MALCOLM X

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha in 1925. His father, a Garveyite preacher, died violently when Malcolm was six; his mother was later committed and the children scattered through foster care. A teacher told the top student in his class that being a lawyer was no realistic goal for a Black boy — he later called it the turning point.

He drifted into hustling in Boston and Harlem and was sentenced to prison at twenty. There he read through the prison library, copied out a dictionary by hand to build vocabulary, and joined the Nation of Islam, replacing the surname inherited from an enslaver with X.

Released in 1952, he built Nation of Islam temples across the country and became the movement's most visible speaker, growing membership from a few hundred into the tens of thousands. He argued for Black economic independence, self-defence rather than unconditional nonviolence, and pride in African descent, and he was ruthless about naming American hypocrisy on its own terms.

He broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964, made the hajj to Mecca, and travelled through Africa meeting heads of state. Seeing Muslims of every colour worshipping together moved him away from a blanket racial account of the enemy toward a structural one, and he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity to take the case to the United Nations as a human rights issue.

He was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on 21 February 1965, aged thirty-nine. Two of the men convicted of the killing were exonerated in 2021.