Phonies?
Historians must have run out of founding father targets (phone home TJ) to revise histories about, because they are finally getting around to Ghandi and Malcom X.
And the revised picture isn’t good… lying about their past, lying about their sexuality, and generally being all around anti-Semitic, racist, and pretty much just big phonies.
But you know who comes out worse? Their past biographers and those that interviewed them for “news” of the day. They were complicit, actively so, in hiding the truth about these men from the public.
Malcom X has always seemed to be an unimportant, contrived, figure to me. And this confirms the view. Ghandi, however, seems to have a lot of impact. In other words, Ghandi was worth writing about, it would have been nice to get the real store. Malcom X was sort of a Disney character of black radicalism. Invented to sell a mystique rather than accomplish anything.
What about those past historians and “journalists” The worst of the lot seems to be Alex Haley, author of the formerly definitive biography of Malcom X, and also of the popular book Roots being the worst of the lot. Both books, it turns out, were pretty much wrong.
That “autobiography,” as David Remnick makes clear in a review in The New Yorker, consisted in large part of Malcolm Little making up tall tales about his life while being egged on by the sensationalist writer Alex Haley, whose later book Roots would also turn out to be mostly fictitious (and partly plagiarized). Haley, says Marable, wanted to write “a potboiler that would sell,” facts be damned.
Who’s next? Martin Luther King? That might be interesting.
