Malcolm X's autobiography is one of the most gripping books I ever read, even when taking the retelling of events with a grain of salt. When discussing it online, Marable's work has been invoked a couple of times, mostly to tear into the myth and suggest that his integrity was compromised by his personal issues.
I tried getting my hands on Marable's work to pry into it myself, but haven't been able to. I tried Googling around to gauge public opinion, but there's a lot of stuff out there. Some reviews suggest that Marable's work fleshes him out as a real flawed human instead of a mythic superhero, enhancing his legacy, while some others suggest that it banks on salaciousness and unsubstantiated speculation to undermine not only his revolutionary appeal with certain demographics, but to engender a distrust of people who speak "truth to power" in general as hypocrites and such.
It won the Pulitzer prize, but it also prompted the release of a collection of counter-essays, "A Lie of Reinvention". And, apparently, there are various verified mistakes within Marable's work.
Could anyone here point me in the right direction?
You need to read Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention to fully understand the claims Marable is making. Given the historical context and Malcolm Little's personal situation, Marable argues that it would have made sense. I think that conjecture or "would have made sense" argument was the problem for a lot of Marable's critics. Without specific interviews or evidence, the critics scathingly called Marable's work poor scholarship and mostly conjecture. I think the problem with those denunciations is that so little can be really "known" about Malcolm X's early and personal life. In his autobiography, co-written with Haley, everything is very constructed and intentional- Malcolm X would not put anything in there he did not want the world to know. He was not going to write about homosexual encounters or marital issues. He was going to write about the revolution. When historians go beyond those issues of what is "known" in order to flesh out a complicated figure, people often take offense.
The problem with writing a biography on Malcolm X is that the writing in itself is a political activity. Malcolm X was so tied to the NOI and Black nationalism, then more toward Black liberation and revolution, however you attempt to write his history, you're going to have to align yourself with a political ideology. Marable could not write a completely objective history, as no one can.
I might be biased because Marable's work was what inspired me to study Black radicalism. For me, it will always be my holy text of what I as a scholar can strive toward. That said, I acknowledge that it did have flaws. As the scholars of A Lie of Reinvention have pointed out, there were some scholarly flaws and maybe Marable putting too much of himself in the text (also, at the end, Marable states who Malcolm X's murderers were and where they can be found). However, it is a book that needed to be written and needs to be read. Malcolm X led a life of reinvention and his historiography needs to be reinvented every generation too.
Conclusion: Malcolm X maybe had homosexual lovers, extra marital affairs, and couldn't sexually satisfy his wife. There is no scholarly consensus and probably will never be. But debating and thinking critically about Malcolm X's life and legacy is something we must continue to do.
Suggested Reading List
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable
Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006, Manning Marable
"The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (As Told to Alex Haley), Malcolm X (Author), Alex Haley
Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, Nikhil Pal Singh
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson