Tamara Payne.Docx

ATEOTT 41 Transcript

EPISODE 41

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:03] TP: Basically, when people said the nation is on – they’re thinking more of Malcolm and not Elijah Muhammad. People in the nation are becoming jealous against Malcolm, especially people who are members of Elijah Muhammad's family. They're feeling that Malcolm may want to try and take over the nation and step into their hierarchy. That becomes problematic.

Also, how much of this is also infltrated by the FBI? We already have the document. They were surveilling them. We’re surveilling Elijah Muhammad, all of his households. They were following Malcolm during this time when he's organized in the Hartford mosque, they're following him. Whenever he held a meeting, they're walking up to people who go to the meetings and ask them what was the inside, underneath. This is all going on at the same time. It's creating this environment of paranoia and distrust. You don't know who to trust. Why are you still building up a nation?

[00:01:05] LW: Hey, there. It's Light Watkins, your host of At the End of the Tunnel. This week, you're in for a very special treat. A few months ago, episode 21 to be precise, I ran a little experiment, where I brought onto the podcast a Yale professor and author, Dr. David Blight to talk to us about the life of Frederick Douglass, which was based on his Pulitzer Prize winning biography called Proft of Freedom. I've been eagerly anticipating the next opportunity to share the life story of historical fgure as fascinating as Douglass.

Well recently, I got to have a conversation with Tamara Payne, who along with her father, Les Payne, were co-authors of a book called The Dead Are Arising, which is a National Book Award-winning account of the life of Malcolm X, who is one of my personal heroes, and who is I believe, one of the most fascinating and misunderstood social justice warriors in modern history. The Dead Are Arising was listed by the New York Times and Time Magazine as one of the best non-fction books of 2020.

It's also received favorable reviews in just about every other major journal and media outlet for its extensively researched page-turning prose, which details aspects of Malcolm X's life that have never been written about so closely. Malcolm's birth name, as some of you know was Malcolm Little. There are lots of stories that Tamara shares about the little family, strong Garveyite background, and how Marcus Garvey even visited their home. They wrote extensively about Malcolm's childhood and his family life is told to the Payne’s frsthand by his brothers and sisters and other relatives.

We learned the truth about how Malcolm's father actually died, which is diferent from the story that Malcolm told in his autobiography. You might remember the Shorty character from the autobiography. Well, turns out, Shorty was a composite of several of Malcolm's friends and running buddies, including one of his brothers. We also talk about the circumstances in which Malcolm's mother, Lorraine Little, was committed to a mental institution, and how Malcolm's older brother, Wilfred, became one of his best friends and closest confdant near the end of his life.

Les Payne had several interviews with Wilfred. They also found and interviewed people who Malcolm went to school with and ran the streets with and even served time with as he underwent his transformation. We knew that Malcolm was an avid reader, but turns out, he was even a fan of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Infuence People, which is a book that played a key role in helping Malcolm get released on parole, which is when he then became a minister for the Nation of Islam.

The Paynes also wrote about the secret meetings at Malcolm X had with the KKK, as well as the details of his gruesome assassination, and who the real assassins were. In this very fascinating episode, we're going to unpack a lot of aspects about the life of Malcolm X, that you've probably never heard about, even if you read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I think that you too, are going to have a greater appreciation for all that Malcolm X overcame in his short life, as well as the direction that he was heading in near the end of his life.

As with the Frederick Douglass episode, we're going to start the conversation by talking about the author's backstory, which is equally as interesting. The Pulitzer Prize winning, investigative journalist and weekly news day columnist, Les Payne, undertook this project after having a chance encounter with Malcolm's brother, Filbert in 1990. Then the book ended up being 28 years in the making. Then, Les Payne unexpectedly passed away in 2018, which led his principal researcher, who happened to be his daughter, Tamara Payne, take the reins and complete the project two years later in 2020.

During those three decades, Mr. Payne had been grooming his daughter to become an expert investigative journalist and showing her how to interview sources properly, so she was more than capable and prepared to take over the project when he passed. It's not surprising that their book went on to win the prestigious National Book Award for non-fction in 2020. I'm honored that I got to speak with Tamara Payne, about this super important project, especially now, after having just observed the 56th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X a couple of weeks ago. Without further ado, let's dive into my conversation with author, Tamara Payne and Les Payne will be there in spirit.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:05:35] LW: Tamara, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. It's an honor to be able to talk with you about the life of Malcolm X and this amazing book that you and your father wrote, The Dead Are Arising. I want to start of by talking about the genesis of the idea. Now, I know your dad, Mr. Payne is from Alabama, is from Tuscaloosa. Then he and his family migrated to Hartford, where he actually got the opportunity to hear Malcolm X speak at the University of Connecticut. I believe Malcolm was about 37-years-old at the time?

[00:06:21] TP: Malcolm spoke at Bushnell Memorial, 1963. My father was attending universities of Connecticut stores, and he and his roommate went to go see Malcolm, because they just said, “Hey, let's go hear what he has to say.” His roommate was Jewish, so it wasn't another black guy, he was a Jewish guy.

[00:06:40] LW: Well, it's interesting, because he described that night as a night that he stopped being a negro. What do you mean by that?

[00:06:48] TP: Well, negro, being that this is the term that black people referring to themselves. They accepted this term, negro, at that time. To call each other black was derogatory. My father would often joke, if I called my brother black, he would beat me up. If I called him African, he'd be chasing me even now. These are considered in 1960, derogatory terms towards black people.

Malcolm was using black, alternating in how he would describe black people in his lectures. He would alternate and say, “So called negros, negros.” Then he would say, “Black.” It was always interesting. After hearing my dad talk about seeing him and reading that essay, and then listening to Malcolm doing it, you realize, Malcolm's really playing with people. If you think about how language is how you get used to your ear, tuning into how you hear terms. What Malcolm does, he plays around with this, and he keeps ultimatum and he gets this response from the audience. Including from my father, he says that so that when you hear black, my father would get ofended. Everybody moving their chairs and have certain responses.

They hear so called negro and they’ll be calm. Malcolm said, “I see you like the term negro and not black. What is negro, but black in Spanish. What you're saying is I can call you black in Spanish, but not in the language you speak.” For dad, that was so clear. It was like lightning struck in his head and just, wait a minute. Wow. What was just so clear and concise. He said it, like it was enlightenment for him.

Then it made him think, like he didn't think of himself as I willfully see myself as inferior. I mean, we talk about in this book, when we talk about how we have to look at the sense of inferiority black people have inherited through our history here in this country. It’s not because they really see themselves as lower, but it is also a survival tactic, just to get through the day. I mean, to avoid lynchings and stuf, even when you move up north and escape the Jim Crow South, there are things that you have to do.

Dad in those moments, all this fell away in that moment for him to see on the one hand, no white person has never seen themselves on an equal par with me, as a black person, just when they see me. Black people will say, we can do anything, but yet, what are we doing? How do we see ourselves? This is a question, I think, even in our generation that this is something that we see, even when we get to see ourselves on television, what were those images in the 70s and 80s? Then the 90s, it proliferates into these great images.

Before then, it was always these diferent images. Those images are we starting to realize, this is how we are. This is how we speak and then we should be proud of them. We should be, but we're also more than that, too.

[00:09:52] LW: I want to fast forward a little bit. When your dad becomes a family man, he's still reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X every fve years or so. He's playing these speeches on the weekends. I'm just curious, what was the setting like? Were you guys all sitting in a living room, listening to speeches? Were you in the car? How did that happen?

[00:10:15] TP: I mean, he had the speeches on reel-to-reel tapes, and later on in cassettes. On the reel-to-reel tapes, we played in the living room. We would be in the kitchen, usually breakfast around the table, and listen to the speeches. It was just the background. Listening, it was loud. This is again, how we can inherently change our perspectives too, right? I'm coming up at a time listening to Malcolm X, talking about the ballot book. I don't understand what a ballot is at six-years-old. I don’t know what a ballot is.

His description and his critique, his analysis, it gets in there, because it's the language that I hear; I get used to hearing. When I hear it outside, it's like, “Hey, I've heard that before.” Or, why aren't people saying this more often? Why don't I hear this anymore? That was really the question I was asking. I do want to just say a little bit about my dad, because dad as a journalist, he was hugely impacted by Malcolm X. Yes, he was reading him. It infuenced him, how he would look at getting into journalism, which is about getting information to the people so they can make informed decisions, but also in helping black people to change their own

Encouraging black people to have that information at hand, now, they chose not to look at that information, use the information. You can't control that. At least, have the information there for them to reach it. That's really what he was working on doing. People would read them. He worked hard to really work at not just – I mean, so that people would read him. He worked really hard at writing and he wanted to look at what other journalists were writing about it, and particularly, at that time was print journalism. That was really huge for him to understand, how do you communicate these ideas? He looked at diferent writers and he looked at all the writers. He read voraciously. Read everybody.

He read ideals and all kinds of ideas and philosophies. One person he would always go back to, and I would say probably two people that hugely impacted his writing were HL Mencken, and Mark Twain. Mencken, because he was an iconoclast. He was very hard-hitting and he was about breaking what the status quo images were. Even though he was a racist, yes, this is true. If you're going to not read racists, you're not going to read. You're not going to read often. You're not going to read a lot of people.

Then Mark Twain, who's just, oddly enough, became what we consider the frst American voice, really, that was distinctly American, writing about our history and not mimicking the English writers, like Hawthorne and so on. He really was developing an American voice in his campaign and his rise. Then I used to talk about this a lot. I’m leaving us those conversations. Just about writing and what we see from diferent writers.

Of course, they're the black writers that we were – he read Richard Wright. He read [inaudible 00:13:27]. He read them all. Even when I was showing an interest in writing, he was saying – he would start me of with Mark Twain, and I hated Huckleberry Finn. I kept saying, “Oh, I’m not into Huckleberry Finn.” Then I started reading Mark Twain’s other stuf, his essays, and his other writings outside of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, I thought were great. I encourage a lot of people to read outside of this stuf, those outside readings, writing.

[00:13:53] LW: You have siblings. Were you the only one who was doing this with, or was he doing this with all of you all?

[00:14:00] TP: We would read books together. I have two brothers, younger brothers. We read together diferent books. We read Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. We read Black Boy and Native Son together also. Others, we read Shakespeare together. It was always really interesting. This is outside of class. I mean, this was outside of school. It's just really getting into understanding the mechanics of writing with a writer.

[00:14:26] LW: Outside of the home, he was helping to create the National Association of Black Journalists. He was working on Pulitzer Prize material. He had his column. Is that something that he would bring into the house a lot and maybe discuss with you as his apprentice?

[00:14:41] TP: We all listened to his ideas on his columns. He always liked mealtime conversations. We were like, “Okay, we will have this conversation. Okay, we have to see what the fnal outcome of this is going to be on Sunday.” A lot of times.

[00:14:57] LW: You remember him actually his work process and everything. He would start of talking about it, brainstorming with you all. Then fnally, you would be excited on Sunday to actually see what the fnal product was?

[00:15:08] TP: Oh, please. Sometimes we got involved and we would say, “Hey, have you heard about this story?” We’d talk about what the story – why was interesting, or why it was important. He didn't necessarily pick up all of our ideas. Some of them, he did write about that I had picked his brain about and he had – I remember one column he wrote. He started of, because I called him up to tell him that Spike Lee was on Arsenio Hall. He was just talking about that interview. We talked about what that interview was like.

[00:15:40] LW: Then you went to China.

[00:15:42] TP: Yeah. I taught English. I graduated from Hobart, William Smith Colleges. Then I went of to China. I actually worked with Channel 13, MacNeil/Lehrer for a few months. Then Tiananmen Square happened and I got really excited. I also had an invitation to go. I didn't hear anything. Then all of a sudden, I heard all these teachers that canceled at the last minute, because of the Tiananmen Square. I was like, “Okay. I'll go. It was really interesting to be there at that time. I went in after Tiananmen Square. The mess afterwards.

[00:16:20] LW: In the meantime, had he had the conversation with Dr. Evans yet, about –

[00:16:25] TP: He had that while I was in China. I stayed there for two years. When I came back, he had had – he had met the brothers and interviewed them. I had come back to visit. He was just processing the interviews. It was just so fascinating what he had learned. Again, as I said, my father is not a scholar. He's not a historian. These are his own words, too. He's a journalist to his core. He's always going to look for a story and everybody's a source.

Having a friend who's a surgeon in Detroit, they met interesting people. One of them happens to be one of Malcolm's brothers. That's how that started. He sat down with one of them and had the interview. It was really interesting what he got from that. Then he came back to New York and spoke with his colleague, Gil Noble. Gil Noble also familiar with the Little family and said, “Which Brother did you speak to?” He suggested he speak to Wilfred. My father spoken with Filbert, who was only a couple years older than Malcolm. Wilfred, who is the eldest, who was older than Malcolm by six years, and he was also Malcolm’s confdant and best friend.

The perspective you get from those two brothers is really interesting. Especially at that time, this is in 1990 when he has those interviews. You haven't really heard that before. Not that this detail. Malcolm mentions his family, but you don't hear the details. The other thing, it's important understand that autobiography; Malcolm's telling you through Alex Haley's flters too, the story he wants you to know about himself. Biography is really what other people say about you.

[00:18:08] LW: First of all, I'm having a small world moment, because Dr. Evans, he was also the catalyst for David Blight, accessing that repository of articles and information on Frederick Douglass. He's also an art collector. He's a surgeon. It's interesting that he's – it's like, all roads to black history seem to go through Dr. Evans in some form or fashion.

Then Gil Noble’s, he had done a documentary on Malcolm X already. He had done a full-length interview on with Wilfred. I'm curious, why he didn't put any of this information out there? I don't know how close they were, or how their relationship was, but was he telling your dad stuf about Wilfred that the world didn't know, or that he didn't know yet? Was he telling them to go in and ask these questions, or what was that relationship like?

[00:19:03] TP: Well, the work that Gil Noble was focusing on was on the assassination. He was really focusing on toward the end of Malcolm's life. Wilfred is giving his perspective on it of that time. A lot of people hadn't even seen those interviews. This was learning about their childhood. This was my growing up in Lansing. This is going in Omaha. This is what was Malcolm’s life when he was 12.

I mean, Gil Noble, his interviews did not a – they were focused on the assassination, which was huge. He's also doing this 70s and 80s. I mean, people want to know what happened, how Malcolm was killed, what was that about and getting that information about. He did great work, as far as what he was able to get access to him. That's the thing as journalists, you focus on what your story is. Now, I also say it's also a matter of time too that people also are more willing to talk about Malcolm even. Gil Noble and Wilfred, they knew each other and they had developed a relationship too. I can't speak to all the details about that relationship that went through.

The thing is what I found, when we started on our book project, that it became a lot easier to fnd people. Whereas before, what I was hearing was, you never fnd James Chavez, but we managed to fnd him. You'll never get Luqman. We found Luqman. I would say, the space had cleared and the environment had cleared and people coming back and they're starting to talk

© 2021 At The End Of The Tunnel 9 ATEOTT 41 Transcript more. There was an interest, because during the 90s, of course, everybody's talking about Malcolm. Everybody’s relistening to his speeches. The movie, Spike Lee's movie has been out.

[00:20:44] LW: The book was a 30-year in the making project. 28 years with your dad. Then you fnished up these last couple of years. I've done a few books, have negotiated a few contracts. I can’t even imagine saying, this is going to be a 30-year project. Was it an open-ended book deal? Or how did that work?

[00:21:04] TP: No. None of us expected it to take this long.

[00:21:09] LW: You guys have made distinctions before about the historian/scholars versus the investigative journalism. Was this going to take as long as it takes for us to interview all these people, because this is how we're approaching this subject?

[00:21:25] TP: When you're picking this live and you would think that a lot of people probably would think that, “This man's been dead.” At that point, 25, 27 years that you just fnd these people and they talk and you can put it together. The vastness of this, what he did was incredible. I mean, yeah, the travel. Dad went and talked to people in Africa. It took time. Dad also did not want to just – this wasn't a report. Just the fact person story. This was a story of not just about who Malcolm was, the person, because he's always presented to us fully formed and angry. This is to show who he was as a person, that he had a family, that there's lineage here, and that this fellow is supportive of him.

Also, the world he was born into. As I know, when we get into the book, will show you the details of the world he was born into. A lot of times when I look at a lot of these biographies, they don't talk about what was going on historically. A lot of people would say, “Oh, it's black history.” This is American history, the Great Depression, the Great Migration afected everybody. Didn't just afect black Americans. This is American history. It changed American history. It changed what people saw and did and what their views of people who didn't look like them, who they started seeing they're deeming to be their enemies and their friends.

It changed, because of these things that were happening. People's movements around, not just black Americans, but people who were coming in from other countries too. This is all part of America. Just looking at all of this and putting in a context and putting all this into context, as well as understanding what was Malcolm trying to do? When we look at Malcolm and his work of achieving – one in this country work for everybody, especially black Americans. He does this through the upbringing of his parents, who are followers of Marcus Garvey.

Also, when you talk to people, it's like, these are the kinds of questions. What was the circumstance that made you – that not only brought you in contact with Malcolm, but how are you even in that city? For example, John Davis, Jr., who was Malcolm's running mate when he was 12-years-old in Lansing. He's from Mississippi. He had upset some white guy, and this guy wanted to have an example made of him and the mob was looking for him and his family smuggled him out, send him up north.

This is a story you hear over and over and over again. This is our history. It's painful. Io ignore it, we can't ignore it anymore. It's painful, we have to deal with that. We have to come to terms with that. We have to make people accountable, because what we were talking about is white supremacy.

[00:24:14] LW: What are some of the tricks of the trade that you learned from your dad, when you approached the source about getting to the crux of their contribution to Malcolm’s story?

[00:24:27] TP: How to connect. It's important to build a connection with it, your source. Understanding that look, and making them understand their story is important. For others to understand that their story teaches lessons, and it does. If you just say, I just need to know the story, because I have this deadline in me. You're not going to get me to answer any questions. Not that and what is do that to me. I was like, “Okay.” They're like, “Well, if you can give me your name.” “I'm not giving you my name.” I've done that. You have to make a connection.

I think that good reporters make connections with their sources, because the other thing is not only just in making those connections, they're going to keep coming back. It’s a relationship.

I’m going to keep coming back to the source. You don't just interview a person one time and get the swing and that's it. You don't have to come back. You don't have to verify. I mean, if it's a real dangerous situation, you're going to want to get as much of the information as you can, but then you're going to have to verify it in some way not to come back and say, these things track, these other things don't track.

Yet, you can only do that when you really make a connection. Then how do you make connections? Also, getting leads to other people. Getting names of other people too – the interview shouldn’t stop with that person. Is there anybody else I can talk to? That's always important too. Making connection was the frst. Watching them prepare for these interviews was just amazing. Then being coming part of that process, like this is information that's really important, because you have to know what information is that you're trying to get out of the person too, especially if it's going to be a tricky, tricky person.

[00:26:05] LW: Yeah. You also talked about how impressed you are with his ability to compartmentalize, because on one hand, he's working on this column, then he's doing some other stuf. Then he's coming back to the book, and the interviews and the outline, and keeping it all going at the same time, which sounds it’s pretty impressive for 30 years.

[00:26:24] TP: It is impressive. When you think of him managing a report, as sending to these sometimes very dangerous stories to report around the world. I mean, you think of people who are reporting on Ebola, like Laurie Garrett was reporting on Ebola for him. Even the story with Clarence Thomas breaking right and Anita Hill and having the reporter on that. I mean, these are huge stories are happening, while we were working on this book. These stories broke.

He didn't stop doing his day job for that, and wrote a column. Was working as a panel on the reporters roundtable for Sunday Edition, the CBS Sunday show, morning show. Then, even making time for us. He compartmentalized, but we also knew what he was doing. We knew exactly where he was and all that. We knew how to reach him, and also that we could reach him. We could talk to him about any of these things.

[00:27:27] LW: All right. Listen, we're not going to recount Malcolm X's story. If anybody wants to hear his story, you can take and read it. There’s an autobiography, or read your book, or go on Wikipedia. I do want to talk about some of the points in the story that may difer a little bit from the autobiography, which I feel is what you guys did so well was bringing context to things and maybe going a couple layers deeper in certain areas.

For instance, with childhood, the circumstances in which he was born into of being in his mother's belly when the clan came around to his house, and his dad was away. The reason behind all of that was that, and as you guys revealed that his parents were big Garveyites. They were followers of Marcus Garvey. They didn't meet up in the dad indoctrinated the mom into believing in this. They were separately followers. It's actually how they met.

Can you just talk a little bit about what that would have meant at that time with her West Indian background and being a believer of Marcus Garvey, and the dad being very high up in that organization?

[00:28:33] TP: Oh. I mean, she coming from Grenada, I mean, Marcus Garvey is also Jamaican, so I'm sure there was that connection too. Also, being black and proud of being black is what just kept her connected to that organization. They just resonated with that. Earl Little’s rise in the organization. I mean, that was when they came together, they married and they settled and they were organizing.

Earl, he was smart, he was a hard worker. He wasn't as educated as Lee's, but he had this pride and this thing, and this organization really helped him to express that, that gave him an outlet for expressing, because when he was living in Georgia his father kept saying, “This is not going to work for you, because you bring way too much attention to us by these white folks and they are looking for you and stuf.” He said, “Maybe you need to go.” How do you express that side of you? You have to fnd something, an outlet for that. He found a positive outlet through UNIA and Marcus Garvey, and he was proud and it resonated with them. I mean, they started of in Philadelphia, and they've just – I mean, the decision to say, we're going to go out to where folks are not organized. We don't know these people.

[00:29:52] LW: They were like a missionary. They’re like Garveyite missionaries almost.

[00:29:55] TP: Yeah. They were very intrepid. He’s like, “We don’t know these people, but we're going to do this. It's great that they were able to make that work.” Look, marriages, relationships, they have their ups and downs, but the mission, the overall mission of how to work together on this, they're defnitely in step one. They were in lockstep with that. They were in agreement with that. Even in the way that they raised their children, where we show you how Louise is passing these ideas and philosophies and this support system onto her children, of being proud and bright, and not accepting these insults from white people and their white classmates.

She's bringing that into them, while going with their homework. Earl is organizing this household as their children – and it's approved. As it increases, he's organizing and giving everybody chores, making sure everybody gets up and all the chores are taken care of, while still going out to look for day work, as well as organize for the organization. I would also say, this is the way of life, but this was also diferent in that not everybody was choosing to follow Marcus Garvey. Yes, a lot of people did join, but there was a lot of people who didn’t. I mean, I think about how they were just in lockstep with the – the larger picture for them was building that community, which was so important.

[00:31:37] LW: What would you say, from your research that Malcolm's favorite activity was as a child, who's a young child?

[00:31:44] TP: He did like to see movies, except, he didn't like to see the movies where we were just gone with wind, with the bad images of us. He was into this ball sports and stuf like that. He was very active, but he was social. He was very, very social. We hear that just like, that's probably one of the reasons we talk about how Earl gravitates to Malcolm’s – his whole thing with language. He's taking him to these meetings, and Malcolm gets to see his father.

[00:32:19] LW: He's the only one that Earl would take to these meetings.

[00:32:22] TP: Right. Earl took only Malcolm. He didn’t Wilfred, or the other brothers. Malcolm was very social.

[00:32:28] LW: Then his dad died of these mysterious circumstances. In Malcolm's autobiography, he said, it was the result of the clan. You guys did deeper research. What did you fnd?

[00:32:39] TP: It was a street car accident. He had forgotten something, and he ended up getting his coat. When he was running back for the street car, he slipped and fell on the tracks and there’s three cars coming in and ran over him. The details that we're getting from this is the frsthand details of Wilfred, who is at home with his mother, when the policemen come to say that their father's in the hospital and they're trying to get her to see him.

Wilfred is listening to how this policeman is speaking to his mother. He talks about – now, I think he was being really honest. Now, this family had been through so much by this point. We look into this, and we look at the coroner's report. We look at also the newspaper reports, but we're also talking with people who are in the town. We did end up fnding somebody. Dad did speak to somebody who's actually related to John Davis, Jr., who was on the streetcar. He had seen it. Dad was able to confrm it, even through him.

It wasn't just one person. It was layered. You have to get layer upon layer of how is this? You constantly have to ask these questions of how did that happen? How is it played out? How do people talk about it? Wilfred just would continually say that we accepted what the police ended up telling us, that it was an accident, except Malcolm did not. He went with it. People may ask, why did Malcolm really want to believe that it was the clan. I said, because we’re talking about – this is the depression and the family had just been pushed of their land. They have bought land, with the exclusionary clause that said that black people could not own it. The white neighbors pushed to have them removed. They evicted them and then burned the house down.

There is that tension already in the air. Then there were people who were whispering about it and say, “Hey, it was the black legion that did it.” People were trying to say that they were going to take credit for it with no proof. What's even more devastating about this, because a lot of people say, “Oh, okay. Malcolm believes that.” Then you look at the insurance companies. Earl had these insurance policies and one paid and the larger one did not pay. They said that they weren't going to pay, because they believe that Earl Little committed suicide. There was no proof of that.

Somebody else had said that he had burned his own house down. I mean, there is tension in that community and it's there. We see today how this plays out too, right? There are people, they’ll follow these light. It sounds like it could be true. Then they go down these rabbit holes, and this is a similar type of thing. It's hard for people.

I mean, Malcolm at the time of Earl's death, and he's six. Whereas, Wilfred was 12. Again, it's like, with a child, I mean, he's still a child and he doesn't fully understand everything. If he's feeling a certain way emotionally, I mean, it's stuck with him. The rest of the family, they did not agree with what Malcolm had said. Wilfred would say this throughout the interviews, “Yeah, Malcolm believed that. But no, we don't believe that.”

[00:35:57] LW: The family relocated. There was a lot of fnancial pressure on the mom, who ended up being admitted to a mental institution.

[00:36:07] TP: At that time, it's hard, because Malcolm also – the father is gone. By the time she's admitted, this is 1939. Still, it's just dire times for the family just trying to make ends meet. Wilfred done diferent things. He'd gone out to Boston and sent money back and Malcolm was taking that money, and as was Philbert, and people focus on that. I'm also saying, but also what's happening is where she's trying to get a widow's pension, the judge is trying to get her to sign over the property she's on now.

We can be upset about Malcolm, but what about the government that's doing this? That's supposed to be giving her the money that she's earned as a widow? These are her benefts.

They are like, “Well, if you sign over your property,” and I don't think everybody, every widow in this town is having to deal with that. We're not hearing that story. We're not looking at that. It's like, this is why you have to look at the world Malcolm's born into. These things are happening. This is impacting Malcolm too.

[00:37:13] LW: You guys also noted that Malcolm was always very honest. When he would get caught doing stuf, he would admit to it. He would cop to it.

[00:37:20] TP: Yeah, he didn't lie. Even his mother had said, “He's not a liar.” She said, “Philbert is another story.” She said, “Malcolm is not a liar.” Wilfred said he wasn't a liar. He’s like, bust him all the time and he said he would cop to it. He wouldn't tell you. He wouldn't just come up and tell you. 50 bucks and he'll let you know.

[00:37:45] LW: What were the circumstances surrounding this cop that put the gun to his head when he was 14-years-old?

[00:37:52] TP: Well, I mean, he was with John Davis, Jr. Malcolm he's in his teens. This is before he sent of to Mason, actually. He’s more like, 13, 14, 12. Still, it's these teen years. Malcolm, the one thing that John Davis would talk about, he liked attention and he would do these risky things and draw attention to himself. This thing with a cop, they got in trouble for supposedly missing out this white woman. It wasn't him, but the cop was drawn to him, because his description is tall. He had red hair.

[00:38:31] LW: He was tall. Yeah.

[00:38:33] TP: He had red hair, who's black. John Davis was tall. John Davis was four years older than Malcolm. That's the other thing. They looked older, because they were tall, and they were black. This ofcer, his attention was drawn to Malcolm and he put a gun to Malcolm’s head and Malcolm dared him to pull the trigger. “Pull the trigger, whitey.” John Davis was oh, scared. Oh, it’s those days [inaudible 00:39:05], but that Malcolm was doing this. I mean, I

In that age, I mean, I think this is what we have to look at development and how we develop in our ages. I mean, Malcolm is in his teen years. People look at – like to me, when we talk about Malcolm was a criminal. He's always presented to us as if he was full-grown, like 25-years-old. When you really look at, he was 20-years-old before when he goes to jail. All this stuf has happened.

[00:39:38] LW: I think, because Spike Lee's movie portrays Denzel Washington, he's clearly in his 20s, maybe 30s when he's doing all this crime and stuf. Yeah, you're right. He was a teenager.

[00:39:50] TP: He was a teenager. I would also argue, from the autobiography, people would teach that before the movie. I mean, I felt that way when I was in college, when they were teaching the autobiography. I mean, yeah, I know, a lot of people's memory might be about Denzel butchering this. What I'm saying is that the information has been presented. It could be even that you would say, Malcolm would have wanted people to think that he had done all these horrible things that are older, he was older, but he wasn't.

He did these things when he was in his teen years. Here's the clarifcation that comes up. Then when you look at it that way, a person committing these crimes, and when he’s in Harlem, yes, he's pimping women and steering – well, not pimping, but steering them to John's stuf. What is everybody else doing? What is the environment of that time that he's doing this thing? This is in the early 40s. He's, he's a teenager. He's doing these things and he's surviving. He's trying to make away.

It's also, I say, that he's still developing too. He's still learning. He's learning from all of this stuf. By the time he gets to jail, it's diferent. He's not 25. He's 20. He's just turned 20, 21. He's going on 21 rather when he gets into jail. It’s a totally diferent mindset. It's really looking at the humanity of him and developing. That's what I’m going to say.

[00:41:15] LW: You will also realize that the shorty character was really a composite of several people that he would spend time with.

[00:41:24] TP: Yeah. It was one of Ella's husbands, Malcolm's older brother, and Shorty, Malcolm Jarvis. The person that was really called Shorty, Malcolm Jarvis, he wasn't short. He was tall. He was called shorty, and then we talked about in the book, because of his car, he had a car and he also had this thing on the side of the car that you could stand on. They call that the short, this slang, and they call him Shorty for that, but it's not because he was short.

[00:42:07] LW: When he was in jail, obviously, he becomes an avid reader. He read the dictionary. Join the debate teams, etc. He used Dale Carnegie's book to get parole, How to Win Friends and Infuence People.

[00:42:20] TP: That was at the suggestion of his brother, Wilfred. In fact, Wilfred suggested it to him and Malcolm Jarvis. Malcolm Jarvis uses it and he gets from Malcolm and says, “I'm going to tell these people what I think about them,” and he ends up getting in that year. Then, Malcolm does study that and how to win friends. Yeah.

After Malcolm’s father dies, Malcolm has his void, and he's has his – he's still also searching to fll that void of the father fgure. Wilfred, as the older brother and very good friend, I mean, he steps in, but he's still his older brother. Then when you also look at Malcolm's attraction to the Nation of Islam, and Elijah, Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad who embraces him after he's coming out of jail and not make him feel like, “Oh, you went to jail and you're a terrible person.” Just saying, “No, man. This is all part of the experiences and this is going to help us grow our organization.” Malcolm, he feels that he's found this new father fgure.

He was still trying to fll that in, but also, develop other parts of his brain. I mean, he meets Bembry in jail, who tells him, “Yeah, okay. You’re using a lot of your physical energy, but maybe you want to move into your mental energy.” Malcolm, who is smart, says, “I don't want to get of. me. I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing this stuf.” He starts reading. He's a

© 2021 At The End Of The Tunnel 19 ATEOTT 41 Transcript smart guy. This is the thing, consistently everybody, even people who didn't like him. He was smart and he knew how to talk to people. He really knew how to talk to people. He knew how to listen to people. He knew how to really make you feel good about yourself.

[00:44:01] LW: The other thing that you guys talked about was, Wilfred introduced Malcolm to the Nation of Islam, but then you also – you showed a little vignette of Wilfred’s experiences at the furniture store and his Garveyite attitude that impressed all of his co-workers. When Malcolm gets released from prison, he goes and works at that furniture store. Does he become a protege of Wilfred, or is Wilfred a protege of Malcolm, or why wasn't Wilfred one of the top ministers in the Nation of Islam? Why do you suppose Malcolm rose to that position over his brother and who seemed to embody the same principles?

[00:44:44] TP: Yeah. I mean, they have diferent personalities too. I mean, Wilfred, he was such a statesman. He was so dignifed and he looked like a mountain too. I met him a couple of times, and he was just – and he sounded like him.

[00:44:59] LW: Is he tall?

[00:45:01] TP: He's tall. He's tall. He sounded like Malcolm, but in a really – If you imagine just talking, like you and I talk and not speaking in it in front of a room of a 100 people, but just talking. Wilfred is a family man. He was about his community. He was a leader and he related with in his circles. His interest wasn’t to grow like Malcolm was, but he knew that Malcolm had that and he encouraged Malcolm. He said, “Look.” I mean, he encouraged [inaudible 00:45:30] to reach out to me. He said, Malcolm's, our brother in jail. He's really special. I mean, he would really beneft not only from me reaching out to him and talking to him, but helping this organization.

I mean, you already see what we're doing. He had brought in his other siblings and the sisters didn't really take to it. There are reasons for that. The brothers, they found something in there for them. Malcolm, really grew with it. He ran with it. Malcolm had bigger ideas. They're just people who just don't think on that level. Malcolm thought larger than Elijah Muhammad, which

© 2021 At The End Of The Tunnel 20 ATEOTT 41 Transcript is part of the friction between him and Elijah Muhammad. He was thinking that this Nation of Islam, could be so much larger and can be so impactful on the community, and leading this community into forward into the future with dealing with white supremacy, but also, building up our communities and stuf. He saw that.

Elijah Muhammad was like, “We don't want to mix it up with anybody.” That was the tension between the two of them. Malcolm saw it. He said, when Malcolm comes out and he starts, and he's so excited, and he's going after – his thing is grow this group of organizations as quickly as possible. Then he's saying, grow it with people who have ideas. He's going after educated people. Other people who are already in there, they're not as educated and they feel threatened, or they don't like this, and it's causing all this tension. Elijah Muhammad ends up sitting him down like, “You have to calm down.” Malcolm's like, “This needs to grow faster,” because he's just thinking larger than everybody else was thinking. That's just who Malcolm is.

It wasn't jealousy between Wilfred and Malcolm. He's like, “Look, that's what Malcolm wants to do.” This is what I want to do. They're diferent personality types. Wilfred did not join the Nation of Islam for religious reasons. He joined it for really community reasons. The Garveyite principle said it carried on. We show that Garveyism is in their organization and strategies of how they laid out their plans.

Wilfred was attracted and resonates with him. He wants to build up where he is. He wants to build up that community. He's thankful to fnd that group to do that. He grows with that and he's happy with that. Malcolm, he goes all in, because he has all the – it's just a diferent personality, but also, he's thinking all the stuf that he had read, and he wanted to see for the community. He just thought larger than everybody else did. Some people can feel threatened by there. Some people go with it.

[00:48:11] LW: How do you suppose Malcolm reconciled with some of the more cultish aspects of the Nation of Islam, the spaceships and the mythical origin and these kinds of things?

[00:48:21] TP: I mean, I think there are times when he did believe in it. I also think that he stopped teaching that part a lot. He left that to other people. He wants to focus more on building the nation, makes sure the FOI was doing what they need to do, training the men and making sure people are being respectful. I mean, I think that he grew away from that pretty quickly. He stopped teaching a lot of that. He preached it in some of that stuf. In his later speeches, you'll see that he doesn't really preach that. He will let other ministers talk and teach that.

[00:48:53] LW: This led to this infamous meeting with the KKK, which you described it in detail in your book, but it hasn't really been talked about very much outside of The Dead Are Arising, or has it?

[00:49:07] TP: Not, and people knew about it. Malcolm talks about it, but he didn't want to talk too much about, because it angered him. This really angered him. From what we found, I mean, what now and dad getting, talking with Jeremiah Chavez, he really learned that look, Malcolm doesn't like the KKK. He doesn't really have any alliance with them at all. That's his position. The nation, they don't want to mix up with anybody, so Elijah Muhammad can and see as well, maybe we can work something out, because the KKK in the south, they’re in everything. They’re in the police, they're the realtors and the doctors. They're there everything.

Maybe they can help us in building our nation and our businesses down there, or they can leave us alone as we conduct our business. He's saying, see what we can get out of that. Malcolm, on the other hand, he was like, he want to have a showdown, like they had in the newspapers, when you had the letter writing campaign with Elijah Muhammad. I forgot who it was now, who wrote into the Philadelphia Inquirer and was basically saying, the Nation of Islam, calling the N word. The only thing that black men wants to do with the women and this cannot happen.

They have this whole argument, literally, in the newspaper. Malcolm wanted to have a showdown like that, face to face. Elijah Muhammad was like, “No. Let's see what they want and this is what we want. Let's see where, if we can make something work.” Jeremiah Chavez,

© 2021 At The End Of The Tunnel 22 ATEOTT 41 Transcript he's a minister at the Atlanta temple and a follower of Elijah Muhammad. He's more like Elijah, whatever Elijah Muhammad says, we do. Elijah Muhammad is the leader of the Nation of Islam, so they defnitely have to follow the orders.

Malcolm starts to see that this can be problematic for him, because there's no way that he can – in his theme right about the clan working, doing anything with the clan, hiring them as lawyers, or anything. He don't want any of that. That Elijah Muhammad can do that. That's a problem for him.

[00:51:14] LW: Well, he also has that personal confict of one of his earliest experiences, even before he's born with, involving the clan. They've been a part of his life in a detrimental way, as long as he can remember. That would defnitely be the background of it. I mean, that's the foundation of it. Showing up on the doorstep while he's still in utero, and rising up in Lansing and the Black Legion, to the feelings of their – making him feel about his father's death. I mean, and just constantly seeing them in the news and what they're doing and the fear that they're instilling and people are joining the nation, who were running away from the south. This is a terrorist group.

[00:52:01] LW: Do you think that's when his loyalty started to weaken with the Nation of Islam at that point? Because they know the child [inaudible 00:52:07]. Yeah. With Mr. Muhammad?

[00:52:11] TP: Yes. With Elijah Muhammad. Yes. It's a serious rift. I mean, it's a serious tear in the relationship.

[00:52:20] LW: Meantime, he's becoming more popular than Mr. Muhammad. You mentioned that he is a master of TV media and the soundbite. How do you think he developed that?

[00:52:32] TP: He's a talker, right? I think he studied it. I mean, Malcolm, he would look at how things worked. He wanted to know how things worked, and then how to use it. that was one of the things that was brilliant about him. He was a great student. Even though he dropped out, he was a great student. He knew how to study something, and to the point of to see its faws,

The language, I mean, if you think about how you've worked with language. Now, he would exaggerate and say, he wasn't a good student, and he didn't know how to write. He always knew how to write. His mother really instill grammar in him when he was a child, and it stuck, and with all of them, with all the siblings. All of the siblings were able to – they're educated and as far as they had gotten and then were able to communicate well. Malcolm, he was a great student of analyzing these types of things.

I mean, if you think about even how he comes up with the idea of – I mean, the way he's critiquing the American society. Nobody else was critiquing it like that. People who critique it like that, since were infuenced by him. I'm not saying he wasn't infuenced by others. I mean, clearly, there are people who came before him that he studied. How he was critiquing, the way he was critiquing, how he was reaching people, that's what he was a master at, and getting people to understand, and whether you were a college educated, had a PhD.

I mean, you see how he even talked to Bayard Rustin. Yeah, the people who won the debates that he had with Bayard Rustin. Bayard Rustin have respect for Malcolm as a debater. Then, you have said, “I don't believe anything about the Nation of Islam,” like in the Hartford chapter. You have people who are educated, who, “I don't want to be Muslim, but I like the community. I like the entrepreneurial stuf that Malcolm was stressing.” He showed them how to do it. He had a way of reaching people where they were.

[00:54:42] TP: One of his main mantras was self-defense, right? We're going to abide by the laws. We're going to do everything correctly and be self-sufcient. We're also not going to tolerate any violence against our community. Then this Ronald Stokes afair happens, which further weakens his loyalty to the organization, Nation of Islam. Can you talk a little bit about what that would have meant for him?

[00:55:10] TP: Yeah. I mean, because what's happens at this point – Ronald Stokes is killed by policemen, who basically, harassing the Nation of Islam in California and LA temple. They run up into the temple and they shoot people and Ronald Stokes. Ronald Stokes is a exemplary member of the Nation of Islam in California. He and Malcom were friends. They had a lot of respect for each other. When he dies, this is somebody Malcom knew who was close to, but it’s like, we have to be able to hold these people accountable. We have to be able to fght back on this.

Elijah Muhammad was like, “No, you can't. He wouldn't allow that to happen.” It was huge. It was another realization for Malcolm, because it's like, if we can't defend ourselves in this situation, where we’re bumped on, or when we're attacked, what do we totally – it was like, what are we doing for him? That really tore at him. I mean, he really wanted and he had them fnd out who the policemen were.

That FOI out there, they were ready. They were ready to go after the cops, but Elijah Muhammad said, “You couldn't do it. Because if you think about it, if they went out to the cops, the cops were so down, so hard on the nation villains, they wouldn't be able to do anything.” On the other hand, this is constantly the case that we are constantly experiencing throughout history, even today. That Elijah Muhammad would not give the go ahead to do this. I mean, that bothered him. I mean, it was the last straw. There are other things that were leading up to that too, because we haven't really touched on that. While Malcolm is becoming more popular, while he's mastering the television, how to use a soundbite and is getting all this.

Basically, when people say the nation is on – they're thinking more Malcolm and not Elijah Muhammad. People in the nation are becoming jealous against Malcolm, especially people who are members of Elijah Muhammad's family. They're feeling that Malcolm may want to try and take over the nation and step into their hierarchy. That becomes problematic, because also, Elijah Muhammad is getting older, his health is frail. There's that jealousy in there. You already have that working from within the Nation of Islam. Malcolm is feeling that too.

It's a number of things that are splitting, because awesome while that's happening, because your people are now whispering to Elijah Muhammad about Malcolm. He's not who you think he is. They’re whispering to him. Also, how much of this is also infltrated by the FBI, who has already – we already have the document. They were surveilling them. They were surveilling Elijah Muhammad on his households. They were following Malcolm during this time, when he's organizing the Hartford mosque, they're following him. Whenever he holds a meeting, they're walking up to people who go to the meetings and ask him, what was being said underneath.

This is all going on at the same time and it's creating this environment of paranoia and distrust, so you don't know who to trust. Why are you still building up a nation? There are a lot of things happening and people are – the energies are being scrambled in. It's also how the FBI is to me, successful in weakening the Nation of Islam, in which they can turn people against each other and end up assassinated.

[00:58:43] LW: He ended up becoming deprogrammed. He deprogrammed himself. What were the circumstances surrounding that?

[00:58:50] TP: I mean, what he realized is what he was preaching and what Elijah Muhammad was preaching than what was being practiced. We see constant examples of that. I mean, that's what we're seeing with the model stuf. I mean, it was very upsetting to him. Then he gets in trouble, because he says, plane falls out of the sky. That's going against. It's not funny, because all these people died.

He says, “Oh, Allah has answered my prayers.” All these people die, but he's saying, “Well, that was an answer for [inaudible 00:59:23] murder by the cops.” Elijah Muhammad ends up saying, “You can't talk like that.” He's fnding. his movements are being restricted. He's seeing all of this happen at the same time. As smart as he is he sees this. Then it's a question, “Well, what do you do with it?” As well as move forward and how do you focus on that? That becomes the dilemma that he has to work through.

[00:59:50] LW: Well, he also has this major fnancial dilemma. He's got a big family. He's living in the nation's house. They're trying to evict him. He's making money, I guess of of speeches at this point. This is his only source of income.

[01:00:03] TP: Well, really, the nation's paying him. Pretty much, everything goes through the nation and nation is paying him.

[01:00:09] LW: Then he decides to go to Africa. How does he fnance this trip to Africa?

[01:00:14] TP: Well, he goes up the invitation of some dignitaries out in Africa. Not in Africa, but because he makes [inaudible 01:00:21] and he has connections that he's made. They help him out with that. People are supporting him through that. Talked about in the book. I'll let people go back and read that. The point and thing is that he – it goes to show, and this is after he split. Now he goes to Africa for Elijah Muhammad, by the way, to help Elijah Muhammad organize his haj and his trips earlier in 59. That's done at the expense of the Nation of Islam, but he has gained support of people who help him.

They want Malcolm – even though they see Malcolm wants his splitting from the Nation of Islam, they want to help him, so they helped him fnance that. He’s going for his haj. Then, he's able to continue with his other visits, because he wants to see what's going on in the world. He goes to all these diferent countries in Africa and the Middle East and in Europe.

[01:01:16] LW: Did he get poisoned in Africa?

[01:01:18] TP: It’s debatable, whether he was poisoned, or he had just gotten sick from food poisoning, like bad food. There were a lot of things happening at the time, because there was something – there was an incident in Ethiopia and there was also an incident in the past.

[01:01:31] LW: Okay, what happened in Ethiopia?

[01:01:34] TP: He was at a restaurant and he was eating and he had gotten sick. The other thing was that he had seen somebody at this restaurant that he had recognized from the United States, and he thought that they were following him. I believe that they were following him. He did get sick. Now, the food poisoning thing, it's – even he writes about it in his diaries that it was food poisoning. Yeah, now a lot of people say that it was – that he was defnitely poisoned. I'm not sure whether it was actual food poisoning, or if it was actual poisoning.

[01:02:09] LW: You guys didn't fnd the chef at the restaurant to interview and talk about that night?

[01:02:14] TP: We didn't fnd that. We didn’t nail it.

[01:02:19] LW: It’s interesting. You guys did talk about the Sunni Muslim, who challenged Malcolm's translation of the Quran. That was a little surprising for me, to be honest, because I felt as such an intellectual, how could he have missed that? How could he have not known about the various translations of the Quran? Or was it just cognitive dissonance, or something like that? Because like you said, he had been all over the world at that point.

[01:02:49] TP: No. That actually, he was still a minister at the Harlem mosque.

[01:02:53] LW: He had done that trip in ’59 at that point?

[01:02:56] TP: He had done the trip ’59. His real exposure to this is whatever they're teaching him. There was exposure, but was he really what he was studying and what he was exposing himself to. The Nation of Islam was teaching was not true Islam, and they knew that. Malcolm knew that. It's when you have somebody, he says, “Let this man speak. Let him explain to us what he's saying,” because he didn't know Arabic. He was interpreting something from the Quran that was written in English. The man says, “That's not what that means.” That's when he has to go through this whole thing. He's still a minister at that point.

Sure, he's going through these other, but is he really studying? That was my question. He's studying what he's been given in the Nation of Islam. He's not studying all of the books that are out there and doing all of this work. He wasn't doing all of that at the same time.

[01:03:58] LW: The last couple of weeks of his life, he knows – well actually, there was hints that his mother was psychic and that he also knew that his time was nearing the end and his house was frebombed at 2 something in the morning. They all made it out. Then, you guys went into this great detail about what happened after the fre bombing and what that was like. Did you actually talk to people who were around during that?

[01:04:27] TP: Well, yeah. I mean, we spoke with people who are in the nation, like Captain Joseph. We spoke to people who are following James Shabazz. Yeah, I mean, they were the people who are around him telling us what was going on. It happened in that detail.

[01:04:42] LW: Right. Because again, he had no money, and he has a family of –

[01:04:46] TP: No, Because at this point, basically, it's people – people around him realized he has no money. That he needs help. They're giving him places to stay, because at that time, I mean, people were more supportive, as far as making sure people had at least a place to stay like that. He fortunately had people who were around and who were doing that. I mean, even think about the time – well, let's just talk the frebombing. They've been evicted from the nation. Basically, that's their cut. He split from the nation. The house is now evicted. He's cut. Now it's like, they basically are at the mercy of and support of friends. Davis and Ruby Dees and the Harry Belafontes. They defnitely were around and helping.

[01:05:37] LW: Then a week later, he is assassinated. I didn't realize this. When I read the book, I found that there was a rehearsal for the assassination, before the assassination.

[01:05:50] TP: Yeah, the dry run, as we call it.

[01:05:52] LW: He had a dry run. The undercover cop, who’s the one that kills –

[01:05:55] TP: Look, and that comes from where we get that information. You get it from Jean Roberts, who's working for BOSSI. He was Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, and which is a special section in the New York Police Department. He is not a trained police ofcer. He was in the military with diferent intelligence clearances. He's never gone into the police academy. He's brought of, but taking basically, acting. Hits the street after he leaves the military, they hired him to be an informant and to infltrate Malcolm's group, and he did. This thing stays with him.

What happened? Because, I mean, honestly, I mean, when you see somebody's chest opened up, I don't know how you get that out of your mind. I mean, I think that just stays with you, no matter whether you like the guy, or didn't like the guy. At the time, he wasn't a huge fan of Malcolm’s, but he did see his humanity.

His training kicked in. He was an army medic, and his training kicked in. When Malcolm decides, and he's the one that is giving Malcolm CPR and he tries resuscitate him. It's Malcolm's – just gone.

[01:07:10] LW: Well, I don't want to go into the details, because I want people to read the book, but you guys do plot the entire assassination. You have some pretty strong conclusions about all that, because I know, that's another mysterious aspect of Malcolm's life? Who exactly was the assassin? Was it the government? Was this the mosque, or what actually happened?

[01:07:34] TP: So much of dad's work in that, I mean, those last chapters in particular, like some of the best work, as far as fnding people in that letting story get away from as much as we could, and fnding out what really happened. He was determined. He was he was constantly just trying to fnd out.

I mean, this thing, years later, I mean, it's still – people are still connected to this. I mean, it's branched out. What I mean by branched out, like way that people have moved around. The work that goes into this is just incredible and the details, and it's just showing that you keep

© 2021 At The End Of The Tunnel 30 ATEOTT 41 Transcript asking the question. You don't let it go. This is how these stories can go on for so long. It's like, you can say you have a great book when you talk about Malcolm’s earlier life.

Then it's like, but how can you write a book in that cover as much as you can about the assassination? My father was really determined to get everything he could fnd about that. I still think that there’s stuf out there. Yes, we fnd out who the killers are and they're not going to, because most of them have passed on. Then not going to have served the day and their lives for this murder. Like I said earlier on, it's like, you can't just solely point your fngers at the Nation of Islam, because they were infltrated. There's plenty of evidence to show you that Hoover wanted Malcolm taken care of, in his own writing. He wrote that.

Today, people still question whether or not the FBI was involved. We lay it out how they are. Other people have worked on showing you how the FBI did this and why they would do this, and why that were continued. If they were capable of doing it back then, do we honestly think that they have stopped?

[01:09:31] LW: Obviously, Malcolm's life got cut. He was 39-years-old. Had a lot more to do, a lot more to say.

[01:09:38] TP: Where he was taking us as far as the human rights issue and how we were seeing ourselves on the human rights issue level. I mean, it was revolutionary for that time. The way he was critiquing what America is doing, even when you look at – I mean, I remember just looking at the ballot and bullet speech, for example. You read that today and you’re like, “Wow, totally explains the setup of these two parties,” and which party do you choose? They're both admissions; major, huge issues, and they're not for unless we really work to make them part of our – look at our issues, but where do we ft in them as black people? I mean, he really lays it out for you to see that. That critique, he was so clear on that.

There was even a comment. I've been thinking about that. He said, “Well, he talked about how racism in the United States and call it white supremacy. It succeeds because of greed and ignorance. In order to overcome it,” he says, “If White people understood our real black

© 2021 At The End Of The Tunnel 31 ATEOTT 41 Transcript people's real contribution to civilization and sciences, they wouldn't feel the way that they feel about it. They really saw what we were doing. They would feel not as superior to us.” He said, “Be at least negated.” He's saying, black people, if they really understood and saw what our contributions were, that we would see ourselves diferently. We would see ourselves as human beings and act like human beings among human beings.

He says, the only way to overcome this is through education. He says, “You don't even get that until you go into university degrees, because the American education system is set up to keep us down.” Here saying those words, but he says that it's set up. I hear these conversations, and you really start to think about, “Well, where are people getting this information,” if they're not looking outside of the school syllabus, the class syllabus, syllabi, that they're – whether they're in high school, or college. We have to really go out and educate ourselves. Sometimes educating ourselves means simply traveling, or talking to people from other places, and really trying to understand the histories, but also understand that these people may not know their own histories, because they've been denied. We have to understand, Malcolm critiqued that in 1965. He said that 1965 and it still holds true.

[01:11:58] LW: Speaking of people whose life ended early in March 19, 2018, your father unexpectedly passed. You obviously, were devastated, but then you were thrust to the forefront of this project. How did that feel for you becoming the primary person involved in this project? Did you feel ready?

[01:12:21] TP: I was ready, but I was upset. This is my father's life's work. I just feel that he should be here to have this conversation with you to receive a National Book Award. All this stuf is bittersweet for me. He also would say, “Look, you know this stuf. You understand it.” Yeah. I mean, I understand and I knew from day one that this book was going to be really important. As the time drew closer to the time that it becomes published and then see what's happening current events, I was like, “Man, this book is right on time.” That's one thing. I was like, there were times when I said, “Can’t we get this book out sooner?” He's like, “Whenever this book comes out, it'll be the time for it to come out.” He's right.

It is said to me that he is not here. I mean, I'm proud to have been able to fnish this book and make sure it's published and people are reading it, like yourself and throughout the world, and that people are seeing Malcolm in a more nuanced in his way and then and then seeing his humanity and seeing the world that he was born into, what America really is, all over, here and abroad. At a time when all the veils are coming down, about all of the hypocrisy.

I mean, I can tell you before January 6, people were uncomfortable saying white supremacy. After January 6, everybody is saying white supremacy. That Malcolm was saying that back in 1960s, as was Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. They were talking about that then and what would happen. The media would isolate these guys and then make them the perpetrators and say that you are the racist, you are the troublemaker. You are creating this, not the system. It is you, because you're speaking out against the system.

We see this happening every single day, whether it's Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem. I mean, come on. This country was said that we should be able to protest. I mean, a silent protest like that? Sure, you're going to be accountable. What is taking and he’s still showing respect. Because it's him and his image of doing that, that riles people up. Why does that rile that up? It's challenging white supremacy.

[01:14:42] LW: You all even talked about how Rosa Parks was a Malcolm X fan, which I think surprises a lot of people as well.

[01:14:49] TP: Yeah. I mean, that was great news to fnd out actually, because it just goes to show you, because you can say you don't have to choose between Malcolm Martin, because we have them. Now you hear the woman say, who is considered the mother of civil rights is going to say, “I was more Malcolm than Martin.”

I say again, it's like, he could see what was going on. He could take the moment, but he also provided ways for people to deal with these situations. Educate yourself. Embrace yourself. Don't accept when people tell you there's something wrong with the shape of your nose and your lips, the texture of your hair. Don't accept that. Embrace yourself. He will say, and if you

© 2021 At The End Of The Tunnel 33 ATEOTT 41 Transcript embrace something, you're changing the perspective. It's like, you hear that actually being other than the new wave, and this new way in solid. The enlightenment, when they talk about changing your perspective, transforming your perspective. It’s what Malcolm was talking about. Embraces, don’t accept what people are telling you about yourself.

[01:15:53] LW: Thee more quick questions. I know the last when you're publishing a book, the title is usually one of the last things you decide upon. Was your dad a part – was that his title, The Dead Are Arising?

[01:16:03] TP: It was his title. Yeah, The Dead Are Arising is dad's title. It comes from the Nation of Islam, when they refer to people outside of the nation, they call them the dead. Malcolm, this is their language. Malcolm, when he was in Hartford, writing to Elijah Muhammad about his progress in recruiting new members. He was saying that we're coming across some obstacles, but we're making headway for the dead, they are rising. Dad just changed the rising to arising, because a rising, it's really more of the actual transformation. It became a metaphor for the book of looking at Malcolm, of looking at how people around him, even the dead arising, Malcolm was The Dead Are Arising. Then, you can look at today as well, the dead are arising.

[01:16:50] LW: How do you think Malcolm would think about success these days?

[01:16:55] TP: I think, he'd be really critical of people accepting, or going for the what he would say. I mean, he would be like, you've been hoodwinked. Accepting what people are calling success, like these material –

[01:17:08] LW: The capitalists. Yeah, the capitalist –

[01:17:10] TP: There’s television images, only looking at what the media is showing you success and accepting that, as opposed to real internal growth has been success and real – that you can stand on that and support you and you can rely on during difcult times. You can't rely on this materialism all the time. During your deepest moment, you're dealing with this

© 2021 At The End Of The Tunnel 34 ATEOTT 41 Transcript question of whether you're going to move forward, or sideways. Having a Mercedes Benz in your driveway is not going to help you. I'm not saying you shouldn't have one. By the way, I'm just saying that and I won’t be critical of that.

It’s like, thinking, having the inner with wherewithal to move forward. He would see that we've been caught up when you look at the media and the media images that are keep – They keep shooting at us. He'd be really critical. However, he’d be moved by Black Lives Matter, young people and what they're doing. I think you'd be really interested in how they have – the way that they are moving. It's like, they have diferent focuses.

I mean, if you look on local levels, they're focusing on where they are locally. Then there's the national movement. If you look at where they are in Louisiana, and where they are in Georgia, it's diferent than what you see here in New York, because these states run diferently. You would be interested in seeing that, but he would also want them to be – he would probably be able to give them more insight on how to move forward even stronger on that. I think that we really missed something when Malcolm was taken. Because he was really on a precipice of something.

I mean, I think about that moment. I write about in the epilogue, where he was at the University of Beirut and speak with those students, these Iranians. They have a question answer session and he's just listening to them and their problems and he said, “You know what you guys need to think about is monetizing your resources for yourselves.” They're saying that nobody ever spoken to them about that. This is a 1964.

I'm like, those types of things we are missing. He was free enough to think, be in a situation, think about how the world is working and it's tied to resources and how to get systems organized and disorganized about that. I think that he really would be – he would have helped us fgure that out.

[01:19:43] TP: You've completed this monumental project. You're obviously still promoting it to some extent. I'm just curious, what's next with you now that you're this big national book award winner and investigative journalist? What are you up to next?

[01:19:57] TP: I'm really just focused on promoting the book. Also, just getting, keeping dad's name out there, it's important to me, because not only did dad do this work, I mean, he's working so many important stories that we should know about, like how he reported even on the Soweto uprising in 1976. If you look at what's happening in South Africa now, you'll have a lot of people who will tell you that part that didn't happen. Whereas, in Soweto uprising series, he's writing about that system in real-time.

It's almost like, we really need to go back and look at that. I think, it's really important that, what's important to me about this book is that it shows what was going on in 20th century America and how we got to where we are, and things that are happening before that. It's important that we know how we get here. There's so many stories in here that I think can even be even more feshed out. I would like to pursue some of those.

More importantly, I think it's, we really need, just getting the folks on people to really look at this history and understanding how we got to – how we are here. It didn't just happen and it's not a surprise.

[01:21:09] LW: I want to acknowledge you for carrying on your dad's work and for being a great spokesman for that, and just for showing up over these 30 years. That's a long time to stay committed to a project, while you're doing other things.

[01:21:24] TP: Yeah, but I learned a lot from my father, as a journalist, as an interviewer, as an editor, as a writer. It's just so many lessons I learned from him and just about this history. Working on this book for me, too, was just learning this history up close. It wasn't just a textbook for me. I mean, really, these people are alive. John Davis is a real person. Wilfred is a real person. I've met them. Vicki Garmin, Alice Window. These are people who are really real

I just think it's really important that we hear these stories and understand. A lot of people like to talk about Malcolm and his issues with women. I'm like, but it evolved. He didn't stay in one place on that. I think, even part of the book, but what's also important about this book is the appendix, which is something that was in the archives of Dr. Evans, Walter Evans. It was this last questionnaire and Malcolm was working on at the end of his life, given to him by the Islamic Center of Geneva, which is very – I mean, Malcolm was saying, was speaking a lot of this stuf.

To actually see his answers, his thought-out answers to these questions about, for example, why is he still talking about race when he's a Sunni Muslim, Muslim and he's orthodox. Islam doesn't see race, only the human race. Doesn't he understand that? Malcolm said, “Until my 22 million fellow African, fellow black people and Americans are free, I'm not. I will continue this. They're not free yet.” He was even critical of them saying that, yes, this is a great religion. Even when you come to the United States to bring recruits, you only look at White Americans. You don't even look at black Americans. He's still critical, and he's still hold, having the fear of black Americans as his frst cause and he doesn't put himself in front of that. [01:23:33] LW: Do you have any thoughts about the fctionalized one night in Miami? Or the Who Killed Malcolm X Netfix series? Did you see any of that stuf?

[01:23:43] TP: Yeah. I mean, Who Killed Malcolm X is a documentary. That wasn't fctionalized. I mean, I think that they did really well.

[01:23:48] LW: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:23:49] TP: They did some really interesting work there. I think, it opened the eyes. Look, it got the attention of people to look at this case, murder case.

[01:24:02] LW: Yeah. The DA, apparently, was revisiting whether or not to open the case back up again.

[01:24:08] TP: Yeah. Look, Norman Butler – Look, we show also that Norman Butler and Thomas Johnson weren't in the room, and that the people who could identify them were not called in, or asked those questions, like Benjamin Karin, for example. Jean Roberts wasn't called in at all, because they knew that they call them in and people would realize, he was a cop. I thought that they did some really good work on that.

One night in Miami, kudos to Regina, as she really did this. Because again, like in our book, back to Malcolm and the context of his family and the world he was born into, you're showing his humanity. In this book, and this movie that she did, she's showing the nuance of these four iconic black men, who is so important in 20th century America. Not just black America, America. That they had a friendship, and that they were all breathing this rare air at the position and those conversations they were having are so important.

It was like, we got to look in on that and what that was like, and then to see humanity, their disagreements and their agreements. Then, and it's like how we have our own friendships, right? It's like, you have friends when you’re like, “Man. I don’t [inaudible 01:25:27]. Yeah. I mean, agree with him when he said that, but you're right. It's being able to see that is important.

[01:25:36] LW: Yeah. Yeah, that was awesome.

[01:25:37] TP: Basically, did a great job portraying the nuance that exist. Yes. I mean, it's fctional, but it's still images that are important.

[01:25:48] LW: Yeah, and the spirit was there, I felt.

[01:25:50] TP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[01:25:53] LW: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for taking time to talk to us. I hope everybody gets a chance to get the book, The Dead Are Arising, and I'll put all of it in the show notes, all the information. What's the best way to just keep up with you? Are you on Twitter? I know you're on Instagram.

[01:26:09] TP: I’m on Instagram. I will have a website up, thedeadarearising.com, where people can also visit that. Right now, it's Tamara Payne on Instagram is the best.

[01:26:19] LW: Okay, beautiful. Thank you so much.

[01:26:22] TP: Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[01:26:24] LW: I don't know about you guys, but I'm inspired. I want to keep bringing on more experts and authors to talk about the fascinating lives of changemakers from modern history, and even ancient history. I mean, why not? Because not only do I get to learn a lot, but we get to see their lives in context and glean whatever wisdom we can from their experiences to apply to our own.

Thank you very much for going along on the journey with me. I hope it inspires you to read The Dead Are Arising. If you've never read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I highly recommend reading that too. It's in my top fve dead or alive all-time favorite books. Meanwhile, you can follow Tamara on Instagram @ItsTamaraPayne. The website is thedeadarearising.com.

If you want to support this podcast, the best thing you can do for now is to leave a fve-star rating. It only takes 10 seconds. All you do is glance down at your screen, click where it says At The End Of The Tunnel, which is in purple. If you're not listening to this on the podcast app, look for a button that says listen on Apple podcasts and you'll see the purple link. Then scroll down past the previous episodes to where it says ratings and reviews and just tap the star on the far right and you've left a rating. It's literally that easy.

I thank you in advance for taking those 10 seconds to do that. It really means a lot. More importantly, that's what's going to lead Apple to potentially feature this podcast more prominently and you can help to spread these inspirational stories more widely. You can also fnd the show notes and a transcript of my interview with Tamara at lightwatkins.com/tunnel. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for my daily dose of inspiration email, which is a short and sweet daily motivational message that I've been sending out every morning for years now.

I'm gearing up for my next book launch, which is based on those daily dose emails. It's called Knowing Where to Look: A 108 Daily Doses of Inspiration. It's coming out in late May. It's ofcially now available for pre order everywhere books are sold. You'll see purchase links at lightwatkins.com/knowing.

Thanks again for listening to the podcast, for sharing it with your friends and your followers. I'll see you guys back here next week with another amazing story from the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, keep trusting your intuition, keep following your heart. Please keep taking those leaps of faith and I'm sending you lots of peace and love. Have a great day.

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