Malcolm X: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · Omaha, Lansing, and What Was Left

A family taken apart before he was fifteen

1925 – 1941 · Omaha · Lansing · Michigan

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925. His father Earl was a Baptist preacher and an organiser for Marcus Garvey's movement, which argued that black Americans should build their own institutions and look to Africa. The family moved because of threats and because their house in Lansing was burned down.

In 1931 Earl Little was found dying beside a streetcar track. The police recorded an accident. His family were certain he had been killed by white supremacists, and the insurance company refused to pay the larger of his two policies on the grounds that his death was suicide, which left his widow with eight children and almost nothing.

Louise Little held the household together for eight years under the pressure of welfare officials who questioned her competence, and in 1939 she was committed to the state mental hospital at Kalamazoo, where she remained for twenty-four years. The children were distributed among foster homes.

Malcolm was clever and did well at school, and in the eighth grade he told a favourite teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer. He recorded in his autobiography what the teacher said in reply: that it was not a realistic goal for somebody like him, and that he should think about carpentry. He left school shortly afterwards and did not go back.

Everything he argued later begins in this chapter. He had watched an institution refuse to pay, an agency take his mother, and a school tell a clever boy what he was for.

Why this matters

Malcolm X's later argument that American institutions were designed to fail black Americans was, first of all, a description of what had happened to his own family.

A father on a track, a mother in a hospital, a teacher's advice. What would you ask him?

Ask Malcolm

• “What did your father's Garveyism give you before you lost him?”
• “What did the insurance company's refusal teach you?”
• “How much of what happened to your mother was the welfare system?”
• “Why did that teacher's answer stay with you for twenty years?”
• “Would you have become a lawyer if you had been encouraged?”

Chapter 2 · The Prison Library

Copying out a dictionary, one page at a time

1941 – 1952 · Boston · Harlem · Charlestown State Prison · Norfolk

He went to Boston at fifteen, then to Harlem, and spent his late teens and early twenties in the numbers rackets, hustling and burglary, under the name Detroit Red. In 1946, at twenty, he was arrested for a series of burglaries and sentenced to eight to ten years — a sentence considerably longer than was usual, which he attributed to the fact that white women had been involved in the thefts.

In prison his brothers wrote to him about the Nation of Islam, a movement led by Elijah Muhammad which taught that black Americans were a chosen people, that white society was irredeemable, and that separation rather than integration was the goal. He converted.

What he did next is the part worth studying. He found that he could not write the letters he wanted to write, so he borrowed a dictionary and copied it out by hand — every word on every page, then the next page — and read the copies back to himself. He read constantly in the prison library at Norfolk, which had an unusually good collection, and took part in its debating programme.

He left prison in 1952 as a self-educated man with a formidable memory and a debating technique built on definitions.

He also dropped the surname Little and took X, on the Nation's teaching that it stood for the African family name that slavery had taken away and that no record could now supply.

Why this matters

The most feared debater in American public life taught himself to read and argue in a prison cell by copying out a dictionary.

A dictionary copied by hand. What would you ask him?

Ask Malcolm

• “Why copy out a whole dictionary rather than just read it?”
• “What did the Nation of Islam offer that nothing else had?”
• “What does the X stand for, and why keep it?”
• “Was your sentence longer than it should have been?”
• “What did the prison debating programme give you?”

Chapter 3 · Temple Number Seven

Building a movement, and being the reason people feared it

1952 – 1963 · Detroit · Boston · Harlem

Malcolm X became a minister of the Nation of Islam and was given Temple Number Seven in Harlem. Over about a decade the Nation grew from a few hundred members to tens of thousands, and the great majority of that growth is attributed to him: he recruited on street corners, in prisons and in bars, and he founded the newspaper Muhammad Speaks.

His argument in these years was uncompromising. Integration was a distraction; black Americans should build their own businesses, schools and institutions; non-violence was a demand made of the victim; and the Christianity offered to black Americans was the religion of the people who had enslaved them. He described what he was doing as telling black people the truth about themselves, and his audiences were largely people the mainstream civil rights movement had not reached.

In 1959 a television documentary called The Hate That Hate Produced introduced the Nation to white America and made him nationally notorious. He became the man television called when it wanted somebody to argue against Martin Luther King, and he was extremely good at it.

The difference between the two men in these years was real and it was not simply about violence. King wanted the American promise honoured. Malcolm X did not believe there was a promise. He said repeatedly that he was not against self-defence, which is not the same as advocating attack, and the distinction was routinely collapsed by people reporting him.

Why this matters

The disagreement between Malcolm X and the mainstream movement was about whether America could be reformed, not simply about tactics.

A movement built on street corners. What would you ask him?

Ask Malcolm

• “Who were you reaching that the churches were not?”
• “What is the difference between self-defence and violence?”
• “Why did you think integration was the wrong goal?”
• “What did you actually think of Martin Luther King?”
• “Did television make you famous or make you a caricature?”

Chapter 4 · The Break, and Mecca

A year in which almost everything changed

1963 – 1964 · Chicago · Mecca · Ghana · Harlem

The break with the Nation came from two directions. Malcolm X had learned that Elijah Muhammad, who preached strict personal morality, had fathered children with several of his young secretaries, and he could not reconcile it. And in December 1963, asked about the assassination of President Kennedy, he said that it was a case of the chickens coming home to roost — that a country which had tolerated violence abroad and at home should not be surprised. The Nation suspended him from speaking, and by March 1964 he had left.

In April he made the hajj to Mecca. What he found there changed his position on the central question of his adult life: he prayed alongside Muslims of every colour, including white Europeans, and wrote home that he had seen a brotherhood he had believed did not exist. He took the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

He travelled through Africa and the Middle East, met heads of state, and began arguing a different case: that the treatment of black Americans was a human rights question rather than a civil rights one, and should be taken to the United Nations rather than to Congress. He founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity on that basis.

He did not become a integrationist and he did not renounce black nationalism. What changed was the claim that white people were irredeemable as such, and he said so publicly, which made him enemies in the movement he had built.

Why this matters

The hajj changed the part of his argument that was about race as such, and left the part that was about power intact.

A pilgrimage that altered a public position. What would you ask him?

Ask Malcolm

• “What exactly changed for you at Mecca?”
• “Why did the remark about the Kennedy assassination cost you so much?”
• “Why take the case to the United Nations rather than to Congress?”
• “Did leaving the Nation of Islam feel like a loss?”
• “What did African leaders tell you that Americans had not?”

Chapter 5 · The Audubon Ballroom

A death, a book, and a case reopened in 2021

1965 – now · Harlem · New York

In the last year of his life Malcolm X was under continuous threat. His house in Queens was firebombed in February 1965 with his family inside. He told interviewers that he did not expect to live long and that he had been marked by the organisation he had left.

On 21 February 1965 he was shot at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, at the start of a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, in front of his wife and daughters. He was thirty-nine.

Three men were convicted. Two of them, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, maintained their innocence throughout, and in November 2021 their convictions were vacated after a joint re-investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney and defence lawyers found that evidence pointing to their innocence — including material held by the FBI and the police — had not been disclosed at trial. Aziz had spent twenty years in prison and Islam died before he was cleared. What is now settled is that the case was not properly investigated; who was responsible beyond the one man who admitted firing is not.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley from interviews and published months after his death, became one of the most widely read American books of the century. It is also a made object — Haley shaped it, and its final chapters were written after the subject had already moved past the positions they describe — and it should be read as a source with an author rather than as a transcript.

Why this matters

Two of the three men convicted of the murder were exonerated fifty-six years later, and the book that made him famous was shaped by a collaborator with his own view.

A ballroom, a book, and a case reopened. What would you ask him?

Ask Malcolm

• “Did you expect to be killed?”
• “What did you want the Organization of Afro-American Unity to become?”
• “How much of the Autobiography is yours and how much is Haley's?”
• “What should have been investigated in 1965 and was not?”
• “Which of your positions do you most want people to have understood?”

What Malcolm changed

Malcolm X gave the movement a second argument: that black Americans should organise around their own institutions, defend themselves, and treat their position as a question of power rather than of persuasion. Black Power, the campus movements of the later 1960s and a great deal of what followed drew on it directly. He also changed his mind in public, repeatedly and at cost, which is the least imitated and most instructive thing about him.

A debate that continues

Did Malcolm X's argument advance the movement by widening what could be demanded, or did it make the mainstream movement's gains harder by giving opponents something to point at? Both cases have been argued seriously since 1965.

Keep exploring — ask Malcolm

• “Is it a strength or a weakness in a leader to change position publicly?”
• “What is the difference between demanding rights and demanding power?”
• “How should a historian use an autobiography written with a collaborator?”

Related lives

• Martin Luther King Jr. — Reverend · Nobel Laureate · Prophet
• Fannie Lou Hamer — Sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired
• Rosa Parks — Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Related themes

Black Power · The civil rights movement · Decolonisation and the Cold War