02. Malcolm X

Malcolm x was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, and spent much of his life fighting for equal rights for African Americans. Freedom for African Americans was supposed to have come with the end of the Civil War in 1865, but their struggle to attain equality persisted well into the next century. Despite freed slaves’ legal and political gains during the period just after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, they and their children suffered blows to their rights in the last decades of the nineteenth century. For example, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation, in the form of “separate but equal” public facilities, was constitutional. Legalized racism across America, especially in the South, continued through the first half of the twentieth century.

Suffering from discrimination, economic oppression, and violence at the hands of whites, African-American communities rallied around several different political leaders. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) encouraged blacks to gain political power by earning the respect of white people through hard work and humble conduct. W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963) demanded political empowerment and spiritual rebirth. Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) urged a return to Africa, contending that black people should rely upon their own unity and create their own means of empowerment. Garvey’s fiercely nationalist ideas influenced many African Americans, among them Earl Little, Malcolm X’s father, a preacher who spread Garvey’s ideas in his small Michigan community.

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Malcolm X gained national and international prominence. Often distancing himself from the movement’s leaders, he was perhaps the most controversial leader of the period. Malcolm X’s separatism and militancy contrasted with the desegregation efforts and nonviolent tactics of Martin Luther King, Jr. Historians credit Malcolm X as the spiritual father of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. At the time of Malcolm X’s murder in 1965, his views and commitments were undergoing a great change. He was demanding unity and self-determination for black people, whose struggle he viewed in the context of oppressed peoples all over the world. He was also abandoning the hard-line anti–white prejudice of his early years.

Film director Spike Lee released the movie Malcolm X in 1992, shortly after the infamous beating of black motorist Rodney King by white police officers:

Rodney King, the black motorist whose 1991 videotaped beating by Los Angeles police officers was the touchstone for one of the most destructive race riots in the U.S.'s history:

Read these texts (here and here) and answer the following questions:

1. Where was Malcolm X born?

2. Why did white people murder Earl Little?

3. How does Malcolm decide to support himself after he moves back to Boston?

4. Who converts Malcolm to Islam?

5. What is Malcolm’s official post in the Nation of Islam after helping establishing several new mosques?

6. What is Malcolm shocked to learn that Elijah Muhammad has done?

7. After breaking with the Nation of Islam, what organization does Malcolm X found?