Malcolm X

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on the nineteenth of May 1925, the fourth of seven children of Earl Little — a Baptist minister and Garveyite organizer who led the local chapter of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association — and Louise Little, born in Grenada. The household carried a proud, defiant vision of Black dignity and self-determination that would echo through Malcolm's entire life.

That inheritance came at a heavy price. In 1931, when Malcolm was six, his father died in what officials ruled a streetcar accident; his mother and Malcolm believed he had been killed by white supremacists. In the years of hardship that followed, Louise was institutionalized and the children were dispersed among guardians. Malcolm's promise as a student was extinguished by a teacher who told him a Black boy could not aspire to be a lawyer, and he drifted into a hard life in Boston and Harlem that ended in a prison sentence in 1946.

In prison he found the Nation of Islam, shed the surname "Little" as a relic of slavery, and emerged as Malcolm X — a spellbinding minister whose discipline and unsparing eloquence made him the movement's most powerful voice. He built temples, drew thousands, and pressed a message of self-respect, self-defense, and Black independence that reached far beyond America's shores.

His pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 broadened his vision toward a human-rights struggle uniting people of African descent worldwide, and he took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He was assassinated in New York on the twenty-first of February 1965, at thirty-nine. May the honored voice that taught a people to stand upright be remembered with the dignity he gave to others.