Democracy Now!: "Manning Marable's 'Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention'"

Events are being held today across the country to mark what would have been Malcolm X's 86th birthday. Earlier this year a major new biography of Malcolm X was published titled, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

The book's author, Columbia University Professor Dr. Manning Marable, died at the age of 60 just days before its publication. Two decades in the making, the nearly 600-page biography is described as a re-evaluation of Malcolm X's life, providing new insights into the circumstances of his assassination, as well as raising questions about Malcolm X's own autobiography. Democracy Now! interviews Zaheer Ali, one of the researchers who worked with Dr. Marable on the biography. "In a sense, this book is kind of iconoclasm in that way in that it takes Malcolm off the pedestal to examine him as a human being struggling through these political and religious currents he was in," says Zaheer. Ali also served as associate director and senior researcher of Columbia University's Malcolm X Project, a program that focuses on the life and legacy of the civil rights activist.

Read the transcript and view the entire show here.