The Roberts Court vs. Voting Rights - Is Racism Over?

Chief Justice John Roberts is exactly what he claimed to despise in his confirmation hearings - a judicial activist. This is a man who came to the Court with a well-defined agenda, and one of the areas in which he had a solid track record coming in was his desire to eliminate the Voting Rights Act.

This is from a recent article in Mother Jones:

When he was in his late 20s, John Roberts was a foot soldier in the Reagan administration's crusade against the Voting Rights Act. Now, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he will help determine whether a key part of the law survives a constitutional challenge. 

Memos that Roberts wrote as a lawyer in President Reagan's Justice Department during the 1980s show that he was deeply involved in efforts to curtail the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act, the hard-won landmark 1965 law that is intended to ensure all Americans can vote. Roberts' anti-VRA efforts during the 1980s ultimately failed. But on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, he'll get another chance to gut the law. Roberts' history suggests a crucial part of the VRA may not survive the rematch.

My guess is that the VRA will not survive this challenge, especialy with Roberts as the Chief Justice - a man with an agenda. This summary of the current challenge comes from the New York Review of Books.

The Roberts Court vs. Voting Rights

David Cole

Voters waiting in line, Birmingham, Alabama, November 4, 2008

Mario Tama/Getty Images

What happens when a Supreme Court ostensibly committed to judicial restraint confronts a long-standing civil rights statute that offends its conservative majority’s sense that law should be colorblind, even if the world is not? That question will be front and center when the Court hears arguments Wednesday in Shelby County v. Holder, a case challenging the constitutionality of a central provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The provision, known as Section 5, requires nine states, mostly in the South, and select jurisdictions in seven other states, to obtain federal approval for any change in their voting laws. Congress concluded that this was necessary to ensure equal opportunity in voting. But conservatives in some of the southern states have long complained that the law gives the federal government too much power, and now, Shelby County—a largely white suburb of Birmingham, Alabama found guilty of racial discrimination in voting as recently as 2008—has sued the US government to get it annulled.

If the Supreme Court majority exercises restraint, it will acknowledge that Section 5 falls within Congress’s constitutionally assigned authority to enforce rights of equal protection and voting. But if the Court chooses to impose its own view of racial justice—according to which laws should be drafted without regard to race, even if race-conscious efforts are needed to forestall discrimination—it will invalidate a core part of one of the country’s signal civil rights laws. The Court has frequently reviewed the Voting Rights Act since its initial enactment, and has until now always upheld it. But this time around, the result could well be different. It shouldn’t be.

The Voting Rights Act is the most successful anti-discrimination law in US history. It has transformed a nation in which minority voters were routinely and systematically denied access to the ballot box, through literacy tests and the like, into one where registration and voter restrictions are the exception. And the Act has also defeated many attempts by states and local jurisdictions to gerrymander minority voters into districts designed to minimize or negate their influence.

Yet while there has been great progress, many of the problems the Act was designed to address persist in different ways today. Quite apart from the battles over “voter ID” rules during the 2012 election, “racially polarized voting,” in which white and minority voters divide along racial lines in the candidates they support, continues to occur in many parts of the country; and de-facto residential segregation is all too common. As a result, it is easy for those drawing voting district lines to group black or Latino voters into districts in which they are a minority, meaning that their votes will rarely if ever “count,” because candidates will need to appeal only to the white majority. And because minority voters often favor Democratic candidates, there is great temptation among Republican-dominated state legislatures to minimize the influence of those voters, even if old-fashioned racial animus is not the prime motivator.

Section 5 has provided an effective and flexible way to address these continuing problems. It applies to specific states and locales that have histories of voter discrimination and especially poor records of registering minority voters. Although most of the covered jurisdictions are in the South—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—the provision also governs all of Alaska and Arizona, and parts of California, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, and South Dakota. Importantly, states and counties that have not discriminated for ten years may “bail out” of Section 5’s obligations, and many jurisdictions have done so. (The Justice Department has approved every such application since 1982). The law also empowers courts to “bail in” non-covered jurisdictions that show a persistent pattern of discrimination, and courts have imposed this requirement on jurisdictions in nine states.

Moreover, there is continued evidence of discrimination in many of the original Section 5 jurisdictions. The majority of successful voter discrimination lawsuits in the twenty-five years leading up to 2006, for example, were against jurisdictions covered by Section 5. Yet those jurisdictions represent less than one-quarter of the nation’s population, and ought to be less vulnerable to lawsuits precisely because their voting rules must satisfy preclearance. In 2012 alone, Section 5 blocked Texas from implementing a voter ID law that would have disproportionately barred black and Latino citizens from casting their ballots, and prevented a statewide redistricting plan that was found to be designed to reduce black and Latino influence in federal and state elections. Section 5 also compelled South Carolina to modify its voter ID law to reduce its discriminatory impact, by providing an exception for those who faced a reasonable impediment to obtaining a government-issued identification card.

Critics of Section 5’s “preclearance” process argue that it is not needed because another provision of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, already permits parties to sue in court to challenge discriminatory voting practices. But Congress found Section 2 insufficient because voting rights lawsuits are extremely expensive to mount, often necessitating complex expert analyses of voluminous demographic data, and can take years to resolve, whereas Section 5 creates an administrative process and puts the onus on states and localities with bad records to show that their changes to voting laws are not discriminatory. And the preclearance process’s deterrent effects are substantial, because officials in the covered jurisdictions know that any change they make will have to pass muster in Washington before it can go into effect.

While the Supreme Court has ruled against previous challenges to Section 5, it expressed grave doubts about the provision when it heard the last challenge three years ago. The Court’s concern centered on the law’s differential treatment of covered and non-covered states, and on what it considered the substantial “federalism costs”—or infringement on states’ rights—in the requirement that covered states obtain advance federal approval of changes in state law. The Court did not ultimately rule on the constitutionality of Section 5, but warned that the law’s “current burdens” had to be justified by “current needs” and gave a broad interpretation to the conditions under which the law’s “bail out” provision was available to the challenger.

This time, though, that way out is not available. Shelby County is not eligible for a “bail out” because it was found guilty of discriminating in its voting rules in 2008. County officials argue that the formula used to identify states and counties subject to preclearance requirements makes no sense, because it is tied to legal practices and registration rates from three and four decades ago. And they contend that discrimination is no longer sufficiently prevalent to warrant the extraordinary requirement that covered states come to Washington “hat in hand” for approval of their every voting law change.

How the Court decides this case will turn on its view of Congress’s power to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Those amendments do not merely create rights enforceable by courts, as do other “individual rights” provision in the Bill of Rights. They expressly authorize Congress to enforce their guarantees through “appropriate legislation.” The amendments’ drafters foresaw that judicial enforcement might not be enough to make equality guarantees meaningful, and therefore empowered Congress to play a coequal enforcement role.

Past decisions have found that Congress, in exercising this authority, can enact laws that go beyond core violations of the Constitution where appropriate to forestall such violations. Thus, even though only laws that are discriminatory in purpose violate the Constitution, Congress can also prohibit practices that have a discriminatory effect. Section 5 does just that. For example, in a city that is 30 percent black and 70 percent white, an ostensibly neutral rule that all ten members on the city council should be elected “at large” will often mean in practice that the 70 percent white majority will elect all ten representatives. If the council is divided into districts, however, it should be possible to ensure that black voters are able to elect some members to the council, particularly where, as is often the case, housing segregation makes it relatively easy to identify districts in which minority voters form a majority. Section 5 requires states and jurisdiction to show that their voting rules, even if ostensibly neutral, do not “dilute” minority voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice.

But today’s Court features five conservative Justices committed to a “colorblind” view of equality, who find offensive laws that take race into account, even for ameliorative purposes. This skepticism was evident in the Court’s oral argument last fall in the case challenging the University of Texas’s affirmative action program, in which conservative justices questioned whether one could really determine the race of an applicant, and expressed doubts about the value of racial diversity. Section 5 bothers many of these justices for similar reasons: in order to ensure that a voting change does not have a discriminatory effect, states and local jurisdictions must consider the racial impact that an otherwise neutral change to a voting law might have. The court’s majority may well doubt that this requirement is truly warranted by “current needs.”

It is. Before Congress reenacted Section 5 in 2006, it held twenty-one separate hearings, compiled a record of over 15,000 pages, and concluded on that basis that Section 5’s preclearance obligations remained necessary for another twenty-five years—except in states or localities that can successfully demonstrate that they have a clean record and “bail out.” The question before the Supreme Court on Wednesday will be whether it should respect Congress’s considered, recent judgment as a co-equal branch of government. Do “current needs” justify the continued use of Section 5? As long as racially polarized voting and residential segregation persist, the need to protect voting rights remains urgent—and nowhere more so than in those states and jurisdictions that have the worst histories of discrimination and have been unable to show that they have cleaned up their acts.

February 26, 2013, 12:46 p.m.

From Yes! Magazine - an excellent interview with author, poet, activist, and multiple award winning novelist Alice Walker, an American icon. She is known for her magic realism, but more important perhaps is her commitment to social justice.

Alice Walker: “Go to the Places That Scare You”

The acclaimed novelist on why a life worth living is a life worth fighting for. 

 

by Valerie Schloredt

posted Oct 02, 2012

Photo by Harley Soltes.

Alice Walker is a poet, essayist, and commentator, but she’s best known for her prodigious accomplishments as a writer of literary fiction. Her novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983 and quickly became a classic of world literature. Set in an African-American community in the rural South during the decades before World War II, the novel is told in letters written by Celie, a woman who survives oppression and abuse with her spirit not only intact, but transcendent.

Walker’s writing is characterized by an ever-present awareness of injustice and inequality. But whether describing political struggle—as in Meridian, which deals with the civil rights movement—or meditating on the human relationship to nature and animals, as in her latest book, The Chicken Chronicles, her work conveys the possibility of change. In Walker’s vision, grace is available through love and a deep connection to the beauty of the world.

 

Walker was born in the segregated South, the eighth child in a family who made their living as sharecroppers in Georgia. She came of age during the civil rights movement, and emerged early in her career as a defining voice in feminism and an advocate for African-American women writers. She is a prominent activist who has worked, marched, traveled, and spoken out to support the causes of justice, peace, and the welfare of the earth.

Alice Walker spoke to YES! about the challenges of working for change, and the possibility of living with awareness—and joy.

Valerie Schloredt: Over the past few days I’ve been immersed in your work, and I’ve been wondering how you do it. Being able to move someone to tears with a few words on a page is extraordinary to me.

Alice Walker: I want very much for you to feel for whoever I’m talking about, or whatever I’m talking about. Because it is only by empathy being aroused that we change. That is the power of writing. I’ve experienced exactly what you’re saying, reading other writers. I remember the book I first had that experience with was Jane Eyre, being right there with Jane, and understanding, yes, we have to change these horrible institutions where they abuse children. Today, I’m the supporter of an orphanage in Kenya. And one of the reasons comes from having been so moved by reading about Jane at Lowood.

Schloredt: It’s interesting to hear about what you read as a child, because some of your best-known work, like The Color Purple, draws on the stories of your ancestors and your family and aspects of the world you knew as a child.

Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth
A new documentary on how the poet, activist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author 

has changed the world with her words.

Walker: I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder. We were way out in the country, and why wouldn’t you just absolutely wonder at the splendor of nature? It’s true I had various sufferings, but nothing really compares to understanding that you live in a place that, moment by moment, is incredible. That your mother could say, “I think we’ll have tea tonight,” pull up a sassafras root, take it home, boil it, and you have sassafras tea. I mean, it’s such a miraculous universe. For a child, this magic is something that supports us, even through the hard times.

Schloredt: Do you go back to your childhood home?

Walker: It doesn’t exist.

Schloredt: No?

Walker: No. And there were many of them. We lived in shacks. Each year the people who owned the land (that they had stolen from the Indians), after they had taken the labor for the year, forced us to another shack. How could people do that, to people that they recognized as people? They did this to babies, they did this to small children, they could look at the people they were exploiting and actually see that they were working them into ill health and early death. It didn’t stop them.

 

The most beautiful parts of the area that I lived in are now an enclave of upper-class white housing tracts with a huge golf course. They built a road that went right through the front yard of our church. Most of the people moved to cities, they moved to projects. So, it doesn’t exist.

Schloredt: Something I wanted to ask after listening to you talk last night [at the YES! celebration in Seattle], is the idea that some people don’t experience empathy, and don’t have a conscience that bothers them when they’re treating people extremely badly. Where can progressives go with that idea? How do we relate to knowing that?

Walker: You relate to it by being honest. We’re sitting back thinking that every single person has a conscience, if you could just reach it. Why should we believe that? I mean, what would make you actually believe that? Certainly not the history of the world as we know it. So it’s about trying to understand the history of the world, how it’s been shaped, and by whom, and for what purposes.

Understanding trumps compassion at this point. When people are forcing you out of your home, starving your children, destroying your planet—you should bring understanding of them to bear. Not everybody is loving of children, not everybody cares about the ocean. I think if we collectively decide that we are going to confront this, we have a chance. Because humanity is very smart, and we’d like to survive. And we’re not going to survive the way we’re going. I think we know that.

Schloredt: Your novels are among those books that cause people to say, “This book changed my life,” or “This book changed my way of thinking.” For me the book of yours that really did something to my way of thinking was Meridian.

That is a very powerful book. One thing that really affected me was the description of the cost of racism to the psyche, what a struggle it is to fight such embedded injustice. I think I saw you as the character Meridian. Are you—have you got some Meridian in you?

Walker: I think all people who struggle at the risk of their lives have some Meridian in them. It’s an acceptance of a kind of suffering. You hope that something will come of it, but there’s no way of knowing. What I didn’t realize was so close to me was how Meridian gets really sick as she encounters various struggles. She’s using every ounce of her will, her intelligence, her heart, her soul. It often leaves her debilitated. And that has certainly been true in my life. And it’s something that I have to accept.

 

In Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights movement, the mayor had a tank that the town bought just to use against us. So there’s the possibility of the tank running over you, and you have to stand there. So I understood that, well, this is probably going to mean a few weeks of just being immobilized. And then you figure out ways to recuperate.

It’s learning to accept that the cost is great. It would have to be, because we’re talking about emotional intelligence and growth and stretching yourself, reaching for the sun, kind of as if you were a plant. It’s a difficult thing to change the world, your neighborhood, your family, your self.

Schloredt: Not only is Meridian risking her life, like the other civil rights activists in the South, but there’s also internal oppression, an inner struggle the characters deal with.

Walker: The inner struggle is extremely difficult for all of us, because we all have faults, severe ones, that we will struggle with forever. One of the things that I like about Meridian is that it is about how we like to have almost a stereotype about leaders and revolutionaries and world-changers, that they are always whole. It’s wise to accept that [human faults] are inevitable. Factor that in and keep going.

Schloredt: I love the passage where Meridian visits a black church after the assassination of Martin Luther King and finds that they’ve incorporated his rhetoric into the sermon.

Walker: This is the segment where B.B. King is in the stained-glass window with a sword—where the people needed to incorporate, as far as I was concerned at the time, a bit more militancy. More awareness of what you’re up against, and confronting that with real clarity. In some ways it’s the same issue that we’re talking about. You have to go to the places that scare you so that you can see: What do you really believe? Who are you really? Are you prepared to take this all the way to wherever the truth leads you and accept that you have to figure out different ways of confronting reality?

Schloredt: I wanted to ask you about Occupy and uprisings in the Middle East. You’ve been politically active over your lifetime. Is there advice that you would give to people who are organizing now in the United States?

Walker: If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions, and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it. You have to go wherever you need to go, and you have to be wherever you need to be, and place yourself there against the forces that would distort you and destroy you.

I love the uprisings, I love the Occupy movement, and I think the young people especially are doing something that is very natural. It is natural to want to have a future. It is very natural to want to live in peace and joy. What is lovely about this time is the awareness that is sweeping the planet. People are just waking up, every moment.

Schloredt: One thing that I worry about for progressives is that we are often distracted from effective direct action by the project of improving ourselves, of being good.

Walker: And also, “good” in that sense can sometimes be very facile. And a good cover, you know, “I’m doing good, so I don’t have to change very much.” But I think for most Americans, the change that’s required is huge.

Schloredt: How do we make that change happen?

Walker: Well, you know, you’re doing it. I think YES! Magazine is part of what’s changing people’s consciousness. And I think the spread of Buddhism—the retreat centers, the meditation practice—has had a huge impact on people’s consciousness. Americans learning Buddhist tradition has helped a lot of people understand that they actually have a power that is theirs. They have their own mind. It’s not somebody else’s mind, and it’s not controllable, unless you permit it. That’s a foundation for huge change.

Schloredt: Your writing has, I’m sure, also changed consciousnesses. How does it feel to know that your work has in some way changed the world?

Walker: Well, it’s a gift the universe has permitted you to achieve—but it’s not just dropped in your lap, you have to really work for it. For instance, years ago when I wrote Possessing the Secret of Joy, the campaign against female genital mutilation [FGM] was a dangerous subject. There was a great deal of flak about my wanting to address it.

 

I wrote the book, and then Pratibha Parmar and I made the film [Warrior Marks, a documentary about FGM], and lugged it around Africa, and London, New York, all over. It allowed women who had no voice about FGM to speak. Progress is slow, and sometimes it’s discouraging. It’s like knocking on doors in the South asking people to vote, and they’re terrified of voting. And then seeing over the course of years that people started understanding that they had a right to reject the practice of FGM, that they had a voice. I feel grateful that I could be an instrument to stop any kind of suffering. I mean, what a joy.

Schloredt: In your novels you describe profound suffering and pain, but there is also often the potential for reconciliation and healing. If you could create healing and reconciliation for something that’s happening in our country today, what would it be?

Walker: I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism. The hypocrisy of that is corrosive, and we should not accept it. There is no way to stop terrorism if you insist on making enemies of most of the people on the planet. Why should they care about you? All they feel is fear.

So I would stop the War on Terror, and I would start making peace with the peoples of the planet by trying to understand them. I would like us to be able to say, “If that happened to me, I would feel exactly the way you do. And what can we do from here, from this understanding? What can we do together?” 

---

Valerie Schloredt interviewed Alice Walker for It's Your Body, the Fall 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. Valerie is associate editor of YES! Magazine.

 

TEDxHendrixCollege - Us and Them . . . and Beyond

Hendrix College recently hosted a TEDx event, and among the speakers was David Berenby, author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity (originally subtitled, Understanding Your Tribal Mind), and Terrence Roberts, a member of the Little Rock Nine who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.

Each of them gave nice talks, with Berenby explaining the model he uses in his book and Roberts offer hope for a world beyond Us and Them.

David Berreby - Us and Them: A story we can't help telling

David Berreby is the author of "Us and Them: The Science of Identity", and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and many other publications. David also writes a blog called Mind Matters at bigthink.com. Having already written a book on the topic, David talks about some of the science behind our natural tendency to form us and them groups and how us and them have value for our lives but need to be handled properly. 

Terrence Roberts - Beyond Us v Them: An eye toward a hopeful future

Dr. Terrence Roberts is a civil rights activist, diversity consultant, and member of the 'Little Rock Nine' who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Dr. Roberts looks at how Us vs. Them impacts racial relations today and has been doing so longer than the US has been a country. He sees reason to hope for the future and a day when Us vs. Them is removed from human interactions between groups of individuals that differ based on skin tone.

Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr

It's interesting to me that the title of this review article on a book about Malcolm X traces his development (in Spiral Dynamics terms) from egocentric power drives (criminal) to authoritarian religious figure (Minister) to rational equal rights crusader (humanist) and, finally - with the awareness that he one day would be killed - to sacrifice his life for the future of his cause (martyr).

I wonder if the author of the review has any awareness of the developmental framework.

Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr

By TOURÉ

Published: June 17, 2011

“His aura was too bright,” the poet Maya Angelou said of her first meeting with Malcolm X. “His masculine force affected me physically. A hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut.” Malcolm X had that same sort of bone-deep, visceral impact on America. He got under everyone’s skin — either in the sense that he seeped into your pores and transformed you the way the great love of your life does, or in the sense that he annoyed or scared the living hell out of you. There is no middle ground with Malcolm. If you hate him or distrust him, you should consider giving him another try: officers assigned to monitor the wiretaps on his phones sometimes ended up being flipped, because close listening led them to believe that his programs and philosophies were sensible and righteous and that law enforcement agencies should not have been working against him at all. And while Malcolm’s ideas changed America, his life journey has captivated us even more. He went from a petty criminal and drug user to a long-term prisoner to an influential minister to a separatist political activist to a humanist to a martyr. Throughout his life he continually grew upward, unafraid to challenge or refute what he believed, giving hope that any of us can rise above even our deepest convictions to become better people.

Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos, Malcolm X in 1961.

MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention

By Manning Marable
Illustrated. 594 pp. Viking. $30.

Related

• Excerpt: ‘Malcolm X’ (April 2, 2011)
• Link by Link: A Digital Critique of a Famous Autobiography (May 9, 2011)
• On Eve of Redefining Malcolm X, Biographer Dies (April 2, 2011)
• Manning Marable, Historian and Social Critic, Dies at 60 (April 2, 2011)
• Books of The Times: ‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ by Manning Marable (April 8, 2011)

The prime document that has kept Malcolm’s story alive over the dec­ades since his assassination in 1965 is “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” That book has changed countless lives and made Malcolm a central influence on generations of black men who admire his force, his courage, his brilliance, and his way of merging the protean trickster and the bold intellectual activist and the inspiring preacher. But all autobiographies are, in part, lies. They rely on memory, which is notoriously fallible, and are shaped by self-image. They don’t really tell us who you are but whom you want the world to see you as. Did Malcolm X consciously lie in his autobiography? In some cases, yes — he wanted us to believe he was a bigger criminal than he actually was, so that his growth into a Nation of Islam figure would seem a much more dramatic change. He also wanted us to think it was a friend who did sexual things with another man and not Malcolm himself. Sometimes he just left out details that didn’t fit his political agenda or the literary agenda of his co-author, Alex Haley. Some of those choices were right for what they were creating.

For a more complete and unvarnished — yet still inspiring — version of Malcolm’s life, there’s “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” by the late Columbia scholar Manning Marable. It’s the product of more than 10 years of work and draws on Malcolm’s letters and diaries; the results of surveillance conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department; and interviews with Malcolm’s contemporaries, including Minister Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, whom Marable talked to for nine hours. Farrakhan has said that Malcolm was like “the father I never had.”

The loudest rumor before the book’s release was that it would shed light on Malcolm’s secret homosexual past. When he’s a young hustler, we find him apparently being paid to do things with one rich, older white man, but this moment is brief and anticlimactic and does not convey the impression that Malcolm was bisexual. Besides, there are far more titillating things in this book, which dives deep into Malcolm’s sex life. Marable obtained a letter Malcolm wrote in 1959 to Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam, in which he complains about his wife, Betty Shabazz: “At a time when I was going all out to keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction.” Marable describes Malcolm as a virulent misogynist and a horribly neglectful husband who repeatedly got his wife pregnant, perhaps to keep her from making good on threats to cuckold him, and also made a habit of leaving for days or months immediately after the birth of each child.

That’s a Malcolm we all haven’t seen before. Meanwhile, the Malcolm we do know starts coming into view far earlier than expected, given that he’s known for metamorphosis. Born in Omaha in 1925, Malcolm was drilled as a child in the principles of Marcus Garvey — nationalism, separatism, Pan-Africanism, black pride, self-reliance, economic self-­empowerment — by his parents, Earl and Louise Little. Malcolm’s father was a particularly powerful role model: a devoted Garveyite who in 1930s Michigan stood up for what was right for black people, even in the face of death threats, and then paid for his bravery with a gruesome end. The apple did not fall far at all. And as a young man working the streets of Harlem, Malcolm came to know most of the stars of ’40s jazz and absorbed their example, learning to use pace, tone and space in jazz­like ways and perhaps to become a sort of jazzman of the spoken word. “He lived the existence of an itinerant musician,” Marable writes, “traveling constantly from city to city, standing night after night on the stage, manipulating his melodic tenor voice as an instrument. He was consciously a performer, who presented himself as the vessel for conveying the anger and impatience the black masses felt.”

As Malcolm moved away from the insular religiosity of the Nation of Islam, which at the time counseled members not to vote, and into political issues, his relationship with Elijah Muhammad began to rupture. Many know that Muhammad’s womanizing — the married minister fathered children with several young women — was one cause of the break between them, but few know how close their sexual paths ran. Evelyn Williams, one of the most fascinating characters in the book, fell in love with Malcolm when he was a street hustler, then moved to Harlem and joined the Nation after he became a minister. Malcolm proposed to her but changed his mind days later. After he became engaged to Betty, Williams ran screaming from the mosque. She was soon sent to Chicago to work for Muhammad and later had his baby.

That must have been painful for Malcolm, but Marable does not cite Muhammad’s womanizing as the main reason Malcolm broke with the Nation. Instead, he points to an incident in Los Angeles in 1962, when police officers burst into a mosque and shot seven Nation members, killing one and paralyzing another. Malcolm moved to create a squad that would assassinate members of the Los Angeles Police Department, and when Muhammad vetoed that idea, Malcolm lost faith in him, wondering if he really cared about his people’s lives. Right there the bond was irreparably shattered. Later, Malcolm told Farrakhan, a protégé turned rival, about Muhammad’s affairs, a conversation Farrakhan said he would have to report to the minister. This set Malcolm’s death spiral in motion.

Malcolm saw the end coming months in advance. He said, “There are a lot of people after me. . . . They’re bound to get me.” He spoke of living like a man who was already dead. He survived narrowly several times and yet did nothing to insulate himself. He could’ve moved to Africa for a few years, could’ve used armed bodyguards, could’ve had the audiences at his rallies searched, could’ve carried a weapon. But he did nothing, even as his inner circle screamed that he needed protection. Some who were close to him wonder if Malcolm wanted to die or if he had embraced death as an inevitability. Marable names the men who killed Malcolm and describes his last moments in such excruciatingly visual detail that it could bring tears or cause nightmares. He makes it plain that Nation of Islam figures ordered the killing, planned it and carried it out, but he also speculates that both the man who ordered it and the man who fired the fatal shot may have been F.B.I. informants. Did the bureau have Malcolm killed? Did it stand by and knowingly let him be killed? Marable is unsure.

As the book reveals, the F.B.I. struggled with how to deal with Malcolm — i.e., how to discredit him — because he was so disciplined, so law-­abiding and too smart to actually create the violence that would allow him to be arrested. Marable shows us Malcolm in Africa, watched by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and points out “the David-versus-Goliath dimension”: “Malcolm had few resources and was traveling without bodyguards, yet the attorney general and the F.B.I. director were so fearful of what he alone might accomplish that they searched for any plausible grounds to arrest and pros­ecute him upon his return.” Of course, they found nothing. Similarly, an exhaustive biographer combing through Malcolm’s days pulls away the curtain to show us the entirety of his life, and the emperor remains clothed. He has some failings, but Malcolm is still the empowering figure his autobiography showed us he was.

Touré’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” will be published in September.

Tags: Malcolm X, Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr, Toure, New York Times, books, reviews, race, culture, civil rights, history, Nationa of Islam, MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable, separatism, political activist, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley, Betty Shabazz