“Professor Marable felt that to do a life story, any biographer has to deal with the autobiography because it is such a powerful voice,” said Zaheer Ali, a doctoral student in history with Professor Marable who was project manager for the first four years. Haley in the final years of Malcolm X’s life, the way others scrutinize the Bible - if, that is, biblical commentaries included a photo of the burning bush, interviews with witnesses and a botanist’s report. The site scrutinizes the autobiography, which was written with Mr. With a sly grin, he notes: “People still refer to it from time to time as a fairly acceptable eulogy.” “It seemed to me that Malcolm, he was not a king, he was a prince.” Shortly before he died, the actor Ossie Davis explained how he came up with the term “our own black shining prince” in his eulogy of Malcolm X: “I don’t know why the image of a monarchial situation came to me to deal with Malcolm, who certainly was a man of the people,” he says. Marable, who was 60 when he died, recorded at Columbia with key participants. There was another reason that it seemed fitting that I was entering a library with columns and names like Homer and Cicero inscribed above the entrance to click on a computer and open a Web browser: the brilliant online project I was viewing was slowly disintegrating, like so much parchment.

While Columbia may have permission to share a digital version of the original copyrighted book within its campus, they certainly didn’t have permission to share it with the world. The material I would be viewing was largely constructed around the earlier, more famous book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as told to Alex Haley, who died in 1992.

Manning Marable, whose new “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” was published last month, days after the author died of lung disease. The Malcolm X Multimedia Study Project was created by the late Prof. Can’t you just send me a link? I asked.īut there was a reason that I had to be invited there. That the documents were in digital format, and I would be viewing them on a Web site, made the exercise seem a bit extraordinary. I ARRIVED at Butler Library on the Columbia campus last week, showed my ID and was directed to a fifth-floor room where I could examine in person a trove of documents related to Malcolm X.

The autobiography of malcolm x online