March: Books 2 & 3

Though Malcolm X is perhaps the best-known figure of the civil rights era besides Martin Luther King Jr., conventional wisdom often holds the two men to be opposites, even rivals. Much of Malcolm’s life and career were in fact strikingly different from King’s. Born Malcolm Little in 1925, his father was murdered by a white mob when he was still a boy, and his mother battled with severe mental illness. He drifted into a life of petty crime, and in prison he encountered the writings of Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole in 1897), who taught that white people would never accept Black people on an equal standing, so they would have to carve out a nation for themselves within what they called the “American wilderness.” After leaving prison, Malcolm adopted the last name “X” to signify his unknown African name lost to the legacy of slavery, and he became the Nation of Islam’s ablest and best-known spokesmen. While his rhetoric was much more confrontational than King’s and even skirted toward justifications of violence—such as his famous speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which called for “freedom by any means necessary”—the two men’s differences were not as stark as is often portrayed. Both King and Malcolm recognized the value of the other, King as a valuable interlocutor with the white establishment and Malcolm as the logical alternative following a failure to provide Black Americans with their basic rights.

By 1964, Malcolm was at the height of his fame and influence, as he helped to secure the conversion of heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay to the Nation of Islam, whereupon he took the name Muhammad Ali. Around this same time, Malcolm began to question his role in the Nation after learning that Elijah Muhammad had fathered children with several assistants. After formally breaking with the Nation, he sought to build ties between the Black struggle for equality in America with revolutionary movements against colonialism, especially those in Africa. He also attended the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, which led him to revise his views about the impossibility of different races working together. He was just beginning his work with the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) when he was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem in February 1965. Members of the Nation were convicted in his murder, although there continues to be enormous controversy surrounding his assassination, and two of those convicted recently had their sentences overturned (one posthumously). Though Malcolm was once a figure of dread in white America, the decades since his death have featured a reassessment of his life and legacy, and he is now widely recognized as a major figure of Black pride and self-reliance.