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Malcolm Before X

Audiobook
Nonfiction: History
Unabridged   12 hour(s)
Publication date: 04/29/2025

F O R T H C O M I N G ! Available April

Malcolm Before X

Available from major retailers
Digital Download ISBN:9781696617673

Summary

Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X.

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Product Description

In February 1946, when twenty-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X's post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth.

Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr's Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X's life (1925–1965).

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the listener into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.

Author Bio

Patrick Parr is professor of English at Lakeland University Japan. He is author of The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, and his work has appeared in the Atlantic, Politico, USA Today, and the American Prospect. To learn more about the author, visit patrickparr.com.