. he did not like them
Explanation:
1. His father may have been killed by white supremacists.
As vocal supporters of pan-African leader Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X’s parents faced constant threats from white supremacists. Just before Malcolm’s birth, for example, armed Ku Klux Klansmen rode out to their house in Omaha, Nebraska, and shattered all their windows. Another of their homes burned down a few years later, apparently at the hands of the Black Legion, a Klan splinter group. Even worse, when Malcolm was 6 years old, his father went out one evening to collect a debt, only to be hit by a streetcar and mortally wounded. Though the authorities ruled his death an accident, African Americans in town believed the Black Legion had beat him and placed him on the tracks to be run over. To this day, no one knows for sure. Malcolm also lost other relatives to violence, including an uncle he said was lynched by whites.
2. He moved around constantly as a youth.
Despite being born in Omaha, Malcolm Little (as he was known then) spent very little time there before his family uprooted, first to Milwaukee, then to East Chicago, Indiana, and finally to Lansing, Michigan, where his father would be killed. Not long afterwards, Malcolm’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was shipped off to a mental institution, prompting welfare officials to split Malcolm and his now-parentless siblings apart. At first, Malcolm stayed with neighbors.
He was then sent to a juvenile detention home in Mason, Michigan, about 10 miles south of Lansing, where he attended a nearly all-white junior high. Though academically near the top of his class, an English teacher purportedly told him that being a lawyer was “no realistic goal for a n.” Fed up, he went at age 15 to live with his half-sister in Boston, never to attend school again. A railroad job instilled in him a fondness for travel, and by age 17 he was residing in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem.
READ MORE: The Explosive Chapter Left Out of Malcolm X's Autobiography
3. He spent six-and-a-half years in jail.
A 1944 police mug shot of Malcolm X, then known as Malcolm Little. (Credit: Time Life Pictures/Timepix/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
As early as age 9, with his family in dire economic straits, Malcolm began robbing food from stores in Lansing. Later on, in Boston and New York, he got involved in drug dealing, gambling and prostitution rackets, spending much of his time in seedy nightclubs. At age 19, he was arrested for the first time for allegedly stealing and pawning his half-sister’s fur coat. A second arrest followed for allegedly mugging an acquaintance at gunpoint, and a third arrest came after he burglarized a series of Boston-area homes. Sentenced to state prison in 1946, his cellblock mates called him “Satan” for his habit of pacing around and muttering curses at God and the Bible.
Soon after, however, he settled down and began voraciously devouring works of history—the horrors of slavery made a particular impression on him—as well as virtually all other nonfiction he could get his hands on. He even tried memorizing the dictionary. “In every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk,” Malcolm wrote in his autobiography. “You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge.” Meanwhile, following the example of his siblings, he joined the Nation of Islam and struck up a correspondence with its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Like Garvey, the Nation of Islam preached black self-reliance and empowerment. In a far cry from traditional Islam, it also taught that whites were a race of “blue-eyed devils” created millenniums ago by an evil scientist.
.BY JESSE GREENSPAN
