While I was still a baby Malcolm he moved his family to Lansing, Michigan. When he was six years old, his father, the Reverend Earl Little, a Baptist minister and former supporter of the first black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, died after being hit by a streetcar, possibly the victim of murder by white people. The surviving family was so poor that the mother of MalcolmLouise Little turned to cooking dandelion leaves from the street to feed her children. After being committed to an asylum in 1939, Malcolm and his siblings were sent to foster homes or to live with relatives.
Malcolm He excelled in school, but after one of his eighth-grade teachers told him that he should become a carpenter instead of a lawyer, he lost interest and soon finished his formal education. During her rebellious youth, she moved from the Michigan State Detention Center, a children’s home in Mason, Michigan, to the Roxbury section of Boston to live with an older half-sister, Ella, from her father’s first marriage. There, during his adolescence he became involved in minor criminal activities. Known as “Detroit Red“Because of the reddish tint of his hair, he became a street con man, drug dealer and leader of a gang of robbers in Roxbury and Harlem (in New York City).
While in prison for robbery from 1946 to 1952, he underwent a conversion that eventually led to him joining the Nation of Islam, an African-American movement that combined elements of Islam with black nationalism. His decision to join Islam was also influenced by discussions with his brother Reginald, who had become a member in Detroit and was imprisoned with Malcolm in the Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts in 1948. Malcolm he quit smoking and gambling and refused to eat pork in compliance with the Nation’s dietary restrictions. To educate himself, he spent many hours reading books in the prison library, even memorizing a dictionary. He also sharpened his forensic skills by participating in debate classes. Following the tradition of the Nation, he replaced his surname, “Little”, with an “X”, a custom among followers of the Nation of Islam who considered that their surnames had originated with white slaveholders.
After being released from prison, Malcolm he helped lead the Nation of Islam during the period of its greatest growth and influence. He met Elijah Muhammad in Chicago in 1952 and then began organizing temples for the Nation in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and in southern cities. He founded the newspaper of the Nation, Muhammad speaks, which he printed in the basement of his home, and began the practice of requiring every male member of the Nation to sell an assigned number of newspapers on the street as a recruiting and fundraising technique. He also articulated the Nation’s racial doctrines about the inherent evil of whites and the natural superiority of blacks.
Malcolm he rose rapidly to become the minister of Boston Temple No. 11, which he himself founded; later he was rewarded with the ministerial position of Temple No. 7 in Harlem, the largest and most prestigious temple in the Nation after the Chicago headquarters. In recognition of his talent and ability, Elijah Muhammad, who had a special affection for him, appointed him National Representative of the Nation of Islam, second in rank after Muhammad himself.
In 1963 there were deep tensions between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad on the political direction of the Nation. Malcolm he urged the Nation to become more active in widespread civil rights protests rather than being a critic on the sidelines. Muhammad’s violations of the Nation’s moral code further worsened his relations with Malcolm, who was devastated when he learned that his mentor had had children with six of his personal secretaries, two of whom filed paternity suits and made the matter public. Malcolm brought additional bad publicity to the Nation when he publicly declared that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was an example of “Chickens come home to rest“A violent society that suffers the consequences of violence. In response to the outrage caused by this statement, Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm to observe a period of silence of 90 days, and the rupture between the two leaders became permanent.
Malcolm He left the Nation in March 1964 and in the following month founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. During his pilgrimage to Mecca that same year, he underwent a second conversion and embraced Sunni Islam, adopting the Muslim name. el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.
Renouncing the separatist beliefs of the Nation, he affirmed that the solution to the racial problems in the United States lay in orthodox Islam. On the second of two visits to Africa in 1964, he addressed the Organization of African Unity (known as the African Union since 2002), an intergovernmental group established to promote African unity, international cooperation and economic development. In 1965 he founded the Organization for African American Unity as a secular vehicle to internationalize the plight of black Americans and make a common cause with the people of the developing world: to move from civil rights to human rights.
The growing hostility between Malcolm and the Nation provoked death threats and outright violence against him. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated while lecturing at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem; three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of the murder. He is survived by his wife, Betty Shabazz, whom he married in 1958, and six daughters. His martyrdom, ideas, and speeches contributed to the development of black nationalist ideology and the Black Power movement and helped popularize the values of autonomy and independence among African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.