Malcolm Before X

by Patrick Parr

Overview

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
A Spectator Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the 2025 ASALH Book Prize

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. 

In February 1946, when 20-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 traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced.

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader 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.

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781685750879
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	12/21/2024
Series:	African American Intellectual History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	381
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Part I—Outside
1. B&E: December 1945 to January 1946
2. Origins: 1815 to 1925
3. The Middle Child: 1925 to 1940
4. The Sirens of Roxbury: 1940 to 1946

Part II—Inside
5. The Hell of Charlestown: February 27, 1946, to January 10, 1947
6. The Purgatory of Concord: January 10, 1947, to March 31, 1948
7. The Paradise of Norfolk: March 1948 to January 1949
8. The Fall of Little: January 1949 to March 1950
9. The Rise of X: March 1950 to September 1952

Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

A valuable, sympathetic new volume that focuses on Malcolm’s time in prison. . . . As we continue to see the growth of prisons-for-profit, we are likely to lower our expectations for improvements, but Malcolm Before X demonstrates the very thing it argues: Our ability to read and research the historical record can effect real change.”—Paul Buhle, Rain Taxi

“Ambitious, eye opening. . . Parr's book is a portrait of growth.”—The Guardian

“Parr’s Malcolm Before X is an important addition to the literature on both black nationalism and the US criminal justice system. . . . Thoroughly researched and crisply written, Parr’s work provides the most complete examination yet of Malcolm’s prison years.”—Jacobin

“Parr has written the definitive story of the youth and early adulthood of one of the most dazzling and controversial civil rights leaders in American history.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“This first-rate biography looks at. . . one of the great conversion stories of modern history: a young man mired in crime raises himself up and, through self-discipline, becomes an explosive spokesperson for Black Americans.”—Library Journal, starred review

“Malcolm Before X focuses on the early years of Malcolm X’s life and the experiences that shaped the man he became. . . . Excerpts [from Malcolm X's autobiography] are supplemented with accounts from his family and friends, providing external perspectives that at times conflict with his own. The multiple accounts are managed well, adding layers and widening the scope of the narrative.”—Foreword Reviews

"Drawing on voluminous prison records, Parr’s descriptions of the midcentury penal system are chilling."—Barbara McIntyre, Akron Beacon Journal

"Revelatory and revolutionary. If you think you know Malcolm X now, learn the rest of the story by reading Malcolm Before X."—Mayor Stefan Roots, Chester Matters

“Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X is a breathtaking act of intellectual reconstruction and a sublime literary achievement. Parr’s book excavates the life changing, yet woefully underappreciated, six and a half years that Malcolm spent in prison, and masterfully probes the roots of his traumatic childhood and troubled young adulthood. Malcolm Before X for the first time puts us fully in touch with the contradictory yet constitutive forces that shaped one of the monumental lives of the twentieth century.”—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X

“Malcolm Before X is strikingly original. Parr's prodigious research gives us the most richly documented book about Malcolm's early life that we will ever have. His account of how a good prison library can spark a personal transformation should resonate widely. A superb achievement.”—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross and Rising Star

“I have known Patrick Parr since 2019. The original research he shared with me was extremely helpful in writing one of my own books, The Awakening of Malcolm X. I believe Patrick’s new book is an important addition to the story of my father’s life.”—Ilyasah Shabazz, author of Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X

“Patrick Parr has managed an extraordinary feat. In telling the story of Malcolm Little the child, the student, the burglar, the prisoner, he has helped us to more fully understand Malcolm X the orator, the leader, the radical thinker. Parr has unearthed remarkable documentary sources to tell the gripping and important story of the shaping of a great mind.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life

“Six and a half years in three Massachusetts prisons turned an aimless, twenty-year-old petty thief named Malcolm Little into the spiritual and intellectual powerhouse we know as Malcolm X. Patrick Parr’s meticulously researched book gives us the most detailed account yet of this historic transformation—and offers lessons for today about the life-changing potential of prison libraries and educational programs.”—Mark Whitaker, author of Saying It Loud: 1966-The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement

“More than any other previous biography of Malcolm X that I have read, in Malcolm Before X, Patrick Parr delivers an air-tight, well documented chronology of the well-known episodes in Malcolm’s early life combined with a compelling, revelatory portrait of the six and a half transformative years he spent in prison.”—Abdur-Rahman Muhammad is a scholar, historian, journalist, writer, activist, and authority on the life and legacy of Malcolm X

“Parr offers an extraordinary portrait of Malcolm by relying on a cornucopia of significant primary sources that, in many instances, no one—literally no one—has ever tapped before. His rare and extremely commendable detective work shows on virtually every page.”—Keith Miller, author of Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources

“Patrick Parr has produced an extraordinary act of historical research and recovery. By taking Malcolm X’s prison years seriously, Parr helps to restore the human being behind the legend. This groundbreaking book, which should be read by every student, researcher, and scholar of Malcolm X and postwar American history, offers the most detailed examination to date of Malcolm X’s prison years. In so doing, Parr provides the most brilliantly nuanced understanding and analysis of Malcolm Little’s transformation into Malcolm X. Magnificent.”—Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century

“Patrick Parr has done it again—showing us how much more there is to learn about the prison experience and young life of Malcolm X. A must-read for anyone interested in how Malcolm X became the radical intellectual that he was.”—Jeanne Theoharis, NAACP Image Award-winning author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

From the Publisher

★ 2024-09-27
The early life and incarceration of the man who would become Malcolm X.

Parr (The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, 2018) has written the definitive story of the youth and early adulthood of one of the most dazzling and controversial civil rights leaders in American history. He uses long-neglected primary sources—papers, correspondence, records from the Massachusetts prisons in which the self-destructive Malcolm was incarcerated for his crimes as the leader of a small band of Boston burglars—to vividly depict the fascinating transformation of Malcolm Little to the electrifyingly eloquent and ever-evolving activist Malcolm X. Parr’s thorough research and engaging style augment and enhance the story of Malcolm’s African, Caribbean, and American roots; the predisposition for intellectualism and worldliness that he inherited from his activist parents (particularly his mother, Louise Little, an intriguing figure in her own right); and the racial duality he struggled with as a child in rural Michigan. Parr makes use ofThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, the celebrated collaboration between Malcolm and Alex Haley, enough so that readers who have not read it are not operating in ignorance of that foundational work. Parr’s use of the prison documents provides for eye-popping descriptions of Malcolm’s horrifying and edifying correctional experience and in-depth profiles of the significant individuals Malcolm encountered—most notably John Elton Bembry “Bimbi”—who were instrumental in his quest for self-discipline, structure, knowledge, and erudition.

A rich portrait of a young revolutionary.

Kirkus Reviews