 The Dead Are Rising, The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne, narrated by Dionne Graham. Introduction by Tamara Payne When my father Les Payne began his research in 1990 for The Dead Are Rising, Malcolm X was very much alive in the consciousness of the black community. Coming down Harlem's 125th Street, you would hear Malcolm's emphatic voice resounding from the speakers of sidewalk vendors, selling his speeches, and you would see his continence emblazoned on t-shirts. This generation of hip-hop embraced Malcolm X because he spoke directly to them. His messages provided clear direct analyses of what was happening around them in their communities. Out by point, he outlined how state-sanctioned racism is not new, but a continuation of the coordinated destruction of black people in America. Malcolm changed the way they viewed themselves and gave voice to their struggles. Numerous rappers and activists quoted Malcolm in their lyrics and interviews on radio and television. Malcolm also changed the way Les Payne viewed himself. As a college student in 1963, he had heard Malcolm speak in Hartford, Connecticut. On that June night, my father came face-to-face with his own self-loathing. Malcolm X addressed the race issue head-on. Now, I know you don't want to be called black, he said. You want to be called Negro. But what does Negro mean except black in Spanish? So what you're saying is, it's okay to call me black in Spanish, but don't call me black in English. Later, in the night I stopped being a Negro, an essay that was first published in a collection titled When Race Becomes Real, Payne wrote that he had entered Bushnell Hall as a Negro with a capital N and wandered out into the parking lot as a black man. Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Payne had moved to Hartford with his mother and two brothers at age 12. I'd never met a white person, South or North, who did not feel comfortably superior to every Negro, no matter their rank or station. Conversely, no Negro I'd met or heard of had ever felt truly equal to whites. For all the polemical posturing, not even Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., or the great Richard Wright, with all his crossed up feelings, had liberated themselves from the poison weed of black self-loathing with its deeply entangled roots in the psyche. The lightning strike of Malcolm's sword released the conditioned sense of Negro inferiority that was housed in the college junior psyche. Hearing Malcolm's piercing analysis forced him to think about the Jim Crow South he was born into, remembering how he was told that Negroes were just as good as whites. But seeing Negroes rise only to janitors, cooks, cotton pickers, not to landlords or owners of lumber yards. By the end of the lecture, Payne was irrevocably changed. Whites were no longer superior, blacks were no longer inferior, he wrote. Always inspired by Malcolm X, Payne would reread his dog ear copy of the autobiography every five years. So he was naturally curious when his high school buddy Walter O. Evans, who had become a successful surgeon in Detroit, introduced him to Filbert Little, one of Malcolm X's brothers. Payne discussed this meeting with Gil Noble, a friend and fellow journalist who at the time hosted the weekly Sunday show, Like It Is, on W-A-B-C-T-V in New York. In addition to his work as a renowned broadcaster, Noble was an admirer of Malcolm X. Every year he dedicated episodes of Like It Is to the life and assassination of Malcolm X. Noble suggested that Payne also meet Wilfrid Little, Malcolm's oldest brother and best friend. At the time, Payne was an editor at Newsday, a daily newspaper on Long Island. He had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 as part of a reporting team investigating the international flow of heroin from the poppy fields of Turkey, through the French connection and into the veins of New York drug addicts. He was renowned for his investigative persistence and a skill in obtaining the truth from reluctant sources. As he often told his three children, Jamal Haley and myself, he could not abide the phrase, we may never know. Sample complete, ready to continue?