Photo by Library of Congress

“Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood.”

– Ossie Davis

“Treat me like a man, or kill me.”

– Malcolm X [1]

It’s been sixty-one years since Malcolm X was gunned down in a hail of bullets at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City as he was starting to give a speech. The week before, his house had been firebombed, and days before that the French government had refused to allow him into the country to fulfill a speaking engagement, apparently fearing the assassination might take place on French soil.

Malcolm fully expected these attempts on his life, which grew out of circumstances surrounding his break with the Nation of Islam the previous year. U.S. intelligence had infiltrated his security team, and at the time of his death Malcolm recognized that though the assassination plot originated with the corrupt advisers around Elijah Muhammad in the Nation of Islam, by the end the circle of intrigue had broadened considerably and the U.S. government was certainly involved.

Malcolm was undergoing rapid transformation in the final year of his life. He renounced the aberrant strand of Islam favored by Elijah Muhammad, shed his view that white people could do nothing to end racism, and apologized for having repeatedly called civil rights leaders “Toms” and other degrading nicknames. He lectured and traveled widely, met and talked with important leaders of national liberation movements abroad, and embraced a broad, internationalist vision focused on delivering freedom and justice to all peoples regardless of race. But he stuck to his view that black unity in the United States was a prerequisite to any constructive change in American race relations.

Though often portrayed as a violent extremist (he insisted on self-defense against racist attacks), he was actually quite conservative in his habits (he didn’t drink, smoke, gamble, or swear), and was never known to have laid a hand on anyone. James Baldwin considered him one of the gentlest men he ever met, and when Baldwin was once called on to referee a debate between Malcolm and a young civil rights activist – on the assumption that Malcolm would overpower the youth – Baldwin discovered that he was not at all needed. Malcolm treated the youngster with tender solicitude, smiling indulgently and gently correcting his view that being born in the U.S. was all it took to be a full U.S. citizen: “Now, brother, if a cat has kittens in the oven, does that make them biscuits?”[2]

The same gentleness was evident in Malcolm’s home life. In a 1992 interview his daughter Attalah remembered him as a firm father, a mushily romantic husband, and a gentle and funny presence sparking frequent laughter throughout the house. Though work required he be away for long periods, he managed to be present even when he was absent by hiding little surprises around the house for his daughters. Then when he was on the road, he would send letters home telling them to go into a certain room and look in a special place to find a treat he had left for them.[3]

How did such a man gain a reputation for uncontrolled rage and violence? Easy. He was born in a deeply racist country.

He grew up broke and hungry in a family of eight. “We were so hungry we were dizzy,” he recalled years later.[4] His father Earl died when Malcolm was six, run over by a rail car, and his mother was slowly driven insane trying to raise eight children alone after her husband’s life insurance company refused to honor the $10,000 policy it had issued him.[5]

Disciples of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm’s parents were proud and rebellious, living isolated from whites but refusing to reside in officially segregated housing. Malcolm’s father took his son along on trips to secret, private homes to hear the “Back To Africa” gospel. This early public exposure with its heavy emphasis on black racial pride prepared Malcolm for the speaker’s platform and the barricades years later,[6] but he took a very circuitous route before re-connecting with Garvey’s ideas and fashioning them into his life’s work and legacy after years of evasive wandering.[7]

Born in Omaha, raised in Lansing, the flash of Michigan street life claimed Malcolm by age twelve. Strutting into town with a fistful of reefers, he was soon seen as a rising star on the streets. Bold to the point of recklessness, he openly challenged authority, once telling a police officer who put a gun to his head to, “Go ahead! Pull the trigger, Whitey.”[8]Kids who knew Malcolm at the time predicted a bleak future for him – jail and an early grave.[9]

Malcolm’s fascination for the streets deepened at fifteen, when he spent a summer in Boston, where he was exhilarated by the neon lights, fancy cars, and late-night partying.[10]Though he briefly returned to Michigan, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the fact that blacks from New York and Boston always had a hustle going that gave them money or kept them in clothes, a far better fate than being a ditch-digger or a janitor, which was the limit of realistic black aspirations in the Mid-West. Boston soon proved to be his most natural habitat, a place where he could live out his desire to survive by his wits.[11]

Living with his half-sister Ella on “Sugar Hill,” Malcolm loathed the status-conscious blacks he encountered there, preferring to hang out in the “valley” below with what he called “his people”:  pool sharks, pimps, hustlers, and hard-working blacks pursuing snatches of weekend escapism. They were his entire world, along with the pawnshops, bars, pool halls, cheap restaurants, walk-up flats, barbershops, beauty salons, and storefront churches that surrounded........

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