Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prizeâwinning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm
Xâall living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to
transform what would become dozens of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction.
The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-beforeseen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with
purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting Malcolmâs life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces
the life of one of the twentieth centuryâs most politically relevant figures âfrom street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.â
In following Malcolm Xâs life from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem assassination in 1965, Payne provides searing vignettes culled from Malcolmâs Depression-era youth, describing the
influence of his Garveyite parents: his father, Earl, a circuit-riding preacher who was run over by a street-car in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, and his mother, Louise, who continued to instill black pride in
her children after Earlâs death. Filling each chapter with resonant drama, Payne follows Malcolmâs exploits as a petty criminal in Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts penitentiary.
With a biographerâs unwavering determination, Payne corrects the historical record and delivers extraordinary revelationsâfrom the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder âFard Muhammad,â who preceded Elijah Muhammad; to a hair-rising scene, conveyed in cinematic detail, of Malcolm and Minister Jeremiah X Shabazzâs 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK; to a minute-by-minute account of Malcolm Xâs murder at the Audubon Ballroom.
Introduced by Payneâs daughter and primary researcher, Tamara Payne, who, following her fatherâs death, heroically completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work
that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.