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- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The way we change Presidents in this country is by voting.

- A quartet is already a jawn, it'’s just The New Jawn.

- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I mean what other country sends comedians over to embedded military to make them feel better.

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

-_ It'’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it'’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato.

We are honored to be joined by Tamara Payne, who is the co-author of an extraordinary book.

It's actually a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Co-author of the book, "The Dead Are Arising, the Life of Malcolm X."

Ms. Payne, thank you so much for joining us.

- Pleasure to be here, Steve.

- Put in perspective the writing of this book by itself.

Before we got on the air we were talking about your late great dad, Les Payne.

Talk about his writing the book, you picking up the book and finishing, please.

- Well, actually, it started in 1990 and my father had asked me to join him on this project.

So he had already interviewed one of the brothers, actually both of the brothers, two of the brothers of Malcolm X.

And he originally did not want to write a book about Malcolm.

He felt that we knew everything we needed to know from Malcolm's speeches, cassette tapes, as well as the books, "Malcolm Speaks," and the autobiography.

But when he interviewed with one of the brothers, he just learned that there was these rich details about their childhood, being children of Earl and Louise Little, and growing up in that household, being his parents were followers of Marcus Garvey.

They were organizers in his UNIA organization.

And this rich details that we just did not know.

And it was an opportunity to get to know who Malcolm was as a person.

So this project became really a process of seeing Malcolm, who he is as a man, but also the world he was born into and later navigated as an adult.

So that was the purpose of it.

And I worked with my father for 30 years on this.

We worked together for 28 and I ended up finishing the book post his untimely passing.

- And for folks who wanna learn more about Les Payne, an extraordinary journalist, a giant in the world of media who I was honored to work with over at CBS 2 New York on a debate program, a Sunday round table, please look up Les Payne and then get a sense of why he mattered then and matters even more now.

So Ms. Payne, let me ask you this, in reading the book, couple things, I'm gonna ask about Malcolm and.

Malcolm and Dr. King, please talk about that relationship.

- Certainly.

They were phases to that relationship.

They didn't really have a relationship with one another.

They met once at a news conference later in Malcolm's life in 1964.

But earlier on, when Malcolm was a member of the Nation of Islam, he was a minister traveling, he wasn't really working with the Civil Rights Movement.

He was really talking against it.

And the media also saw the Nation of Islam kind of in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement leaders who were preaching non-violence.

And they felt that what Nation of Islam was preaching, which Nation of Islam was really preaching self-determination on the Black community, but also self-defense, especially when facing violent acts, which they were receiving, they were at the receiving end of.

So they were not about turning the other cheek.

And so that's kind of where you see the media just placing Malcolm and Martin against each other.

But later on in life, Malcolm, as he is learning more and traveling more and learning the insidiousness of racism in this country and how it's even moving into the institutions and already had with Jim Crow South laws, but also with the laws that even his family had to face with moving in places like Detroit, Michigan, where they can own land, but they can't live on it.

And so they were forced off the land.

And so this is institutionalized already.

And so he's looking at how do you face this and how do you deal with that?

And he's organizing, he's learning how to do that and he's growing and expanding his mind.

So later on when we find him traveling outside of this country, when he leaves the Nation of Islam and he's learning more even about racism outside, dealing with African countries and meeting with African leaders, he comes up with this idea of looking at our fight here and bringing in the idea of human rights to the Civil Rights Movement.

And Martin Luther King agrees with this, as do other civil rights leaders.

And that's where you see them coming kind of closer in their discussion points on how to deal with racism in America and the Voters Rights Act and so on and so forth.

But you also see King after Malcolm's passing- - In 1965.

- On issues that are like Malcolm X, sorry.

- Yeah, no, no, no, in 1965.

And obviously, at 39 years of age, Dr. King is assassinated.

- In 1968.

- '68.

You mentioned the Nation of Islam, let's get into it.

So the book is an, the detail of, and the horror of Malcolm X's life with Betty Shabazz, his wife.

and their daughters there, I think they had four daughters.

- While he was alive.

She was pregnant with twins when he was assassinated.

- So Malcolm X's break from the Nation of Islam, largely about, if I'm mistaken, you'll correct me, largely about Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X's concerns about what he perceived to be the hypocrisy of Elijah Muhammad, given the fact that Elijah Muhammad had relationships with young women who he impregnated, who worked with him, and Malcolm X thought it was against everything that the Nation of Islam was supposed to be about and he started to break from them and things became crazy after that and violent and dangerous, correct?

- Well, I'd like to go back a little bit.

It was a bit more nuanced, the separation.

And what we say in our book, Malcolm's upbringing, as his parents were followers of Marcus Garvey and self-determination and pride in being Black and organizing and building your own businesses in your community, Nation of Islam also had these traits and tenets in the organization, which was what was attractive- - That's right.

- To the Littles, the Little brothers, in particular, Wilfred and Philbert, who my father interviewed originally- - Malcolm's brothers.

- His brothers, right.

And Wilfred is the first one to join the Nation of Islam and he brings his other siblings along with them.

And so it is kind of a family's organized effort to bring Malcolm along.

Malcolm was in prison at that point.

And so he comes along and they do really well in organizing this organization.

I'm trying to be short and I'm moving fast to this, but let's fast forward to when things start to fall apart.

Malcolm is coming to understand that his ideology, his ideas of how to face racism, they're expanding, and they go beyond what Elijah Muhammad's beliefs are.

Elijah Muhammad's a lot more narrow, but he's building- - The blue-eyed devil, the white, blue-eyed devil, which at some point Malcolm X started to question, is that fair?

- Yeah, of course he questioned that at some point.

But when he first joined it, he didn't really believe that.

His brothers actually had to kind of really convince him that this is a point of the Nation of Islam, and a valid point.

But, when we talk about...

This is the language of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.

But when you see Malcolm coming outside, when he leaves the Nation, he's not using that language.

But what we see, what we're saying in our book, for example, we talk about, in 1960, there is the meeting with the Klan and Malcolm is doing as an ambassador for the Nation of Islam, along with Jeremiah Shabazz.

They meet with the Klan for the Nation of Islam under the orders of Elijah Muhammad.

And it's kind of in this situation where Malcolm really starts to see differences between him and Elijah Muhammad about how to conduct ourselves as Black people in this country and our survivability here in this country.

He doesn't believe in making deals with the Klan.

He has bad experiences with the Klan.

The Klan raided his family's homestead when they were in Omaha, Nebraska and he was in utero in his mother's belly.

And also, his belief that the Klan murdered his father.

So he doesn't want anything to do with the Klan, and here Elijah Muhammad's directing him to meet the Klan.

And he wants to have a fight with them and Elijah Muhammad's directing him to say, "What do they want?

We may be able to do something and work together.

We have our agenda, they have their agenda.

Let's see if we can help each other out."

And Malcolm has a big problem with it, and this is where we start to see the separation.

And it just kind of grows from there, too.

So it's not simply that Elijah Muhammad had- - It's very detailed, and get this book and find out more detail, but let me ask you this.

When Malcolm X decides to break from the Nation of Islam and create his own separate organization, two organizations, here's the question.

The book reveals that there was a very clear plan, a plot to assassinate Malcolm X.

And it's very detailed in the book that while he was in Harlem at Mosque Number 7, if I'm not mistaken, that there were those in Mosque Number 25 in Newark, New Jersey, my hometown, Brick City, I knew where that mosque was, that there were those who were in the Nation who went from Newark to that mosque to the Audubon Ballroom to assassinate Malcolm X.

Is that a fair assessment?

- Yeah, and let me just make it also clear.

Malcolm, he was forced out.

He was expelled from the Nation of Islam by Elijah Muhammad.

And also, Elijah Muhammad had handed down a direct order to have him assassinated, which is how they deal with their number one enemies.

So there's that kind of order.

It's cultural, it's how that organization operates.

As far as, yes, the assassination, we do go through extenuating detail of how this plan unfolded out of the mosque in Newark.

But beyond that, we also have two people who had served time for Malcolm's murder who were out of the Harlem Mosque who were not even on the scene, but they served over 20 years.

But they were exonerated in 2021.

And what we found and the reason why they were exonerated was because the Innocence Project Got involved.

and they came across this treasure trove of unredacted documents from the FBI and the New York Police Department.

Now, we interviewed the New York Police Department Gene Roberts, who was a agent for the New York police agent- - He was undercover for the police department.

- He infiltrated Malcolm's organization.

But this treasure trove also revealed that the FBI actually had a report saying that the killers were transported into New York.

And this report was dated the day after the assassination.

- Let me ask you this, I wish we had more time.

But Malcolm X is especially important now, Ms. Payne- - Absolutely.

- Given race in this country and race relations in this country and racial trauma that continues to go on.

He's more important now than ever before.

Please share.

- Well, Malcolm's language and the way he would talk about how do you deal with this system that's set up against you and how do you navigate it and how do you deal with the hatred that's set against you?

And while also how do you deal with the hatred that you are turning against yourself as a result of this?

And he speaks to that.

And young people pick him up for that.

They pick him up for how he talked about the system, how he talked about how we could use voting, the Black vote in this country.

He talked about this in the 1960s, 1964 and '5, about using the Black vote as a voting block.

And this was before the Voters' Rights Act was even passed.

And so he saw the power structure and how he analyzed what was going on in this country.

But also when we look at how he talks about the human rights struggle, and he really got this infiltrate.

You see Fannie Lou Hamer using that when she goes back and works with SNCC after visiting Africa and meeting Malcolm and her friendship, developing a fast friendship with Malcolm.

His language is still alive today, the way he uses, how do you read people, how do you read people who are coming at you with oppression, and then how do you confront it, how do you deal with it, but also, how do you see yourself and how do you walk through this world?

- Tamara Payne, together with her late father Les, who passed in 2018, if I'm not mistaken.

- Yeah.

- Too soon, an extraordinary journalist and made a great impact, is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

"The Dead Are Arising, the Life of Malcolm X."

Ms. Payne, I wanna thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

- We're now joined by Eileen Markey, who is the editor of a compelling, important book called, "Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the American Epidemic of Corruption" all about Wayne Barrett, an extraordinary journalist.

How you doing, Eileen?

- Great.

Great to see you.

- We're gonna go to a clip in just a little bit, an interview I did with Wayne Barrett back in 2007.

Tell everyone who Wayne Barrett was and why he mattered and still matters so much.

- Wayne Barrett was this fantastic, really legendary investigative reporter at "The Village Voice."

He wrote about New York City corruption matters, large and small, for 40 years.

Almost all of that time, a weekly column in "The Village Voice."

Early in his career, he covered Donald Trump.

A little bit later in his career, he covered Rudy Giuliani.

He came back to those characters again and again.

And so the book includes some of his early reporting and some of his later reporting on both of those two giant, giant New York City national figures, Rudy and Trump.

But week in and week out, Wayne Barrett covered the people who were stealing from the public till, the public officials who were not doing what they should do.

He was really, in this really classic, old-fashioned investigative journalism way, shedding the light of truth on the machinations of power.

And he did it with gusto and with joy in a really fantastic way, and he trained a bunch of young journalists so- - Including you.

- Yeah, including me.

Including me and like 100 other lucky, you know, college kids and post-college kids who got to work for him, you know, early in our careers.

And it set us up to really understand the value of serious investigative journalism.

- So I remember back in 2007 when I sat down with Wayne, the late great Wayne Barrett, and again, we've had other interviews where we talked about Donald Trump early on, but this is an interview from 2007 in which Wayne Barrett talks a little bit about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 from a perspective that you don't hear very often.

Here's that interview.

What's the issue with the command center?

- The command center is this $61 million operation that Giuliani created that was for these kinds of emergencies, but also for hurricanes, West Nile virus.

They had every conceivable telecommunications video.

It was the most high-powered command center in the United States, built by Giuliani.

- [Steve] So what's wrong with putting it-- - He puts it in 7 World Trade in the complex that's already been attacked, attacked in '93.

His own, the highest-ranking police officer in the police department, Lou Anemone, told us for the book that he did a vulnerability study of various buildings and locations in the city of New York that were the most vulnerable to terrorist attack.

This was number one.

- What do you think when you see that, Eileen?

- It's great to see our old friend in his glory again.

And I remember when Wayne was working on the Rudy 9/11 book and when he was uncovering that information, like, I remember going out to lunch with him.

Like, one of the things that was amazing and excellent about Barrett and really made him be the person he was and the powerful investigative journalist he was is that he was angry every time he discovered something that wasn't right.

He was angry for 40 years.

It kept him going.

And like, when he learned what he just said in that clip, he was like, "Can you believe it?"

There was never actually any cynicism, right?

Grizzly old reporter, but no cynicism.

Just like, "Can you believe it?

This is crazy!

He put it in the worst place to put a command center!"

And of course, you know, if you were to keep running that clip, what Barrett would say next is, Rudy put the bunker, the, you know, a high in the sky bunker where he did because he wanted to be able to walk there from City Hall because he wanted there to be cameras on him in the sense, in the case of an emergency.

And of course, I think most people in the US when they think about political response to 9/11 on the day of, first of all, obviously you think of the tragedy and the horror, but then when you think of government response, you think of Rudy Giuliani, and you think of Rudy Giuliani- - America's Mayor.

- With the baseball cap covered in the dust.

- Yes.

- And that's because he put his command center in the most stupid place to put it because he wanted to make sure that there were gonna be those pictures in the case of whatever it was, hurricane or flood or, yeah.

So I remember when Barrett was discovering that and just the outrage, but it's also like the level of reporting that gets you to talk to the guy who was Rudy's advisor on that and look at the plans.

And Barrett, you know, in that book there's really exhaustive analysis of all the things that were wrong with 7 World Trade because it was rushed, because it was improperly built.

- So what's interesting is that even though Rudy Giuliani gets a lot of credit for many of the things he did in connection with 9/11 with family members and being there and first responders, Wayne Barrett's argument was, okay, now let's talk about some other leadership decisions.

And ironically, you know, the book that Giuliani wrote about leadership, Wayne Barrett questions that.

Shift gears, Donald Trump.

One of the things about Wayne Barrett, and I have his Trump book in my library right next room over, he was obsessed in a good, healthy way in trying to understand Donald Trump.

He was writing about Trump early on in Trump's career.

Trump was constantly trying to co-opt Wayne Barrett, was he not?

- Yeah, yeah.

So Wayne wrote a series of three articles, like a three-piece profile of Donald Trump in the winter and spring of 1979.

Really, really early on, right?

It was really early in Barrett's career as actually finally a staff writer at "The Voice."

And they were, you know, several thousand word pieces.

We have several of them in the book.

Really tremendous, exhaustive investigation of, who is this brash, young real estate developer who's getting a lot of Page Six mentions, who's getting a lot of kind of celebrity coverage?

New York glitzy media was happy to cover the glamour of this young upstart real estate developer, and Barrett had no interest in fashion.

He had no interest in- - He wasn't impressed.

- Architecture, he wasn't impressed by the glitz.

But he said, "This guy's getting a lot of public subsidies.

This guy's getting a lot of deals bent in his direction."

And he comes straight out of the, his father comes straight out of the Brooklyn Queens clubhouses.

This is old-fashioned political corruption with this shiny, it's '79, but you think of it as like very '80s glitzy Manhattan sheen on it.

And so Barrett did what he does, is look really closely and read all the receipts.

And those pieces, those three pieces from the winter and spring of '79 are just, everything you needed to know about Donald Trump was written down there.

The court-documented racism, the inside deals, the corruption, everything that a lot of people somehow didn't really understand until 2016 or 2018.

It was all there.

Barrett had it dead to rights early on.

But when he was reporting that story, which you know, took like months and months and months to report those pieces, Trump knew that this young reporter was sniffing around and kind of talking to his business associates and working his way in to eventually interview Trump.

And Trump called him up one day and said, "I noticed that you and your wife live in like, a kind of rough and tumble neighborhood.

I can get you an apartment."

- In Brooklyn.

He was in Brooklyn.

- In Brooklyn.

Like, of out of political commitment, they lived in Ocean Hill-Brownsville because they'd both been involved in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school strike as young radicals aligned with Black radicals.

And they lived there 'cause they loved that neighborhood.

But Trump, like, how could he ever understand such an idea, such a political commitment.

So Trump was, "You guys live in a rough neighborhood.

I could get you an apartment in one of my new developments."

Yeah, which of course was a non-starter right?

Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah.

Wayne Barrett wrote about Donald Trump and understood Trump way before Trump was Trump now.

And it's not that much different.

It's so interesting.

Let me ask you this.

In the book, "Without Compromise" is a series of essays, articles, you know, features that were written by Wayne Barrett, important.

And search Wayne Barrett, you'll find out the whole range of important things about him.

Real quick on this, if you could, Eileen, what do you believe Wayne Barrett would think of those of us, most of us in the media today as it relates to the way we cover or don't cover corruption?

- I hate prognosticating, you know, people who are no longer with us, but what Wayne did in his work was, you know, it was always, can I find the paper?

Can I do the original interview?

Can I find the document?

Can I read the lawsuit?

Can I read the deposition?

Finding real facts.

So much of journalism today is opinion, is prognosticating, is just kind of hot air.

And I know with the rise of that kind of journalism, you know, going back 20, 30 years at this point, Wayne found that really frustrating.

One of Wayne's last like, kind of public events was he won an honor from "City Limits" in the fall of 2016.

And he was already very ill at that point, and he gave this fantastic kind of old lion speech really handing it, like really castigating the TV media and how it was covering that election.

It's so hard to remember back to the fall of 2016.

It seems like a couple lifetimes ago now with all the country's been through.

But he was so frustrated by the horse race coverage.

He was so frustrated by the, like, the lazy coverage, right?

And the willing- - Lazy.

- To like, jump on soundbites instead of doing the work of really chasing down facts.

Another famous thing Wayne always said is, "Readers come to you not for dissertation, but for discovery.

They come to you for facts, not for you to like, you know, bloviate.

It's, what are the facts that you've found?

How can you deliver those to me?

And how are the facts that the reporter finds able to strengthen democracy?"

Was really, he thought of himself as a detective for the people.

- That's right.

The book is "Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the American Epidemic of Corruption."

Wayne Barrett, edited by Eileen Markey.

Eileen, thank you so much.

We appreciate it.

- Great to be with you.

Thanks.

- And by the way, folks, get this book and read about the great late Wayne Barrett.

I'm Steve Adubato, that's Eileen Markey.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Seton Hall University.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

Delta Dental of New Jersey.

NJM Insurance Group.

Veolia, PSC.

The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

MD Advantage Insurance Company.

And by Atlantic Health System.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey Globe.

And by NJ.Com.

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