Patrick Parr’s first book, The Seminarian, was about the young Martin Luther King Jr and his time in college near Chester, Pennsylvania. Parr’s new book, Malcolm Before X, is about the youthful experiences of another giant of the civil rights years, in Massachusetts and in another closed environment: prison.
Prison is “something where you don’t think there would be sources”, Parr says from Ohio, while visiting home from Japan, where he is a professor of writing at Lakeland University. “But it turns out that the Norfolk prison where Malcolm was had a biweekly newspaper that came out, and it details all of the goings on during the time that he is in prison, and he converts to Islam.”
