Today is Malcolm X Day. Why don’t we celebrate him like King?
During my teenage years, I came across “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” The Muslim leader’s name grabbed my attention, but so did the author’s: Alex Haley. My dad swore by “Roots” and what it meant to a generation of Black people.
A wave of conflicting emotions struck me when I read about biographer Jonathan Eig’s “alarming discovery” – that a quote from Haley’s January 1965 interview in Playboy Magazine in regards to King’s criticism of Malcolm X was . I was saddened when I thought about previous claims of attributed to Haley, along with the that surrounded other Malcolm X biographers such as Manning Marable. Media outlets and schools treat King and Malcolm X as ideological rivals instead of two men in their 30s with the world and a
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