Malcolm Before X
New book provides a definitive, full-length account of Malcolm X’s early life, years in prison
Spring of 2025 will mark both the 100th birthday of Malcolm X and the 60th anniversary of his assassination. In advance of this anniversary, this November, the University of Massachusetts Press will publish Malcolm Before X, a new volume by Patrick Parr, author of The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age.
Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X’s life—a hugely transformative period which has thus far been largely overlooked by scholars. 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.
Utilizing a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers, Parr immerses 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, thus changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.
Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, activist and creator of the Netflix documentary Who Killed Malcolm X?, calls the book “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.” In the words of Malcolm’s daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, the book is “an important addition to the story of my father’s life.”
In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told.