‘He transformed his mind’: how did Malcolm Little become Malcolm X?

Patrick Parr’s first book, The Seminarian, was about the young Martin Luther King Jr and his time in college near Chester, Pennsylvania. Parr’s new book, Malcolm Before X, is about the youthful experiences of another giant of the civil rights years, in Massachusetts and in another closed environment: prison.

Prison is “something where you don’t think there would be sources”, Parr says from Ohio, while visiting home from Japan, where he is a professor of writing at Lakeland University. “But it turns out that the Norfolk prison where Malcolm was had a biweekly newspaper that came out, and it details all of the goings on during the time that he is in prison, and he converts to Islam.”

Malcolm Little was born on 19 May 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1946, when he was convicted on breaking-and-entering charges and sent to the crumbling hell of Charlestown state prison, he still went by that name. He served time in two more Massachusetts jails before walking free in 1952, by which time he was involved with the Nation of Islam and on the brink of rejecting his “slave name” to become Malcolm X.

Related: Malcolm X’s family sues FBI, CIA and NYPD for $100m over his murder

Much has been written about the next 13 years, in which Malcolm X became a leading Black voice in America and around the world, on the militant edge of the civil rights movement, feared and surveilled by law enforcement; about his assassination in New York City in February 1965, an internecine tragedy; and about his afterlife as a Black power martyr. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley and published posthumously, remains widely read. Biographies abound. Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic, in which Malcolm X is played by Denzel Washington, remains a lasting visual statement.

Little might seem left unknown. But Parr realized “no other book had used prison newspapers, and I don’t think they even thought about looking for them”. To Parr’s distinct relief, that included The Dead Are Arising, Les Payne and Tamara Payne’s epic biography from 2020, released as Parr worked his way through mountains of prison files. Though Garrett Felber, a researcher who worked with Manning Marable, author of another epic, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (a Pulitzer prize winner in 2012), did find “a couple good bits” from the Norfolk Prison Colony newspaper, “he never went into it as much as I did”, Parr says.

Encouraged by the author and activist Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s daughters, and David Garrow, the King biographer Parr counts as a mentor, Parr set out “to build the world around Malcolm. I said: ‘Well, let’s see that world. Let’s see the people who were incarcerated at the same time.’ I felt I could build a world here, not just in Norfolk, but also in Charlestown and then also in Concord, the three prisons where Malcolm X served time, so that we can understand his transformation, his arc.”

The result is a portrait of Malcolm X as a young prisoner that also depicts men who served time with him, not least Malcolm Jarvis, the friend with whom Malcolm carried out the burglaries that led to prison and whose own dreams of success as a jazz trumpeter were doomed. The institutions that held such men become characters, too. Norfolk was a remarkable place, a high-security lock-up with a superb library and a crack debating team that beat Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge (and helped change Malcolm Little), all part of a mission of rehabilitation rather than simple punishment.

Parr’s book is a portrait of growth. Literally. Brought up in poverty, mostly in Lansing, Michigan, Malcolm Little dropped out of school after eighth grade, found his way east and worked on the railroads and as a nightclub emcee before turning to petty crime. When he went to prison he was 21 years old, stood 6ft 2in and weighed 172lbs. When he came out he was 27, 6ft 3.5in and 185lbs. His prison boxing career stalled – one of a number of mistakes Parr examines – but another form of exercise stuck.

“He transformed his mind completely. When you put his mugshots [from entering prison and leaving] side to side, you can really feel how intense he’s become, and maybe too intense for some of his family. But at that time, I think it was good for him to find this purpose and to direct it somewhere productive,” Parr says.

In prison libraries – even in the desperate squalor of Charlestown, where he picked up Shakespeare and Melville – Malcolm read novelists, poets, philosophers and religious thinkers. He proved a natural reader, “playing with language and voice”, adding an understanding of literature to the fast-talking, fast-thinking style he picked up on the streets of Lansing and in the Harlem clubs.

The result, Parr says, was “something very different than King. When I was doing the book about King, it was as if he was integrating even his own voice so that it could have an effect on as wide a number of people as possible. Whereas with Malcolm, it’s far more about himself as the individual. He’s like: ‘I’m finding my voice. I’m choosing this word because I want that word to impact me and the reader I’m trying to reach.’ There’s far more of an individual process with Malcolm in his writing.”

Parr also discusses an unlikely source on which Malcolm drew: How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie’s self-help manual, first published in 1936. It seems more than a little incongruous in company with Milton and the King James Bible, let alone in a prison setting – though, as Parr says, “when we bring up the title of the book, you and I, we share a laugh, Malcolm is reading this real serious literature, and his brother says: ‘You got to connect with people, read this,’ and recommends Dale Carnegie. Malcolm denies that but then Jarvis, who was just so important to Malcolm’s transformation, he takes that book and uses it [to prepare for a successful parole hearing], and perhaps that strongly influences Malcolm to do it as well.

“I think when it comes to a book like Dale Carnegie, Malcolm is like: ‘OK, I got this voice. I just need to twist the literary frequencies that I’ve been working on all through prison.’”

Related: Malcolm X’s autobiography didn’t change me, it saved me | Lemn Sissay

After his release from Norfolk, Malcolm X made his way back to Michigan and the Nation of Islam, the Black militant group to which his brothers had introduced him and whose strictures he had tried to follow behind bars – abstaining from pork, other than in the lard in which all prison food was cooked. Among law enforcement, at least, he could never have won friends and influenced people, even had he chosen to do so. As Parr writes, even as Malcolm made his first moves as a free man, “provocative letters written while he was in prison” were being “used to begin the first pages of what would end up being a 13-year, 3,600-plus page FBI file”.

“After only 23 days of freedom, he was now under the surveillance of the FBI, where he would remain the rest of his life,” Parr says.

Parr quotes from the very first FBI memo on the man then still formally known as Malcolm Little. Pondering “potential communist ties and his interest in ‘the Muslim Cult of Islam’”, the G-man behind the memo identified his subject as Malcolm K, also known as Malachi Shabazz, Rhythm Red and Detroit Red.

Two years later, Parr notes, the FBI began to refer to Malcolm X.

• Malcolm Before X is out now