haley's work has not lost? >> a very good question. sir, in the blue shirt. >> my name is alex. malcolm x meant a lot to me since i read in high school. i read it right when the movie came out and it was really a big deal in my school. never heard of him and i just want some respect to go to him. it is amazing. but i had a three-part kind of comment i guess. one, it seems to me that when

seeing the failures of the great leader, it is almost like us growing up and seeing our parents differently, like we see our parents as heroes. then we see their failings and all of a sudden we just want to rage against the world because they are not what we thought they would be. been in and we kind of put it together and realize that is what makes them great. the second part is, i think a key to malcolm x and to what you are saying about how his story unfolded was that his story is all marked by conversion. he converted to the nation of islam and therefore, doing that, he had to create a narrative of conversion. i was once this. now i am this. and so that even makes it even harder when you are talking about an autobiography because he would keep reinventing bad as he goes along. you know because he is inventing a story to go with the conversion.

i think being muslim is a big part of who he is and a big part of what makes it him challenging for everyone, but i also notice that malcolm x becomes more and more alienated as he goes along. because, he challenges like. he challenges politics and people go oh yeah you did great but he keeps going and keeps challenging. he goes to another country. becomes muslim man becomes even separate from the people he is around. going to another country although some becoming different from other americans around him. it seems like he has increased alienation that in a way it is strange that he was killed i african-americans just like gandhi was killed by hindus. >> a quick question before we let you close out the evening and respond to all of this. is it just you left? get up there.

if it was a whole line. >> i'm a student at tallahassee university. my question is, because there has been discussion briefly about black nationalism and i guess my question is it possible to have a formulation of black nationalism that addresses some of the policing that goes on in some of what is referred to as the fashion element of insular black thinking. is a possible to address that policing and how does dr. marable's oh, how does his portrayal of malcolm x help in that conversation of the policing of the boundaries of likeness and black nationalism and its potential as a framework of the political advancement of black people in this country? >> i think i wanted to go to the question that the woman asked who saw the people on the light rail and actually it reminds us of the earlier question i think

we did an answer about the being that comes out of the book. and i am not one to give people universal themes out of books because i think that is the part of reading it is that you discovered yourself. i think i understand what you mean by the question and also about what i hear as maybe a little bit of anxiety about malcolm with clay feet. so i want to say a couple of things. one is i'm happy to hear the gentleman say your children were realized later that is why you are great. right now that is happening with my kids so that is wonderful news. [laughter] but i do think that, and i understand the anxiety. i don't think because we are in this room tonight and because we are admirers of manning marable, pretend to ourselves that alex haley malcolm x is going away anytime soon or spike lee. first of all, you are right. first of all they should not.

the autobiography of malcolm x is a brilliant book. it should be read because it is a brilliant look. and it tells a story that is powerful and tells us many things about what it means to be black in america. it is important. it must be read. it is a seminal work. that is not going to change because we learned more details about malcolm's life that make them more human or because we learn his failings. letter from a birmingham jail by martin luther king is no more diminished or is that i have a dream speech or the april 4, 1957 speech because we know he had extramarital affairs or whatever. it just doesn't work that way. and we do have to open our minds to that. i would suggest that you know we follow the example of what white america does with its heroes. i mean this seriously. we know a lot about george washington for example that we probably didn't know when we were little kids. we knew he chopped down the cherry tree, he was the father

of the nation and so forth. at some point, we have learned more. we read andrew why senate's book about his slaves. people didn't stop calling him the father of the nation. people didn't stop saying he was a great manner founder. we still have many theories for john adams. one of the problems i think is we get so nervous about our own leaders and the requirement that they be perfect, even as other portions of the american public recognize the complexity of their heroes and refuse to allow their essential greatness to be diminished. so, i have no problem maintaining what i think is a truth, which is alex haley's malcolm x. that is a truth particularly because it has all the pieces we are talking about, that it is shaped by the time, it is shaped by haley and shapes by how malcolm wants to think of himself. all of that is relevant to

understanding who the man is. the spike lee movie is a good movie. and although it is not a documentary it never purported to be a documentary. and so therefore, it does what every movie fictionalized account of a great person does is that it takes liberties. and so some of those liberties are greater than others. so i think that those stories are not going away anytime soon. i'm not certain that this is going to be made into a movie. i mean, i don't know. maybe it will be but i do think that we shouldn't overestimate you know how quickly the revision will happen. it is going to take time for people to absorb some of what is in here and i think manning marable would want that. the this would begin a -- other people will write in and other people will take portions of this and take up looking more at the nation of islam and looking more at black nationalism in this period. this is the beginning of the story in many ways and that to

me in my closing remarks is what is great about the book as a tribute to manning marable's life. he has not clothes something. he didn't write the definitive word that stored -- closes the story on malcolm x. that means his work will go forward and have tremendous life as other people take up different aspects of it and begin to explore it even further. [applause] >> amen. i mean, amen, amen, amen. that is great stuff, that the book should be continued to be read. it is a great book. it is a great story and the shape of moral ambition in america is the shape of story. and you know that is why we live in a post-culture where people are going to the movies to get their you know, fix for what novels used to do. the novel is not dead but it is

certainly migrated to the screen. the way in which people consume information, watching john daly versus you know even cnn are watching cnn as opposed to reading "the new york times" or a are reading the dark times as opposed to the guardian. there are various levels at which people consume information i don't think we should be elitist about it even as we are vigorous and the explanation of the idea for this so i think the spike lee film is the greatest black biopicture made i would argue. i am saying what is deeper than that? there were three or four minute segments in that film, when denzel as malcolm is doing nothing but spitting fire at white supremacy in a way you wish obama could do in four years, right? is professor harris-perry has said we understand what the limitations are. we know why he can't do that and even though i'm a peacenik at the end of the day you know, i am interrupting donald trump's show so i can announce bin laden is dead?

how do you like a now? now? first evolved there ain't no mistakes allowed, but anyway. at some level i have to be straight up black masculinist about that and say you tell me i am -- and now here they are for the world to see and i don't know if that is american empire but it is a brown faith in a brown body on american empire. that is part of the problem and you have to kill somebody to prove your american. that is the thing. but anyway so having said that, the greatest biopicture i think being the malcolm x film and i think that denzel was -- big time and i think alpha chino got it back here because pacino had been robbed before for the godfather. so i think it is important and i will end with this. this is a great question in terms of malcolm x as in terms of conversion.

it is true. the beautiful central element of malcolm's life is about constantly going from one thing to another, costs and conversion, constant rethinking and i will tell you what that involves. older ability and self-criticism. a lot of leaders just don't have that. a lot of intellectuals don't have that. a lot of people whoever we are don't have that vulnerability and the ability to be self-critical. ironically i heard somebody say when the gentleman said that -- even if the state was involved and what are the things we didn't get to tonight is that manning marable makes clear the nypd knew what the deal was and that state police forces there with the deal was and didn't warn malcolm and why do we find it hard to believe? they didn't warn martin luther king better and they liked him comparatively speaking better so why wouldn't they warn malcolm x? having said that one of the characteristic or marks of blackness is the self saw the tosh and willingness to hate

other blacks. that is funky white supremacy that spread them by faith. it is a ventriloquist act of white supremacy. so at the end of the day for me i think that the hatred and self sabotage as we have internalized and been discriminated is characteristic of happen to malcolm and what we must resist in ourselves and others as we treat. love is at the that the harder malcolm makes us embrace that at his best. i think ultimately what manning's can do, can't help but think open up a conversation about what black nationalism is and what it should be and what annie, not just black nationalism that any ideology, any politics, any theory that has put forth in the name of people, the litmus test must be, to what degree does it free vulnerable and working people's who are black, who are poor and whose backs are against the wall and to what degree does it arise and their life as a vehicle of

liberation? that is the litmus test at the end of the day and i think this book would bring forward that particular thing. [applause] >> the one question that wasn't answered yet i think is the teaching question. 1965 is to this generation as world war i was to me and professor harris-perry. so, if you think about it like that, what we have is not just just -- [inaudible] [laughter] if you think about that a second, it is not just about teaching malcolm. it is about teaching the 60s, the 70s, the 80's and the '90s. you have got people who don't know who rodney king is, right? so getting back to the

nationalism thing i want to take another cut at it. this is why we need a set of cultural institutions that can teach our history in a way that speaks both to our past and our present moments. again it is not just black nationalism that says okay people aren't black. there are black nationalist churches but the black church is not nationalist. so i would say that it is really about taking that, taking that text, using it as part of a much larger body and creating the spaces where you can take that larger body of text and speak to black people where they are. [applause] >> okay. a lot of different things so i will try to do this quickly. i was feeling sad with a the story about the young man and the mta. part of the reason i felt sad

about it is my sense that ultimately this context, talking about a book and talking about a thinker and talking about ideas is profoundly important and woefully inadequate on that question. i sat at a dinner with the civil rights icon at one point and we were talking about qiang and x and i was talking about the assassination of malcolm x and the civil rights leader said to me, martin luther king was assassinated. malcolm x was -- died in a street fight. and i was stunned and i said but wait a minute. let me explain. martin changed policy. he said when you look at what martin luther king did i can show you the 1964 civil rights act. i can show you the 1965 voting rights act. i can walk you through the structural changes. i think there are a lot of reasons that is unfair. but what i do want to take from

that difficult moment in the way i had to process and think about that is that a lot of what manny manning gets manny gets a senate a lot of what we have done tonight is talk about ideas. and i don't want to move that ultimately our notion that alex haley's version of malcolm x can free the young man on the platform of the mta is an assumption of what keeps that him -- them in a moment of bondage is their belief about who they can be, rather than to set a public policy that make's bare bodies easily victimized by people in uniform. and so, i care about what our young people believe. i am a mother. i am a teacher. i care of my core about what we believe but i do not believe that african-american inequality is primarily a black of imagination on the part of black people. which is to say that for me, but the critical liberating

possibility of black religion, and this is true whether it takes the form of ancestral religion, christianity and i want to come back to your nation question just for a second because i think one of the things we have not been honest about relative to the nation is that the nation of islam is like jazz. if the black christian churches the blues, then -- god i sound like cornell. i don't mean it that way. what i mean is that it is an indigenous black institution. so what i mean is they were there were very few american theologies that are born here. and the two that actually are here that exist here that were born here are black liberation theology out of slave religion that is about christianity as the nation of islam. so there are two forms of islam that find their way here but immigration islam only finds its way here because the nation existed in indigenous institutions. it is part of what makes that

initial slur towards president obama muslim and then what we know, when they say muslim what they mean is the n word. we know that those things are linked and so part of their the pain, the absolute pain of the moment of the killing of bin laden is that we all feel that jc barack obama, get them, take them and simultaneously he had to kill osama bin laden to do it and he had to kill the muslim to do it. the black president had to kill the muslim and then though -- gave the credit to the white president who ain't around these parts no more for having done it. so we feel that because we know that there are -- it was like black people wearing the nypd hat post moment. when i saw black men in the city of new york, while rudy giuliani was vague mayor wearing nypd hats as a reflection of their solidarity with the americans

stayed over and against the islamic terrorists, okay so all right the beauty of the nation and the beauty of alex haley's malcolm and the beauty of the christian god that it enslave people gave us was that they all are about an incredible imagination that is outside of empirical evidence. my great great great grandmother church hill richmond. she never knew anything for herself but slavery. never knew anyone from her except slavery. never expected her children or grandchildren to believe anything but slavery. why would she believe such a ridiculous thing? there was no empirical evidence that god even vaguely liked or noticed the black people existed on the planet. like seriously. and so, this is why i hate the form of christianity now that if god loves you get a big house and a fine