i will double back to that in a second but the thing he killed for me was alex haley. you read this and alex is not looking like we should feel very good about him. that has been done but there's a way in which it is happening here. the work he has to do to deconstructs the autobiography. to deconstructs the autobiography he takes us into the black box of alex haley's and it is not always pretty because particularly when you are writing to feed yourself, you have to take that in ways that were challenging. the third thing i thought was important we talk about as we t unwanted to think about malcolm's assassination in the context of it being a very american moment. we think of malcolm as the black nationalist critiquing america but at all points caught up in a very american structure including the nation's slow reading that again in the context of the killing of bin laden and the final thing i will say in this introduction is i am ready to give up alex haley's malcolm x. and spike lee's malcolm x and not everyone is. i have a dear friend who teaches at an all boys charte

so i have no problem maintaining what i think is a truth, which is alex haley's malcolm x because it's the truth. it has all the pieces that it's talked about. it's shaped by the times, it's shaped by haley and how malcolm thinks of himself and all of that relevant in thinking who this man is. the spike lee movie, it's a damn 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 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 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's going to take time for people to absorb some of what's in here and i take it that this -- and i think manning marable would want that. that this would begin a conversation -- other people will write, other people will take portions of this and take up maybe l

at the thing he killed for me with alex haley. yeah, boy coming to read this and alex is not looking like he should feel very good about 10. and that has been done, but there is a way in which it happening here is -- a work he has to do in order to deconstruct the autobiography. so in order to deconstruct the autobiography, he takes it into the black box of haley's writing, exactly the black boxer talking about. of course as you know it's not always pretty, particularly when writing to feed yourself. so i think you have to take that in ways that were challenging. the third thing i thought was critically important as we talk about manning's passing here. i'd read the book and i've read this section on the assassination and i read it very quickly because i got a very painful to read particularly in the context of manning found passing, something about the speed with which his narrative picks up there in the intensity of it. but a reread it again yesterday, that section in the context in the killing of osama bin laden. and not because

and help us now in most cases alex haley the torpedo effect democrat led senate scales republican debt ceiling plan surely all day was not any of the house's u.s. default deadline knew. that trend's forces gathering and standing in front of the no museum causing outrage from activists.

and i say, well, and i thought about, you know, alex haley and the whole "roots" thing, and we end up saying that was faction -- [laughter] because he had to create a whole lot of things that's impossible for him to know the kind of discussions that they have gone on with distant ancestors and that sort of thing. well, i don't want to go that far in terms of putting manning's book into that kite of category, but it warrants discussion that we can talk about the the infidelity and the homosexuality which, of course, triggered discussion around the book. so i stand right in the middle, i'm prepared to take it from both sides. >> great. and picking up on that. i want to direct this question to sonia, but everyone on the panel's welcome to debate this. manning argued memorably that a black scholar has a specific mandate to produce scholar that is descriptive, prescriptive and corrective. did manning meet the responsibility in this particular book, did he meet that standard in this book by writing a study of malcolm that is descriptive, prescriptive and corrective? >> i'm not too sure that