Born May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm Little saw the world through the eyes of a typical Black man in America. He saw very little opportunity, racism in various forms, and the street life as one of the very few options that would assist him in his pursuit of the American Dream. After a few short stays in Boston, Massachusetts and Flint, Michigan, Malcolm settled in Harlem where he bacame heavily involved in illegal activities such as gambling, robbery, pimping, and drug use. It didn’t take long for the streets to catch up with him and in 1946 he was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison for robbery. It was there that his metamorphosis into Malcolm X began.
He was introduced to the Nation of Islam by his brother Philbert in ’48 and he began transforming himself from a crook to a civilized man while behind bars. He first signed his name ‘Malcolm X’ in a prison letter in 1950. He was released from prison in ’52 and rose in the ranks of the NOI to its National Minister under the guidance of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Because of his popularity and powerful oratory ability, he expanded the Nation ten fold. The popularity also put him under the watchful eye of the government, in which they began to monitor his activities and was placed under surveillance by J.Edgar Hoover and his diabolical CointelPro tactics. It was through this plan that Malcolm was ostracized by Elijah Muhammad most of the Nation of Islam and set the stage for his tragic assassination on this date in the Audobon Ballroom in Harlem in 1965. Malcolm was not only a civil rights leader in America for the so called Negro, but he was a human rights advocate for Black people all over the globe and vowed to achieve freedom, justice, and equality for all “by any means neccessary”.
-ShaBe Allah(@KingPenStatus)
