and this book, some call magnum opus, some call a tragedy, some thinks is destroys his legacy or makes him larger and greater. also chairman of the oversight board. [applause] next to her, michael eric dyson university professor at georgetown university and host a the michael eric dyson show. [applause] last, professor political science and african studies at johns hopkins university. [applause] melissa harris-perry can associate professor of african-american studies at princeton, but now to the university. [applause] let's jump into the heat of the battle and talk about the significance of this book in the arguments around the significant clearly it is adding something he should this discussion, but what is that? i read this book twice. before you throw some of those ideas, i'm curious starting with sherrilyn ifill, what is for you the significance of malcolm x? >> thank you, mark. first of all, significance of course is that bareboat road and he represents many of us to begin scholars, who entered the academy, of how one can read it as relative scholar of a scholar who is relevant to the lives of african-american people who is focused on bringing truth in great detail. this is my train of thought, 80 pages of footnotes. i love it. i remember the night that the news came out that manning marable had passed away as in ann arbor michigan where i had never been before, that giving a talk about slavery and reparations at university of michigan. the woman who is hosting me was the person who told me about it. she teaches at the university of michigan in the last school in the afro-american studies department, a white woman and she immediately began to tell me about how manning marable had mentored her in new york. i didn't find it surprising to simmer in the heartland somebody was telling the story because of his tremendous influence. before i jump into talking about malcolm x come i want to say for me a good deal is that he wrote it. i would secondly say it's also significant that unfortunately released, but that this evening and others like it are important. i remember when the mother of emmett till died, she also had a boat she agreed to and she died it would unshredded week before out.ook came most of you have never read it because she was allied to do the publicity. it's a powerfully important book about what happened to mothers, the journey of a mother when her son is killed, something powerful to the african-american community. tonight is important and it's our job to carry this forward. in terms of significance briefly for me, i think that this book is in some ways long-overdue because it provides missing details that in your intellectuals are at any inner spirit spirit come you just know have to be missing from what you know those who did not know marable unshared malcolm x that were missing from the story. that is really the day to day struggle of takes to evolve as a leader, particularly as an african-american male leader who has integrity. it is a journey. it is not a place and there have been so many pieces of malcolm's journey missing. i've always found these huge gaps in terms of malcolm x's journey and many are filled by this book in airports and because of the iconic position that he holds for so many and i'm sure we contact about our. >> well, i am honored to be here tonight in such a distinguished panel and of course in memory of manning. i wish he could've been here himself to talk about his book he would've loved this audience and the vibrant reception to let this book, this book has been accorded. this has been controversial as well. and manning was fully prepared for that in my conversations with him. he loved malcolm x that very few other people. he loved the meaning of the man he loved from its historical significance. practice and he also had to he had to tell the church is best as he could as bystanders today. the power and the beauty of this book is that it is rendered in such assessable and elegant prose, that engages a broad spectrum and continuing unscholarly data. if you will, on access data about malcolm in terms of interviews and in terms of some of the fbi files. and really tries to wrestle with a complicated story of an iconic figure who meant so much to varying and sometimes competing in outright contradictory to the achievements. some manning had a very difficult job to do. his film with the fire and the heat of various constituencies trying to figure out what are you going to make this and that we love? and even more so because this is a scholarly tried to grapple with the significance of malcolm x, it is an enormous work. i do believe it is a magnum opus and i've seen a whole lot because manning redeker to the alien things that have to be taught with from some of his capitalism developed down to his work on black politics and it's an extraordinary career that he had a vocation for trying to bring lucidity and clarity to complicated and difficult truths. so i bought this book. i read it. i was privileged to read it before it was published. it is a brilliant, insightful, invigorating, and assign comprehension of his outsized and immortal human being has and those who are constantly by some of malcolm -- the man in spite of copastor member you can't malcolm the greatest black figure to emerge in the 20th century. it just don't get it deeper than that. a lot of this stuff has come out has been exaggerated, sun has been generated from peoples since it insecurities and frailties and quite frankly and the fear of dealing with the raw truth of an evolving human being. and i celebrate this book. i think the essence is that it delivers as professor ifill said a complicated vision of a man who needs to be understood and in his own autobiography that manning has now challenged in a powerful way. malcolm says they won't let me turn the corner and so many people still have him in a bear hug and refuses to let him breathe freely the air of his own evolution. so i celebrate this book and look forward to talking to you about it. >> i like the rest of the pan on going to take a bit of time to talk about manning. we often black box the active culture production, the act of writing the book, the active writing a song, the act of painting a picture. and i think we do that for a number of reasons, but i think there is a whole bunch of reasons why we might want to unpack that process. many memorable stuff. and it working to talk about. manning had to have both once while dealing with that. so we don't talk a lot about the active production, dictate the grinder takes. like i wrote a little book that's coming out. these guys have written several. every time you're dealing with some type of crisis, you still have to do it. the fact he was able to do it any never done anything like this in his career, which is dirty a testament. we have four rows of scholars. some of us are primarily mentors. some of us are primarily writers, some teachers. some of us are institution builders. manning was all for. the university of colorado colombia. he there founded or developed black studies programs. he did some other stuff while it's really important to talk about that process and how greedy scholar he was. now with that said, i think i'm going to be the world's critic in that i believe this work is the work scholars who have to wrestle with and join with malcolm x's legacy going forward however even as it humanizes him, they are a of questions that are shunted aside or not affect the blue dealt with and diminishes the importance will talk a little more. he does not give enough attention to black nationalism and even of the nation of islam, have some incredibly problematic politics and doesn't effectively deal with some of the reasons why the nation of islam was as effective as it was in mobilizing people. so the book comes out kind of -- the book ends up doing a great deal and it is an excellent way to end a career. i am so sorry that he's not here to participate. with that said, there are some questions and hopefully will be able to wrestle with those. >> i too will take a commanding moment only because i just really loved him and i really loved him mostly because he was incredibly snarky. i like nice people, but i so prefer people who are that'll harsh and a little snarky and will make the observation. i can remember sitting and listening to people who are important scholars, giving lectures in a room with manning and looking over eye-catching as expressions and thinking yeah, okay. and so, certainly having known him in those places, i know he would not run to beat exclusively a lovefest. it was through criticism and through clear eyed, careful intellectual engagement. so i appreciate you bringing that as well. just a few things i think are days. i actually would take some disagreement with your representation of how we represent the nation of islam. one of the things i like best about the book was my sense that he presents at least theologically as he is discussing the nation without any start for the sense of foolishness. he engages theology of the nation of islam with as much respect and as much care as one historian of any religious tradition. for example, we read books about people who are important leaders within the christian tradition. no one mocks the idea that either way, he believed in this religion where this guy got up after three days of being dead and what to round. but pretty frequently when you read scholarly works on the nation, they do make fun of creationists. they do lock the fundamental underlying urological precepts and manning not only restraints himself, but presents himself in some ways that even though we know the rejection of many of those ideas that are going to come later in the book from malcolm himself. the second thing this book did for me, i know a lot of people are angry that the text takes away the hero that is malcolm x for so many people. i'll double back to that in a second. at the thing he killed for me with alex haley. yeah, boy coming to read this and alex is not looking like he should feel very good about 10. and that has been done, but there is a way in which it happening here is -- a work he has to do in order to deconstruct the autobiography. so in order to deconstruct the autobiography, he takes it into the black box of haley's writing, exactly the black boxer talking about. of course as you know it's not always pretty, particularly when writing to feed yourself. so i think you have to take that in ways that were challenging. the third thing i thought was critically important as we talk about manning's passing here. i'd read the book and i've read this section on the assassination and i read it very quickly because i got a very painful to read particularly in the context of manning found passing, something about the speed with which his narrative picks up there in the intensity of it. but a reread it again yesterday, that section in the context in the killing of osama bin laden. and not because in any way i think malcolm x or osama bin laden have anything to do with one another, but only in the sense of americans bloodlust, the desire to see the picture, the in these he has them about the murder of the opponent. and i wanted to pause and go back and think about malcolm's assassination again in a very american moment. we think of malcolm as the black nationalist critiquing america, but still about plants caught up in a very american structure including the nation. reading that again in the context of the killing of bin laden created a certain. im ratty to give up alex haley's malcolm x and spike lee's malcolm x. not everybody is. is. as a friend who teaches at an all boys charter school in the inner-city and there is no book that appears more frequently on the spring syllabus are on the friend's personal bookshelf than the autobiography of malcolm max. he was never taught a class to these kids about teaching the autobiography. and you know, the work in political science is this idea that malcolm is built through the film and through the autobiography is the kind of magical talent and you got him to get your manhood fix and you started to a malcolm x incantation to represent your anger the american states and your sense of which are organizing political possibilities of black manhood are. and so that meant is incredibly important and powerful and does organizing work. but i'm ready to give it up without to give it up into a void. i suspect that it wasn't quite right, but it wasn't ready to give it up to avoid. but in its text does is allow us to give up five minutes without having to opt-in to avoid. it gives us something else that is contentious and will have to deal with, but this gives us another malcolm who we can live in a very different kind of way. >> what i'd like to do is throw the question out. feel free to just leap into things. i want to pick up on some of the things you said and also some of the things in this book and come out of these notes are really attached themselves to what you're just saying. let me begin where we just left off. for some people, there are many hearts of matter if this book that are tearing people apart who care about malcolm max and care about this broken this way and have read this book. and so let's begin with alex haley. alex haley was, his book was a seminal work to move to millions of young americans, not just african-americans, move human beings understand to struggle on this planet about oppressed people and a sense of being african-american and where you stood in why you said the other to which you had to fight for an offense. so having said that, i understand what you just said. i can read this and going to do trash alec struve heard? some people have criticized manninen this book by saying that he also liberalized the image of malcolm x. not similarly, so what about the argument about the book know that they're being relevant and this being relevant now? >> well, you know, i think in light of what everybody said and after reading the book myself, surely you can't read hailey the same way. you can't come to the same conclusion. you can't see it the same lenses because coming in outcome and manning makes clear that his political ideological framework determined what he included, would be excluded from what he found that the bible. so the thing is -- bright? it's been a bible. so there's a lot of stuff were malcolm, when you're a beginning minister, it's a wonder you even have any faith left, which is beautiful because i believe in trying to deconstruct and the mythologize a lot of step that is secreted historically around these tags they reveal more about the projections of authors in the possibilities that they imagined than an object of truth. so i think that the autobiography continues to be useful, but it has to be seen in a specific way. and i think once the read hailey's autobiographical construction of malcolm's life, he was the secretary said his speed, that was doing a lot more by throwing stuff in and keeping stuff out and fighting with publishers who wanted their own vision of malcolm to prevail. it's also why publishing houses, political framework in its own self mythologizing. it's not like himself as a template of objective truths upon which we could then press our conceptions of what his life is like. this is what manning helps us understand. malcolm is exaggerating his hosting itinerary for particular purposes to try to suggest the redemptive power of elijah mohammed and silicates turned on his head at the end of his life. so when i think about the book now, i guess because there is a famous preacher preaching is very, very famous guy. and these two seminary students were there. it was easter sunday and he was chanting. jesus got up on sunday morning and restart. people yes, my god it's amazing. and the two seminary in schenectady easter sunday and said reverend so-and-so, you restored my faith. and then seminary and i'm reading all this stuff. and after you are talking about jesus resurrect team. [laughter] right? now, you could either say this guy was cynical, that he was lying or that even when you know that all the stuff you read which are reshaped to know jesus reminiscent he was in the stuff people wrote. before jury, right? facets of the bible was written by paul and all that stuff. at the end of the community still have a faith that is sustained in the mid-to the deconstruction, but the deconstruction of the tv set so that how the sex were produced. we talk about the black box of rejection. it assumes they are going to crash. and the crashing has been of the kind of -- the clash between, you know, our understanding of intellectual process these that he brings this sharpness scholarship possible with the kind of faith assertions. i think professor harris. sprayed on here, that and he takes the cosmology and the theology, which makes just as much sense than any other religious assertion that has been put out there. i could end by saying this. i don't think you have to give up alex haley's book, the chip to give up what you think and what you thought it did and give up a malcolm said about himself. would you begin? at the beginning. he began by saying that lives are lived in tents and repeated affirmation of ideals that possibly evolve. that's what frederick had to write three auto biology. so i think we don't have to give it up, but we have to give up what we think about it and begin to use the text differently informed about the stuff that manning brought to us. [applause] i would also said just that this sounded like a discussion about the bible in a way because of the way people respond to text. i guess i want to respond that it's not like a discussion to the bible. i think part of our problem is that we read books like their religious text. you know, religion in and of itself is irrational, you believe it. i'm a christian. you believe it and even though you can't scientifically prove of us have come you believe what you believe. too often when it comes to our heroes, we read about them and internalized stories about them as though they are a religious figure and a deity. and we cut off our critical faculty and we become infested in perpetuating certain myths. it happened with martin for many years through that process that we don't even remember how much people were invested in a mythology about martin luther king jr., who had to be humanized over decades that we now recognize that missing and feared dead as the state we're at now with this task. you can never fully understand raw the product of competing narratives. we all know we talk about ourselves a little to differently than how other people would talk about it. you're reading a biased texas to visit calls itself. i love frederick douglass, but i'm sure that if somebody else, it's mrs. douglas are writing the story -- and just pain. as african american people, we are very protective of our heroes, very protective of them. sometimes it is to the exclusion of wanting to accept them as men and women. here's the danger and that's why i like this book. too much of precisely what melissa said his true, you know, about malcolm becoming a talisman, what we do what we mythologize figures like malcolm x and martin luther king is the scare of people from thinking that they can be leaders. they make it look like it a magical, mystical tours do you have to be born into it and then you have to be in prison and to anoint you. we make it all sound like magic. and it's not magic. these are men and women and they are human beings. and everyone has the potential to be a great leader. and so i always feel that when we begin to get these tax that help us humanize, you know, i like the boring parts of the book. i like just the day to day going down to mosque number seven, having this conversation, having the meeting. this is what is involved in a re