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. 

“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

“Parr focuses on the life of my father, and on how his heart and mind changed during his six and a half years in Massachusetts prisons. . . . In Malcolm Before X, Parr, through prison files, archival prison newspapers and microfilm, gets us as close as we can to my father’s years behind bars.”—Ilyasah Shabazz, author of Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X

“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