Stanley Aronowitz is Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work. He is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a founding editor of the journal Social Text and co-founder and co-editor of Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. He has authored and edited more than twenty books including Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters(2008).
Leith Mullings
Leith Mullings is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is President-Elect of the American Anthropological Association and an activist whose research and writing on structures of inequality and resistance ranges from analyses of traditional medicine in Africa to the impact of illegal drugs, incarceration, and gentrification on urban communities in the United States. Her numerous publications include On Our Own Terms: Race, Class and Gender in the Lives of African American Women.
Cornel West
Cornel West is a philosopher, author, critic, and civil rights activist. His works include The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, Race Matters, and The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century.
Gary Younge
Gary Younge is a columnist and feature writer for The Guardian who has written extensively from the United States, Southern Africa and throughout Europe as well as the UK since he joined the paper in 1994. Born and raised in Stevenage near London, he left school at 17 to teach English to refugees in Sudan before going on to study French and Russian at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. He was awarded a bursary to study newspaper journalism for The Guardian at City University in London in 1992.
In 1996 he was seconded to the Washington Post after being awarded the Lawrence Stern Fellowship. His first book, No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South, was published in 1999 by Picador and was released in the United States in 2002. He was awarded newspaper journalist of the year for the Ethnic Minority Media Awards for three straight years 2002 to 2004 and in 2000 was nominated for foreign journalist of the year for his reporting from Zimbabwe.
Encyclopedia Britannica Article
Malcolm X
Malcolm XAP(born May 19, 1925, Omaha, Neb., U.S.died Feb. 21, 1965, New York, N.Y.) U.S. black Muslim leader. He was raised in Michigan, where the family house was burned by the Ku Klux Klan; his father was later murdered and his mother was institutionalized. He moved to Boston, drifted into petty crime, and was sent to prison for burglary in 1946. He converted to the Black Muslim faith (Nation of Islam) the same year. On his release in 1952, he changed his last name to X to signify his rejection of his slave name. Soon after meeting the Nation of Islam's leader, Elijah Muhammad, he became the sect's most effective speaker and organizer. He spoke with bitter eloquence against white exploitation of blacks and derided the civil rights movement and integration, calling instead for black separatism, black pride, and the use of violence for self-protection. Differences with Elijah Muhammad prompted Malcolm to leave the Nation of Islam in 1964. A pilgrimage to Mecca led him to acknowledge the possibility of world brotherhood and to convert to orthodox Islam. Rival Black Muslims made threats against his life, and he was shot to death at a rally in a Harlem ballroom. His celebrated autobiography (1965) was written by Alex Haley on the basis of numerous interviews conducted shortly before Malcolm's death.
Join Cornel West, Leith Mullings, Stanley Aronowitz, and Gary Younge as they discuss Manning Marable's new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, and the many questions about Malcolm X's life and assassination that it raises. Manning Marable, who died days before his book was released, was professor of public affairs, political science, history and African-American studies and the founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and the Center for the Study of Contemporary Black History at Columbia University. He is recognized as one of the most forceful and outspoken scholars of African-American history and race relations in the United States.