Molding the past of African America

Janus Adams is an author, historian and social commentator.

On Monday, Viking published "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," the long-anticipated biography by Manning Marable. In an irony that has added a certain mystique to the story of a historian prized for his directness, Marable died last Friday at the age of 60, just three days before publication of the near-600-page masterwork -- decades in the making -- that Marable considered his life's work.

He was being modest.

Earning a doctorate in American history from the University of Maryland in 1976, Marable wrote several hundred journal articles and political commentaries, and wrote or edited 15 books, including "Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary History of the African American Experience," "W.E.B. DuBois: Black Radical Democrat" and "The Autobiography of Medgar Evers" with Myrlie Evers-Williams, Evers' widow.

At Columbia University, Marable created the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, an "intellectual community that bridges scholarship, teaching and public life."

Exemplifying that philosophy, the Institute's Center for Contemporary Black History publishes a quarterly journal, "Souls"; its Africana Criminal Justice Project supports research into the meaning of justice and conducts courses for incarcerated prisoners.

The Institute also houses the Amistad Digital Resource bringing African-American studies to the K-12 curriculum.

To all of this, add Marable's "life's work." The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University has generated a digitized repository of years of primary source research that fills in the gaps of Malcolm's life in work previously dominated by secondary sources. Here Malcolm comes alive from his childhood days as Malcolm Little, when he dreamed of becoming a lawyer, to his troubled teens in the wake of his father's murder (allegedly by the Klan), his gangster-running streak as "Detroit Red," his ministry as Malcolm X, and his maturity as El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

Irma McClaurin, president of Shaw University, the first black college in the South, knew Marable when she was program officer for the Ford Foundation. She funded his Amistad project.

"He was an intellectual giant," said she of his range and vision. All of his endeavors are "examples of his desire to always put at the forefront African-American history and culture."

And that is what he did.

Standing on the terra firma of his vast body of research and scholarship -- and following Malcolm's lead -- Marable's new biography reinvents the telling of Malcolm's life story and of 20th century America as we thought it to be. It challenges official government accounts of Malcolm's assassination and the identity of the shooter, reveals the impact of a government informer on Alex Haley's coauthorship of the classic "Autobiography of Malcolm X," and documents the case for FBI and New York City Police Department complicity in the murder (a claim the NYPD denies).

How fitting it is that "Malcolm/Reinvention" was published on the 43rd anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King's assassination. Martin and Malcolm have been traditionally portrayed as the yin-yang, good-cop/bad-cop of civil rights era history. Having unearthed three missing chapters of Malcolm's "Autobiography," Marable documents the evolution of Malcolm's thinking to include an economic base for black America, in cooperation with King and other leaders.

"By preserving the life and thought of those in the black freedom struggle," Marable said in 2007, "I'm trying to make all Americans aware that if you do not preserve the history of struggling for democracy, you can lose, not just that heritage, but can you lose democracy itself."

Manning Marable's scholarship was as provocative and profound as it was prodigious.