Malcolm X

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initial, radical stance as a "Black Nationalist" seeing evil in all whites, he came to think that blacks and whites could work together for international revolution, a belief that ultimately led to his murder in 1965 by rival Black Muslims. Though he came from the American ghetto, spoke for the American ghetto and directed his message first and foremost at the American ghetto, became a figure of world importance developing his ideas in relation to what was happening in the world around him.
Born Malcolm Little in Omaha,Nebraska in 1925, Malcolm was the red-haired son of a Baptist preacher and a half-white, West Indian mother. His father was also an organiser for Marcus Garvey's newly-formed "Universal Negro Improvement Association", which was dedicated to the cause of black-race purity and the return of the American Negroes to their ancestral African homelands. Malcolm's father, like Garvey, believed that the Negro could never achieve freedom, independence or self-respect in the ...

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gangs like the Klan. Indeed, as recently as 1980 several Klansmen who were actually filmed by T.V. cameras shooting to death half-a-dozen antiracists were set free by an all-white jury of southern bigots. Most American blacks lived lives of poverty and degradation, a situation which drove Malcolm's widowed mother into a lunatic asylum and forced him to live with his grown-up half-sister in Boston.

Arriving as a 'hick from the sticks', Malcolm picked up the nickname "homeboy" because he was so unused to the big city's ways. However, he soon got hip to urban life and quickly got himself a job as shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom. In those days most blacks, if they could get work ...

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