Malcolm Before X

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
A Spectator Best Book of the Year

Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X. 

In February 1946, when 21-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X’s post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth.

Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X’s life (1925–1965). Parr traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced.

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told. 

Praise for Malcolm Before X

“This first-rate biography looks at…one of the great conversion stories of modern history: a young man mired in crime raises himself up and, through self-discipline, becomes an explosive spokesperson for Black Americans.” —Library Journal, starred review

"Parr has written the definitive story of the youth and early adulthood of one of the most dazzling and controversial civil rights leaders in American history."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Malcolm Before X focuses on the early years of Malcolm X’s life and the experiences that shaped the man he became. . . . Excerpts [from Malcolm X's autobiography] are supplemented with accounts from his family and friends, providing external perspectives that at times conflict with his own. The multiple accounts are managed well, adding layers and widening the scope of the narrative."—Foreword Reviews

"Ambitious, eye opening...Parr's book is a portrait of growth." - Martin Pengelly, The Guardian

"Parr's Malcolm Before X is an important addition to the literature on both black nationalism and the US criminal justice system...Thoroughly researched and crisply written, Parr's work provides the most complete examination yet of Malcolm's prison years." - Theodore Hamm, Jacobin

“Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X is a breathtaking act of intellectual reconstruction and a sublime literary achievement. Parr’s book excavates the life changing, yet woefully underappreciated, six and a half years that Malcolm spent in prison, and masterfully probes the roots of his traumatic childhood and troubled young adulthood. Malcolm Before X for the first time puts us fully in touch with the contradictory yet constitutive forces that shaped one of the monumental lives of the twentieth century.”—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X

"Malcolm Before X is strikingly original. Parr's prodigious research gives us the most richly documented book about Malcolm's early life that we will ever have. His account of how a good prison library can spark a personal transformation should resonate widely. A superb achievement."—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross and Rising Star

“I have known Patrick Parr since 2019. The original research he shared with me was extremely helpful in writing one of my own books, The Awakening of Malcolm X. I believe Patrick’s new book is an important addition to the story of my father’s life.”—Ilyasah Shabazz, author of Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X

"Patrick Parr has managed an extraordinary feat. In telling the story of Malcolm Little the child, the student, the burglar, the prisoner, he has helped us to more fully understand Malcolm X the orator, the leader, the radical thinker. Parr has unearthed remarkable documentary sources to tell the gripping and important story of the shaping of a great mind."—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life

“Six and a half years in three Massachusetts prisons turned an aimless, twenty-year-old petty thief named Malcolm Little into the spiritual and intellectual powerhouse we know as Malcolm X. Patrick Parr’s meticulously researched book gives us the most detailed account yet of this historic transformation—and offers lessons for today about the life-changing potential of prison libraries and educational programs.”—Mark Whitaker, author of Saying It Loud: 1966-The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement

“More than any other previous biography of Malcolm X that I have read, in Malcolm Before X, Patrick Parr delivers an air-tight, well documented chronology of the well-known episodes in Malcolm’s early life combined with a compelling, revelatory portrait of the six and a half transformative years he spent in prison.”—Abdur-Rahman Muhammad is a scholar, historian, journalist, writer, activist, and authority on the life and legacy of Malcolm X

“Parr offers an extraordinary portrait of Malcolm by relying on a cornucopia of significant primary sources that, in many instances, no one—literally no one—has ever tapped before. His rare and extremely commendable detective work shows on virtually every page.”—Keith Miller, author of Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources

“Patrick Parr has produced an extraordinary act of historical research and recovery. By taking Malcolm X’s prison years seriously, Parr helps to restore the human being behind the legend. This groundbreaking book, which should be read by every student, researcher, and scholar of Malcolm X and postwar American history, offers the most detailed examination to date of Malcolm X’s prison years. In so doing, Parr provides the most brilliantly nuanced understanding and analysis of Malcolm Little’s transformation into Malcolm X. Magnificent.”—Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century

"Patrick Parr has done it again--showing us how much more there is to learn about the prison experience and young life of Malcolm X. A must-read for anyone interested in how Malcolm X became the radical intellectual that he was."—Jeanne Theoharis, NAACP Image Award-winning author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

Publication Date: December 1, 2024

Events:

City Lit Books. “In Conversation with Jonathan Eig and Patrick Parr.” December 5, Chicago, IL. 6:30 to 7:30pm.

The NewSouth Bookstore. “Patrick Parr Presents on Malcolm Before X.” December 10, Montgomery, AL 5:30 to 7pm.

Malcolm X Park in Roxbury, Massachusetts, minutes from the Malcolm X and Ella-Little Collins House on Dale St. Photo taken by Patrick Parr, August 15, 2023.

At the “Sentences” exhibit at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Malcolm’s March 12, 1950 letter, written while incarcerated at Norfolk Prison Colony, sits in the middle (three pages). Photo taken by Patrick Parr. August 9, 2023.

Parr just outside the Norfolk Prison Colony, very much in the same condition it was when Malcolm was incarcerated there from 1948 to 1950. Yes...Parr went in. Photo by Dan Winslow. August 10, 2023.

One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation

What would you do with $2.72?

If you’re John Edwin Mroz, you think big.

At 18, Mroz was given the title ‘literary festival chairman’ at Notre Dame. A freshman at the time, he was also given the bank account associated with the festival budget. When he checked the balance, there it was: $2.72.

One year later, Mroz and his team of fellow sophomores brought Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Wright Morris and Granville HIcks to campus for a week-long literary festival. It just so happens that this week (March 31 to April 6, 1968) was one of the most chaotic in American history.

One Week in America was released on March 2, 2021 by Chicago Review Press. You can buy a copy through their website, or at Amazon, among others.

"Masterfully researched and beautifully written, One Week in America is . . . an important piece of history full of larger-than-life characters and unlikely heroes." —Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life

"Patrick Parr perfectly captures a unique moment in American history, when a motley group of college kids convinced America's leading literary lights to come together for one memorable week in 1968. You'll wonder if it really happened, but it did, and One Week in America rescues this incredible story from obscurity." —Matthew Algeo, author of All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy's 1968 Tour of Appalachia

"In One Week in America, Patrick Parr has written a wonderfully nuanced and essential cultural history. By closely examining the Symposium of Great American Writers at Notre Dame, which took place amid one of the most eventful, tragic weeks in our history, Parr illuminates that time in unexpected and fascinating ways. I tore through this book of conflicting personalities and ideas, and can't recommend it more highly." —Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others

"One Week in America is an engaging, multidimensional snapshot of US society in 1968. It's certainly a useful resource if you wish to research the civil rights movement, antiwar activism, and the literary scene in America in the '60's. It's also fascinating to the general reader interested in modern history, presented from many angles." —PopMatters

"An inherently fascinating bit of American cultural history." —Midwest Book Review

Here’s an interview about the book for the Biographers International Organization’s podcast.

The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age

On January 18, 2021, Parr talked via Zoom with the J. Lewis Crozer Public Library. The goal was to show the Chester community the churches Dr. King preached at during his three seminary years.

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Here are a few reviews for my book, The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age. It's available in bookstores starting April 1st, and I'll try to keep this page updated with new reviews and tour dates (above). The Seminarian is currently available for order now at Amazon as well. 

"Fearless...[The Seminarian] is a cleareyed and honest account of some transformative experiences in the life of the gifted young man who would become a cultural icon." Kirkus Reviews

“Without question the most original and important book about King’s life to appear in more than a quarter century.” David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross and Rising Star

"More than anything else, it’s Mr. Parr’s willingness to dig that impresses and makes “The Seminarian” an original, much-needed and even stirring book about King’s formative years at Crozer...Mr. Parr deserves credit for leaving no page in King’s academic record unturned. But his significant contribution is in helping us understand what made this young man extraordinary and in taking on subjects that might prove difficult to stomach for those who worship King." The Wall Street Journal

"Parr is a wonderful guide through this pivotal season of King’s intellectual development, spiritual formation, and youthful angst. We feel the young seminarian’s anxiety as he arrives at a predominantly white school, we witness his encounters with the North’s less flamboyant but equally treacherous brand of racism, and we experience the heartbreak of his short-lived romance with a white student... Grounded in exhaustive, primary-source research, the narrative bounds forward with an energetic curiosity that resembles the bright and restless spirit of its young protagonist." Christianity Today

"King’s three years at the Crozer Theological Seminary, south of Philadelphia, marked an important turning point in his life and are well worth the exclusive focus they get in this compact, readable and well-researched book. [Parr] leave[s] readers with a memorable image. As classmates passed King’s room in “Old Main,” the imposing central building on the Crozer campus, they often heard him rehearsing the delivery of the verse from the Book of Amos that he would invoke again and again over the next two decades, up to the impassioned “Mountaintop” speech he gave the night before his death. “Let justice run down like water,” King recited, “and righteousness like a mighty stream!” The Washington Post

"Through scrupulous research and interviews with King’s peers, Parr puts the reader in the classroom with King...Worrying about grades and girls, this ML is as familiar as a student of today." - Akron Beacon Journal

“Parr provides a delightful (and deep) exploration of King’s formative years, a period that even the most committed scholars have undervalued or overlooked altogether. King’s years at Crozer are recounted here with such clarity the reader nearly sits next to him through every class and social engagement, so that a mere glance to the right and we fall in among his many classmates who are interviewed here.  The Seminarian is for the scholar and general reader alike who want to learn how a kid from Atlanta slowly matured into our nation’s greatest civil rights leader.” W. Jason Miller, author of Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric

“Not only an engrossing biographical study but an essential source for anyone with a serious interest in the formative years of Martin Luther King Jr.” Clayborne Carson, editor of A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This book provides by far the most thorough and detailed treatment of Martin Luther King's experience in seminary.  Anyone interested in King should be thrilled that Patrick Parr pored closely over the seminary records and interviewed surviving members of his cohort of seminarians (plus his sweetheart).   Count this volume among the small number of indispensable books about King.” Keith D. Miller, author of Voice of Deliverance and Martin Luther King's Biblical Epic

“Seminary training doesn’t always dictate the course of leaders’ lives, sometimes even steering them directly opposite. Yet the time is always formative. Through his careful research, Patrick Parr has produced a stunning piece of work illumining this little-known part of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s journey of stumbling through learning to integrate theology, life, and the real world as he grew into the great American leader he became.” Jason S. Sexton, Editor, Boom California

Historian Parr’s debut work of nonfiction is a true life bildungsroman...Often overlooked or relegated to mere footnotes in previous biographies, Parr highlights this short, influential period in King’s life, fleshing out the details of courses, teachers, mentors, pals, and dates, and presenting a fresh portrait of King, the “rookie preacher.” Publishers Weekly

"Concern about such whitewashing is part of what motivated Patrick Parr to write The Seminarian...Parr has done some impressive digging in the historical record and there is no doubt that scholars writing about King will find The Seminarian useful. The book should also attract students and faculty at seminaries and divinity schools, who will be interested not only in the particularities of King’s experience at Crozer but also in the fascinating picture that emerges of a mid-20th-century theological education."  The Christian Century

"Parr accounts more fully for Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminary education than has any complete biography of the civil rights icon ... A journalist rather than an academic, Parr writes appreciatively and even informally about his subject and drops a few gossipy tidbits, including King’s habitual plagiarism in his school papers and why his professors seldom noticed it." Booklist

Here also are a few interviews related to the book...

90.9 NPR Boston (April 3rd)

The Tallmadge Express (April 25th)

The Delaware County Daily Times (May 21st)

The Ellensburg Writing Group

Winter, 2008

There I was, surrounded by five other writers in a D&M coffee shop on a Wednesday night. They had all read my short story and were deciding who should speak first. We’d been meeting each Wednesday for the last few months, and I’d already given them a few short stories that had been put through the wringer.

We were all men between the ages of twenty-two and forty. John and I taught English as a Second Language at the local university in Ellensburg, Washington and both leaned toward a literary style. Dave wrote fantasy and taught at a community college. There was also Ben, who called himself a graduate student, but his non-fiction suggested that he mostly roamed free like a drifter. Matt and Jeremy were the other two, both being students at the university and wrote in multiple genres. Before this group, we were all writers working in isolation, free to write anything we wanted without direction. That kind of freedom is nice in moderation, but there is always that uncomfortable moment when you know you’ve taken your work as far as you can take it, and it was now time for it to get sliced, diced, tossed around, and, inevitably, judged.

“I’ll go first,” Ben said, plopping the story down on the table. “Is this true?”

I stayed quiet, because that was the only unspoken rule when getting critiqued: Don’t answer any questions or try and defend your work in any way. It was a good rule. That way the discussion about your story happens naturally, without interference from the creator. Still, what Ben said was music to my ears, because I had built the short story, about a strange ritual at the top of a volcano, to sound like non-fiction.

“The first paragraph is like one giant hook,” Dave chipped in. “It really works…but…”

Oh no. There it was. The dreaded three-letter word. B U T. It had found its way into rejection letters from agents, magazine editors, and publishers. The moment that word is spoken or read, that perfect crystal cage I’ve placed my story inside is shattered into a thousand pieces. I’d been conditioned to expect it, but (oh there it is again!) it always contained a tingle of pain, as if my story had just lost its innocence.

“It doesn’t feel like a story. It just feels like a bunch of scenes that fit together, but…I don’t know.”

“It’s a story,” John said to Dave, as I took a sip of coffee. “But it’s broken apart. Maybe on purpose?” John looked at me, but I shrugged and tried to keep a straight face.

“I kind of liked that,” Matt said, however I knew not to get hopeful again. Matt loved anything experimental or non-linear. “If it was just a conventional, A to B story, the ending would kind of lose its impact.”

“Yeah, about that ending…” Jeremy said, smiling. He threw the comment up like a softball waiting to get crushed by someone else.

Dave cracked it over the fence. “So does the main character want to kill himself, or is he trying to change?”

There was division on this answer. I’d left the ending ambiguous on purpose, so I’d expected there to be different opinions. What concerned me more was the general question that I’d asked almost everyone who had read a story I’d written: Were they satisfied? And so, I violated the unspoken rule just for a moment and asked them.

Their responses were No, No, kind of, yes and no, and Yeah, sure.

Not exactly what I was hoping for.

Each person had written comments, along with line edits, and at the end of the meeting, I took home five copies of a short story that had lost its newborn glow. I set it aside for a few weeks, too unconfident to mold it into something else entirely. I worked on other projects, and we continued to meet each Wednesday for the next three months. We learned each other’s styles, we saw stories transform and find new perspectives, and, most importantly, we enjoyed talking about this incredibly lonely profession. When summer came, life jumped in and broke up the group. Dave and his wife and two children moved to Minnesota, Matt graduated and moved west over the mountains, John got a job in Pennsylvania, Jeremy moved to Idaho, and Ben backpacked, somewhere.

Three years later, my wife and I found ourselves in Leysin, Switzerland. I’d written the story in 2007, the writing group edits happened in 2008, and after making a couple of my own changes, I’d submitted it to over twenty magazines. Unanimously rejected, of course. So in August of 2011, I found myself lazily going through a box of stories I’d gathered over the years, and, lo and behold, there were the five copies, paper clipped together. I had a free weekend, so I decided to take a deep breath and re-read all of their comments, this time with a clear mind.

I relived those Wednesday nights—the good times, the advice, the hours of conversation. I thought about Dave, John, Matt, Ben, and Jeremy, and I took pieces of all of their feedback and retooled the story (The title? Mihara). I sent the new story off to a magazine, and three months later, after years of rejection, it was accepted for publication. The longest story I had ever had published at the time. And it all happened because six guys decided to sit in a coffee shop every Wednesday and talk about fiction.