Sunday, February 21st, 2021, marks the 56th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination. In this special segment from this week’s “Marc Steiner Show,” Marc has an in-depth conversation with Tamara Payne, co-author of the National Book Award-winning biography “The Dead Are Arising,” about the deep political and familial influences that helped Malcolm Little become Malcolm X. “The Dead Are Arising,” a book that gives a never-before-seen view of Malcolm’s life and legacy, was thirty years in the making, including thousands of original interviews and research by the late Les Payne, Tamara’s father, and Tamara herself. In this conversation, Marc and Payne discuss how the book expands our understanding of Malcolm X, as well as the process of putting the book together and seeing it through to publication.
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Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show, right here on The Real News Network. Good to have you all with us, as usual. I’m Marc Steiner.
It was 56 years ago that Malcolm X was assassinated. It’s a moment I’ll never forget. I’ll also never forget standing in the frigid cold outside the church at the funeral with the speaker blaring Ossie Davis’s eulogy. And there’ve been numerous books, and of course The Autobiography of Malcolm X being one of them, that moved so many when they read the life of Malcolm X.
There’s also Spike Lee’s biopic film, Malcolm X with Denzel Washington in the lead, which you can now see almost anywhere. And the play One Night in Miami, with a very different sense and portrayal of Malcolm and that you can see now on Amazon Prime. And I watched it the other night after seeing it in the theater.
I keep a picture of Malcolm and Martin just above my desk. I think about those two men a lot, and wonder what we would think about this new amazing book that just came out about Malcolm called The Dead are Arising by the late Les Payne, written with his daughter Tamara Payne.
This book brings us Malcolm that not so much dives into the depth of his politics, but brings us into the world that made Malcolm, from his childhood, his parents, the moments in his life — Many of which were lesser known by many — That led to the split with the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad, but different details of that that we don’t always see or talk about, the most chilling account of his assassination that I’ve ever read, and more. And it’s based on thousands of hours of intimate interviews put together over a 30-year period.
When the great Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Les Payne left us much too soon and his daughter picked up the mantle and made sure the book was finished — As I said, she was also the lead researcher on the book and made this book happen and joins us now.
And Tamara Payne, welcome, it’s good to have you with us.
Tamara Payne: Hello Marc, thank you for having me.
Marc Steiner: So where do we begin? Because I think about this book, and there’s very few things I’ve ever read that take Malcolm X from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X to Malik el-Shabazz with all these details and things.
So how did this begin for your father? He was one of America’s great journalists, Pulitzer Prize winner, editor, incredible writer. This book just pulls you in like a novel the way he put the interviews together. So talk a bit about how you put this together and how you got these interviews it seems very few people bothered to get.
Tamara Payne: Thank you. I would like to start with, talk a little bit about my dad, who was born in 1941 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which was in Jim Crow South. And then his family moved up to Hartford, Connecticut when he was 12 years old.
And he went to University of Connecticut in Storrs, and then after that went into the army in the Vietnam War and served as a… He was an information officer, and made it to army captain. He worked under General Westmoreland and wrote some of his speeches.
And then after he came out of the army, he went into journalism, worked full-time with Newsday — Actually, with the help of an army buddy of his — And he stayed at Newsday for 38 years.
But I say all that also to give a sense of who my father was and his experiences that are how he processes information. So when he’s writing about Jim Crow South, he’s actually writing about Jim Crow South from the first person experience.
I can’t speak of what it was like to see my great-grandmother speak to a young white boy and to call him sir, and he referred to her by her first name. My father can. I think it’s important that people understand that speaking with our elders and learning from them is really important because they capture that history, and if we’re not careful, that history will come back.
But also while in journalism, my father, he worked from being a cub reporter all the way up to being associate managing editor at Newsday. But also in doing that, he covered many stories. And the thing about being a journalist is he’s always looking for the story. And what that really means is looking for what’s new, what’s new here to tell, what’s interesting, but what’s really new, and what’s also not easily found out?
And the thing about Malcolm, my father admired Malcolm. He saw Malcolm speak in Hartford in 1963 while he was a college student, and he admired Malcolm. And so he actually thought, before he met Malcolm’s brothers, that we had everything we needed to know about Malcolm from Malcolm’s autobiography and from his speeches.
And one thing we should also understand about autobiographies is that an autobiography is really what that subject wants you to know about them. And a biography is really what others have to say about you, whether they’re your students, people who knew you, so on and so forth.
So when dad met, in Detroit, one of Malcolm’s brothers, he was excited, and he sat him down for an interview, and he heard all these really interesting details about what it was like growing up in a Garveyite household led by Louise and Earl Little. And so that was new to my father.
And he came back to New York and he spoke with a colleague of his, Gil Noble, who also holds a show here called Like It Is, which is very important here. But Gil Noble also admired Malcolm said, which brother did you meet? My father said, oh, I met Philbert. Said, the brother you should talk to is Wilfred.
So my father, being tenacious, went back to Detroit to meet Wilfred. And Wilfred agreed to sit down for eight hours and talk to my father, and more details. The other thing we learned is their relationships. Philbert was a couple of years older than Malcolm, whereas Wilfred was six years older than Malcolm, but also was Malcolm’s best friend and confidant throughout his life.
And so the information that you’re getting about Malcolm is really on a personal level and the details that you’re getting from him about, for example, when we opened this book with the Klansman writing on the Little household in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm wasn’t even born yet, and the details, that’s all from Wilfred. He was six years old.
His mother is standing her ground against these Klansmen who are trying to threaten her and tell her that she and her family need to leave town because they’re organizing other Black families to support each other, build their own community, to be more conscious of who they were as Black people and embracing their Blackness. And she stands her ground, and she’s like, we’re good people and we have a right to live here. This is basically a free country. And they threatened her, and they say, you need to get out of town. So that’s how we open the book.
And the details, the amount of details, from the horses that ride on, Wilford’s attraction to horses, but then understanding the ominous feeling of the situation because of how his mother’s responding to this. You don’t get this really anywhere else — Except when somebody was there.
Marc Steiner: [Laughs] And what got me, the way you open the book was amazing to me because you’ll always think of Malcolm X as this brilliant, deeply intellectual, proud, but very strong figure.
And then reading the story about his mother on the porch facing down all these armed white guys in the hoods, I said, oh, that’s where Malcolm gets it from. His mother was just powerful. The fact that she faced down the Klan like that and then would not back away said a whole lot about the roots that he comes from.
Tamara Payne: Right, and not just his mother, but also his father, who’s charismatic and an organizer, but —
Marc Steiner: Oh yeah, sure, yes.
Tamara Payne: Malcolm wasn’t getting his sense of who he was as a Black person from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam but really from his parents and the framework of Garveyism. So that’s really important to hear that.
And in telling these details, this is what journalism really is about: getting these stories and interviewing people who are on the scene, getting their stories and finding out what happened as they remember it but then also having to back it up. You have to look at what other people were saying who were on the scene. Also, you have to look at comparing with other news articles that were written at the time, and also getting a sense of what Omaha, Nebraska was like at the time.
But it was an opportunity. Really what my father wanted to do with this book was to tell the story of Malcolm, who was this great historical figure of the 20th century that we all admire, but not just learning about who he is but the world he was born into, and therefore how that world impacted him.
Malcolm, he’s always framed as you said, very intellectual, strong, and oftentimes, through the media, angry, as if it came out of nowhere, and who was he to point his finger at us all the time? But here we’re giving you context as to where all of that comes from, and not necessarily that it’s anger, but really he’s analyzing and critiquing, and we’re taking it as anger because it’s something that makes people uncomfortable.
Marc Steiner: I think that it’s really important how you were able to interview the folks early in his life to get a sense of what drove him. I don’t think there’s ever been such detail about Malcolm that I’ve ever seen before and how that shaped him.
I’m just curious, in those early interviews with Malcolm’s brothers and others, are there things within that that really popped out at you and your dad that were like these aha moments?
Tamara Payne: The real aha moments, realizing how deep Garveyism is in a lot of these movements, in these communities, and then looking into the reasons why. And that’s important, and I hope people will look even more into Marcus Garvey and what his movement was about.
But Marcus Garvey, not only that Malcolm’s parents were Garveyites and followers and organizers — Earl Little was a regional president out in the Midwest, and his mother was recording secretary. But not just recording secretary. They were attracted because they were attracted to the tenets of what Garvey was preaching.
And so knowing that there’s that framing, but then also finding out that it influences the Nation of Islam, it influences the Moorish Science Temple, it influences a lot of other preachers who come up with their own and develop their own groups over the years. So to see that was really interesting to me as well as my father, and especially when he takes time to really look into how the Nation of Islam was founded, even, and comparing it to other religious groups in America.
Marc Steiner: So before I jump into this next piece, I’m very curious about how difficult it was to get some of the interviews that you did get. You went through all kinds of people that you don’t expect to hear from: Captain Joseph, got an interview before he passed away, and all the other interviews you had around this assassination that you didn’t expect to see happen. How difficult was that?
Tamara Payne: It wasn’t done in a sequential way, if you think about it. We were, in the beginning, doing a vacuum of talking to anybody we could get, find who knew Malcolm or had anything to do with Malcolm, whether they attended classes he taught in the temple or they grew up with him or they were friends of the family in Lansing. We didn’t care. We wanted to know stories.
We were able to even look at letters that he had written to his friends in the 1940s when he had moved to Boston, the letters he wrote to his friends, and just being able to see that.
We wanted to get as much information as we could, especially the interviews done with Gene Roberts were done in the early ’90s. So it wasn’t that we were trying to solve the assassination. We wanted to get all the information together, get all this information together, and process it.
Marc Steiner: Yeah, and you can feel and see that throughout the book, which is what I think made it.
It was also interesting that it took so long to do. Clearly, your dad and you were not on a deadline. You were working this thing because you really were trying to unearth things that we had to understand in an artistic and emotional way, which you could only do through the interviews that you did. But 30 years it almost took you to write this, which is just amazing.
So to give the viewers a sense of the book and the writing, we talked a bit earlier before we started talking together on camera, is there something you’d like to share with us from the book to give a sense of your approach to the work before we jump into some of the [crosstalk]?
Tamara Payne: Sure. I’d like to talk about the parents, Louise and Earl, because there was a lot of information given out about them in the past, and also to get a sense of what it was like growing up in the Little household.
So this first reading I’m going to read is from the chapter “The Anchor is Lost”, and this is before Earl is killed, or Earl dies in the streetcar accident.
“The story of Little Black Sambo, published in 1899 by the British writer Helen Bannerman, was a standard children’s reader at Pleasant Grove. The illustrations of the dark Indian child caused the derisive snickering among whites, but the “pickaninny” slur, along with the unrestrained bandying about of the term “nigger”, repulsed the Little children, who were taught at home to disparage such putdowns of the Black race.
“As the taunts escalated, it was their mother, Louise, who conditioned Malcolm and his siblings not to overreact to these racial slurs. ‘We didn’t like being called a nigger,’ Wilford said, ‘but we would try to downplay it.’
“My mother always told us that you can handle racial slurs in a way where you make them continue, or you can let them think they’re not hurting you. She would give them an example: ‘If you’re throwing darts at a dartboard, there’s a satisfaction you get when you hit the target. When you miss it, you get another feeling. Well,’ she said, ‘it’s the same with white people when they’re throwing darts at you by the things they say and do. But if they don’t hit the target, then you don’t get that satisfaction, and eventually they’ll quit.’
“And usually that’s the way it worked. This psychological training for the resistance to racial provocation was conditioned into the behavior of young Malcolm and his siblings. Their behavior earned grudging respect among a growing number of whites in their neighborhood despite, and in some cases because of, their adherence to Garveyism.”
And what I’d also like to say about that, this isn’t about turning the other cheek. This is about having a sense of who you are, too. When somebody’s having these, throwing these insults at you, they don’t understand who you really are, and you don’t see yourself that way too. And that’s also what she’s imbuing them with.
And again, this is why I said this is where Malcolm’s getting this sense of who he is as a Black person in this country: from childhood, from his parents, from Garveyism.
And then I’d like to also read a little bit about Earl. Also in the same chapter, a little later, it says, “All the children agreed that even though their father was not as given to education as their mother, Reverend Little was dead set on installing a work ethic that, as a preacher organizer, he possessed as a sharp ear for glibness. In this latter case, he likely had a penchant for young Malcolm’s gift for expressing himself verbally and otherwise.”
And then a little later, “Earl would take Malcolm with him on proselytizing trips for Marcus Garvey. ‘It was only me that our father would take to the UNIA meetings, which he held quietly in different people’s homes,’ Malcolm noted in the autobiography.
“This special and primal paternal bond was the enduring essence of Malcolm’s childhood imprinting. Even before he reached the first grade, he was impressed with the potency of leadership as demonstrated by his father at the UNIA gatherings. ‘I remember seeing the big shiny photographs of Marcus Garvey that were passed around from hand to hand,’ Malcolm wrote. Despite Garvey’s imprisonment and deportation, Reverend Little was highly respected as regional UNIA president and Malcolm recalled his father closing the house meetings with two dozen or so followers by chanting, ‘Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.'”
Marc Steiner: So one of the things that struck me about the book, and what you just read to me is emblematic of that, is that this combination of Malcolm’s upbringing with these two very bright, powerful parents and what they believed in and the tragedy that took place with his father’s death being killed or died, the streetcar, under a streetcar, and his mom’s subsequent unraveling, which in some ways is what drove Malcolm to the street. But also that part of his path, growing up with his parents, kind of brought him all back. Do you know what I’m saying? It was almost natural for a young guy to lose it being put in foster care and then go hit the street, use his intelligence to hustle.
Tamara Payne: He was kind of hitting the streets before he hit foster care. And the parents, what I was reading is that there’s a stability there. And then when his father dies in the streetcar accident, they lose sense of that stability. And then also the unraveling of Louise is not just due to just the loss of stability, but the pressures. This was also during the Depression, and everybody’s trying to make ends meet, and it’s very difficult.
And just before, not long before Earl Little died in the streetcar accident, the family was evicted from land that had exclusionary clauses so that Black people couldn’t own the land.
So you already have strictures and laws that are setting up the… It’s almost like an imprisonment of Black people’s lives with where they could live and where they could buy a home and where they could buy land. And then after their white neighbors had them evicted off of this land to exercise the exclusionary clause, they’re evicted, the house is burnt down with the family in it. And then Earl Little dies very soon after that. So that’s like the instability, and that starts the unraveling, this enormous pressure on this family.
And then not to mention that while she’s trying to collect her widow’s pension — Which she is allowed. She is a widow. These are things that she’s… She has to go to a judge to collect this from, and he’s trying to harass her so that she signs over the land that she does get on, their farm — They move to another land and they have land — And he’s trying to get her to sign that over to him.
So yeah, we can say that the Depression was horrible and everything, but I don’t know that everybody had a judge trying to take your land from you. Not to mention, by the way, the life insurance company not paying their claim on Earl Little’s passing.
Marc Steiner: That is right. It was a lot. And I think the way it was written gives us a real sense that you didn’t get anywhere else at this moment, a sense of what molded Malcolm in the beginning, what created who became the man that people followed and admired.
And it also played into, I think, the unraveling with — And there’s a huge portion of the book around the unraveling with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. And it wasn’t just as simple as the philandering of Elijah Muhammad that really got to his moral core. But let’s start with this incredible part of the book that, really, I think it was probably the beginning of it, was Malcolm’s forced meeting with the KKK.
Tamara Payne: Yeah, it’s an important part of the book to understand, and a lot of people say, yeah, we’ve heard it. Look that this meeting happened in 1961 is not surprising because Malcolm also spoke about this towards the end of his life. But the details of that meeting were never revealed before, and we were able to get it from somebody else who was there, which was Jeremiah Shabazz, who was at the time the minister of the temple.
So basically what was happening in 1960, they’re in Atlanta, Malcolm was visiting Jeremiah Shabazz, and they were friends from before, they had met in Philadelphia a few years earlier. So they knew each other.
And so Malcolm’s visiting and he’s speaking, and while he’s giving his sermon, as they would call it, the Klan sends them a telegram to the temple and basically is inviting them to have a meeting. Neither Jeremiah nor Malcolm are the leaders of the Nation of Islam. And so the protocol is that they have to go back and speak to the leader, who is Elijah Muhammad. And they do that.
Now, I think it’s important to also point out what’s going on in the South in the 1960s. You have the bus boycotts, which had already happened, and they had desegregated the buses in Alabama. And Martin Luther King and his Civil Rights leader, another Civil Rights leader, they’re working, continuing to push the Jim Crow laws on their head. They’re attacking the superstructure of white supremacy, and that’s representing the Jim Crow South.
And they’re making success. They want desegregation. The Klan wants, they stand for Jim Crow South, basically, want segregation. And the Nation, they want separation. They don’t want to integrate. They’re not messing with the Civil Rights leaders, and they are also not messing with the Klan. They just want to have their own separate state. They want to be left alone to have their own community, society, and, in this case, a separate state.
And those are the positions. So the Klan’s seeing this as an opportunity to maybe have an alignment, an alliance with the Nation of Islam against Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights leaders.
And the Nation, Elijah Muhammad is not interested in doing that, but he is interested in expanding. So when Malcolm and Jeremiah go back to Chicago, meet with Elijah’s mom to discuss this, Malcolm, he’s in his feelings about, he wants to have more of a confrontation and tell the Klan where to go.
Jeremiah Shabazz is, we’re not the leader. We have to go by whatever Elijah Muhammad tells us. And Elijah Muhammad says, I want to have an expansion in the South. I want to have farmland. I want to open up more businesses. I want to have more temples. I even want to set up a separate state. If this Klan can’t help us in acquiring new land, then maybe they can leave us alone when we’re conducting our business down there.
And so he sends them back to have a meeting to see if they can negotiate something like this. Malcolm is not okay with this, and this does not set right. As I said earlier, we have the opening scene of the book where the Klan is visiting in Omaha, Nebraska, the family, and telling them to get out of town. And now he’s being sent on a mission to have a negotiation with how they can conduct business in the South.
And this doesn’t set right with Malcolm. He sees this as an unholy alliance, and this starts this rift between him and Elijah Muhammad about that they are philosophically in different places. And this does not go well for Malcolm. And it just starts this rift and it grows after that. But this is where it starts.
Marc Steiner: And Malcolm, from everything you’ve written in the book, did have these confrontations with the Klan. He wasn’t a wallflower in this meeting [both laugh].
Tamara Payne: His personality comes out. Malcolm isn’t a wallflower. When has Malcolm ever been a wallflower? Wallflower is different than a good listener. Malcolm was an excellent listener, and that’s where it’s important to understand that. But he wasn’t shy. He was never shy. And so no, he definitely takes his shots. And that’s why I think it’s important when people read the book, and definitely that part of it.
Marc Steiner: Yes, absolutely. It makes you wish you were… It’s the closest you’re going to come to being a fly on the wall with Malcolm and the Klan. To me, it became this dramatic scene. I wanted to write it up and make it a dramatic scene for people to act out. It was just such a powerful moment. It’s just unbelievable. Blew me away.
Tamara Payne: I would say with the way life has been playing out, particularly in the last four years, we couldn’t have written it better if we made it up [both laugh].
Marc Steiner: That’s right. Really. And then, on top of that, before we move on, we have the Ronald Stokes affair. this layering on of things that really made Malcolm begin to question what he was doing and why he was there.
Tamara Payne: Malcolm’s realizing, look… Malcolm’s about thriving and he sees that Elijah Muhammad wants to really be off to their own thing. But the thing is that that’s really unrealistic in the way that the Civil Rights movement runs. Even if you’re off by yourself, there’s still going to be people who are going to come hunt you down.
Look at Black Wall Street, where people are minding their own business, and they’re thriving, and yet we have the backlash, the white backlash, and they destroy this town. So Malcolm, he really wants to engage with the changes, not just for the nature, but for all of Black people. Now he sees that Islam as a religion that can embrace Black people and help them and thrive as a religion as opposed to Christianity. But as far as right now in the moment, he wants to work toward the freedom of Black people in America.
Marc Steiner: There’s so many parts of this book that just grab you, but one of the things that really is amazing was the detail in which your father and you described the assassination itself. The fact that you actually interviewed Gene Roberts, who was the undercover cop who was at the assassination and was getting information on Malcolm. The detail almost to Malcolm’s last breath was just so graphic and all of that.
And the goon squad in Newark, and talking about what the mosque did and didn’t do, and really putting the role of Louis Farrakhan in perspective to that. So talk a bit about putting that whole piece together. That, and why you chose to do it the way you did it, why your dad chose to do the way he did it.
Tamara Payne: What we wanted to do is to find out what happened. We were really persistent in wanting to find out exactly, not just did the call come from Elijah Muhammad, for example, directly? How did he say it? How did he instruct people to do it? How many times? Who picked that up? And who was given the assignment? And how was that structured?
Dad was really persistent in wanting to make sure he found out that information, and getting people at the time to talk about — And keep in mind, in 1965 after this happens, it’s a hot time, and people went their separate ways, and some went further into movements, some people went into hiding.
But there wasn’t a real lot of talk about this. And you still hear people talk about with Newark that this was an open secret. But getting people to talk, I think, was a matter of time passing, people are in different points of their lives. So it’s about timing too.
But also being tenacious and persistent and continuing to find out what really happened and not letting that go. And it takes time. It’s not necessarily something that you can put a deadline on and say, if I don’t find out in two weeks, this information, then I have to let go of this story.
This is how a story takes on its own life, and you have to keep persisting until you’re able to find it. And sometimes you also have to say, okay, I really want to get this story out, and I have to put it out, even if I come back to it at another time. But when you’re in the middle of doing the story, you only think about getting the information, and that’s what you’re focused on.
Marc Steiner: So in this particular part of the book with Gene Roberts, I’m curious, let’s talk a bit about what was revealed here that really changes our perception about what happened. You write a lot about the run up to the assassination, the conversation with Gene Roberts almost felt like, coming off the page, had been wrestling with his participation in this his whole life. It weighed on him, at least it felt that way from reading the book.
And that I remember, as I told you when we talked the other day, that when I was at Malcolm X’s funeral, people kept blaming it on Louis X, or Louis Farrakhan, but it’s more complex than that. So talk a bit about what was revealed to you all about that, because there are so many things I learned in reading that part of the book that I never knew before.
Tamara Payne: Well, I’ll say this about what we found in the book and what dad’s work show is that yes, it was definitely more complex than people just pointing their fingers at Louis X and Elijah Muhammad because, when you come to think about circumstances, the FBI was in the room, they had other informants for the police there.
Although the physical police, the uniformed police, their presence had been diminished with the [inaudible] because Eugene Roberts clearly said that he gave reports to his supervisor saying that he thought that a hit was going to come down. And he was surprised to see that the police presence diminished after that.
And then you also have to think about even with Gene Roberts, when Gene Roberts came out of the military, he was in the military, which he reveals to us, and immediately he gets this assignment to be an informant on Malcolm X. He didn’t go through training to be a police officer. He didn’t go through the police academy. He went into the police academy in the ’70s. So he’s trained immediately to be an informant.
And that also needs to be looked at if we want to talk about systemically what that’s about. So I would say that what we reveal is a lot more details, but I still think there’s more to this story too.
Marc Steiner: This, to me, felt like a book more about the depth of racism and his life and the world that formed Malcolm X, that allowed him to become the man he was. That seemed to be kind of the heart of what you were doing.
Tamara Payne: Well, it’s really a story about who Malcolm X was and the world that he was born into, and what formed the person that we’ve come to know who Malcolm X is. And as far as looking at his speeches, we do let him speak.
And it’s not about… My father wasn’t trying to do an analysis and insert himself about what his opinion was about Malcolm. It really was his opinion about Malcolm, that he obviously thinks he was a great guy. That’s why he spent all this time on Malcolm, telling this story. But also telling the information that will help us to have a better understanding of who Malcolm is and why, how he has come to influence us and impact us. Even today, people are gravitating, picking him up all around the world.
So the question that my father initially was answering is like, who is this person? What was the world like? How did he come to be? He’s always presented as this fully formed, angry person, and here’s an opportunity to look at, put him in context. And just because you’re critiquing doesn’t mean you’re angry, you’re critiquing. And he was critiquing what’s going on in America.
Marc Steiner: No, absolutely. So the two final things I want to ask you, and one is I’m just curious for you as a daughter of Les Payne working on this book, and maybe for your dad as well, what was revealed in your research that just took you aback?
Tamara Payne: That took me aback? This always is a hard question because I’ve worked on this book for so long, and when it took me aback was… And I couldn’t talk about it. So it’s really a delay. It’s hard for me to answer that question. What surprised me, or what’s new? I’ve been holding onto this information for 30 years.
But for me, as I said earlier, I thought it was interesting learning about the influences of Garvey, not just on Malcolm and the Littles, but how it impacted all these other organizations too, and how it still thrives. And I think that Garveyism is very important to look at.
I also was really curious in looking at some of the people that we met and spoke to who met Malcolm abroad. I mentioned Vicki Garvin, who saw Malcolm at different points of his life. She knew him as Detroit Red in Harlem, hanging out at Smalls. And then she met him again when he was a minister with the Nation and the minister of the Harlem temple.
And she sees him preaching, as you did, on 125th Street. And she talked about that and what he was like then. And then she met him in Ghana. She was a roommate with Maya Angelou as well as Alice Windom. And so they met Malcolm there, and they went around with him, and they got to talk to him and got to know him deeply. And it was really interesting.
Then also understanding that Malcolm, he was interested in getting Maya to join his organization, the Organization for Afro-American Union. And by the way, it’s interesting, this is a picture of my father giving Maya Angelou an award at the National Association of Black Journalists conference years ago. So on my wall behind me, I’m looking at my camera and I’m like, oh yeah, this [inaudible] behind me.
Marc Steiner: I love that [both laugh].
Tamara Payne: But it’s just finding out that there’s the information, there are these people he’s met.
Even talking with Yuri for years. I met Yuri through interviewing her with my father for the book, and then she and I became very good friends. And I learned so much about her being a Japanese American woman living in Harlem with her family and her work to build bridges in the Harlem community as very important work. And getting to know her and having her and being able to call her a friend.
Marc Steiner: She was amazing.
Tamara Payne: She became one of my favorite people for years. And meeting other people. I’ve met Conrad Lynn. These are all historical figures. Conrad Lynn, the attorney who was one of the attorneys for the kissing case and dealing with Robert Williams.
It’s rich. It’s just rich. It’s of the history of the people that we’ve met who are important, but who are also influenced by Malcolm, who respected Malcolm. And you would not necessarily think that because they may not have talked about it publicly in their speeches, but they saw him, they understood what he was trying to do.
And so it’s important to understand that Malcolm’s still very important today. And the reason why is because not only the way he critiqued America and what it was doing to Black Americans here, but he was also looking at oppression. And he was also at the end of his life getting into the whole, he was moving in this direction of dealing with what was going on worldwide when he was taking the fight of Black Americans from Civil Rights level to the human rights level. That was his idea.
And it was Martin Luther King who joined him on that. He agreed with that. So he’s impacting a lot of these people and impacting this movement, but he’s impacting the world.
So I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but just all of this information. And I started out much younger learning this, but learning in real time from the people who were there, that was such a learning experience for me.
Marc Steiner: It was amazing. Just leave us the one quick last thought, so folks are going to get this. The book is amazing. It took so long for us to set the date to get this done. I’m really glad we did it. So The Dead Are Arising. So just very quickly describe for our listeners, for our viewers, what that means. And then we’ll…
Tamara Payne: The Dead Are Arising. It comes from, in this chapter we didn’t talk about, but the Hartford chapter, which we were excited to find out that Malcolm organized that temple there. He was invited by Rosalie Bey Glover, who was from Florida originally, who had left Florida because of a lynching of one of her neighbors. And she didn’t want to raise her children in that environment anymore. Some of her elder children had moved up north and she had joined them and took the rest of her family up there.
But she was somebody who wanted to, again, following, wanting to thrive, wanting to build a community. She had joined the Moorish Science Temple originally, but she was disenchanted with them. And then she was looking at other… Searching. Again, searching for where else she could find community of other people, and community with other people who shared her idea of building up her community in Hartford.
And she heard of Malcolm, and she would go listen to him in Springfield. They had a temple over there. And then she invited him to come to Hartford to talk with people there, her son-in-law, her daughter and other family friends. And he agreed.
And Hartford’s also important because my father grew up there from age 12 to his adult years, and he went to school at University of Connecticut. And he knows Hartford. They talk about being in Bellevue Square. My father knows what Bellevue Square was. He and his buddies used to hang out, and they’d do all their little antics there when they were teenagers. But he’s able to write intimately about this later on, and being able to do that.
And then as far as journalism, what we learned, everybody’s a source. Turns out that some of the family members of Rosalie Glover worked with my uncle for years. So we were able to meet them through him. And that was just finding all these stories, which was great.
But getting back to the title, it comes from a correspondence that Malcolm was writing to Elijah Muhammad about his progress and building the temple and recruiting people in Hartford. And he was saying that they were having obstacles, but that the dead there were rising. And what he was meaning is that he was making headway, and he was describing that as the dead there are rising.
And it’s like the Nation of Islam would refer to people who were not part of the group as the dead. And once you joined the group, then it’s like you’re embracing who you are as a Black man, as a Black person in the United States, when you’re embracing the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. So you’re arising, you’re rising, so rising in a consciousness.
And so dad liked the term “arising” because that’s a much stronger term of what was really happening. People were arising to new forms of consciousness. And even for what Malcolm would end up doing.
And it really becomes a metaphor, not just for the telling of the story, but even what’s happening today. There are a lot of people, I would say, that were dead and are arising because they’re waking up to what’s really happening around them.
Marc Steiner: That’s why this book is such an important piece. And first of all, I want to thank Tamara, you and your dad, Les Payne, for writing this book, putting this thing together. It’s an amazing piece of work. The Dead Are Arising. It’s well worth the read as we get into Malcolm’s 56th year since the assassination.
So I want to thank you so much for joining today, Tamara Payne, it’s been a pleasure to talk with you, and I really thank you for the book.
Tamara Payne: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Marc.
Marc Steiner: This is great. I do encourage you folks, check it out. You do not want to miss this book. I’m telling you that.
And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you for joining us. And please let us know what you think. You see that mss@therealnews.com below. Write to me, let me know what you think about this conversation, other conversations, what you’d like us to be covering, and we’ll try our best to do it. So take care, and thank you.
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