The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

Malcolm X—born Malcolm Little—is the main figure of The Dead Are Arising. As a child, he is reckless, clever, a daredevil, an attention seeker, and a small-time con artist. He is precocious but uses his abilities to make quick money. He internalizes the teachings of Marcus Garvey as his parents pass them on to him. Malcolm craves respect and power as a youth. Women love him, but he uses them to feel powerful and in control.

Malcolm goes to prison for his role in a robbery. In prison, he is angry, defiant, and an atheist. An inmate named John Bembry awakens Malcolm to the power of words, rhetoric, statistics, and history. He experiences a spiritual awakening in prison and changes his name to Malcolm X.

Malcolm is an uncompromising figure. He eschews the pacifist teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and advocates for black separation from white people, not integration. After a rift with the Nation of Islam’s founder, Malcolm starts his own organization. His studies of orthodox Islam lead to a change of heart about the inherent evil of white people, and he begins to focus on class differences. He is later assassinated.

Louise is Malcolm’s mother. She is light-skinned, educated, and has Caribbean heritage. Louise is a hard worker who insists that her children live with dignity and pride. She is also brave. When the book opens, she faces off with a group of Klansmen without giving in to their demands, even though she would be powerless against them if they chose to attack her. Along with her husband Earl, she helps found a chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Louise is devoted to the teachings of Marcus Garvey, but “did not consider Garvey’s color fixation a matter of personal consequence, choosing instead to work for the larger cause of black unity” (44).

Earl Little is Malcolm’s father. He is a dark-skinned, hard-working preacher. Like Louise, he is dedicated to Marcus Garvey’s teachings. Unlike Louise, Earl is uneducated. Although he is devoted to Louise, Earl has moral failings. He abandons his first wife and their children early in the book, and he beats Louise when he is frustrated or drunk. He helps Louise found the Omaha UNIA chapter. Earl is unwilling to show deference to white people, which gains him the reputation of as “uppity” (9) in white neighborhoods. Earl dies under mysterious circumstances that Malcolm will attribute to Klan activities.

Marcus Garvey is a Jamaica-born activist who founds the Universal Negro Improvement Association. His vision for UNIA focuses on “the group’s uncompromising tenet that the individual free himself from the strictures of the psyche imposed by white racist domination in America—and that Negroes demand equal treatment across the board” (10). Garvey advocated for complete separation of the races. This put him at odds with intellectuals like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., who all sought ways to integrate into white society. Garvey is eventually convicted of mail fraud and the government deports him to Jamaica.

Noble Drew Ali is the founder of the Moorish Science Temple. His backstory is uncertain and many details about his early life remain unverified. A union leader named Alston described Ali as a “quiet minister” with “nothing fiery about him at all” (248). He rarely referred to Africa, focusing instead on the idea that all black people “originated in Canaan” (24). In 1929, police arrest Ali as a murder suspect in the death of Claude Green-Bey, the temple’s business manager. Green-Bey had left the temple with a substantial amount of Ali’s followers. Ali is found innocent and dies at age forty-three of complications from pneumonia.

Fard is the founder of the Nation of Islam, which has many similarities to Ali’s Moorish Science Temple. His charisma and message of black solidarity won him many followers. However, his origins are unclear. Fard used many aliases. The FBI stated that this “Muslim ‘messiah’ was a white confidence man by the name of Wallace Dodd, born in New Zealand, or perhaps Hawaii, who had conned his way to the leadership of the Nation of Islam cult” (253). Fard introduced the idea that every white man was a “blue-eyed devil” (250) and that white people were evil by nature. His expansion of Ali’s teachings included the idea that a “Mother Ship” (250) controlled by Japanese powers was constantly orbiting the earth. Fard vanished in 1934 in an unsolved disappearance.