radical black movement led to his violent murder
during which his badly beaten body, run over by
a streetcar, was almost cut in two. Although Mal-
colm was six, he recollects the nightmare of it all.
Malcolm records the tragic consequences caused
by the deterioration and eventual separation of his
family, including his mother’s mental breakdown
and the inevitable separation of his family, when he
and his siblings were placed in foster care. Despite
the ensuing instability in his young life, Malcolm
excelled educationally and even became president
and valedictorian of his eight-grade class. How-
ever, Malcolm’s aspiration to become a lawyer by
profession was discouraged by his English teacher,
who told him, “you have got to be realistic about
being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal
for a nigger. You need to think about something
you can be” (36).
After dropping out of school during his teen-
age years, Malcolm relocated to Boston to live with
his half sister, Ella. There, he was introduced to the
black middle class, which he rejected outright for
city life and particularly the black underclass life he
found in the Roxbury section of Boston. Employed
first as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland State Ball-
room—where he learned to lindy hop, conked his
hair, and was tutored by his new streetwise friend
Shorty—and later as a waiter on the railroad, trav-
eling the eastern corridor from Boston to New
York on the “Yankee Clipper,” he fell prey to and
embraced the underworld of criminality, drugs,
and burglary that dominated his Harlem environ-
ment. To immerse himself fully in his new lifestyle,
Malcolm, at age 17, moved from Boston to Harlem,
where his new surrogate fathers, including Charlie
Small and West Indian Archie, schooled him “in
such hustles as the numbers, pimping, con games
of many kinds, peddling dope, and thievery of all
sorts, including armed robbery” (83). Malcolm
confesses, “A roll of money was in my pocket. Every
day, I cleared at least fifty or sixty dollars. In those
days... this was a fortune to a seventeen-year-old
Negro. I felt, for the first time in my life, that great
feeling of free!” (99). Thus, hustling, Malcolm was
convinced at this stage of his life, provided an av-
enue through which he could challenge the world
that insisted on emasculating him. Sidone Smith
argues, “through criminality, he [Malcolm] recov-
ers his manhood”; he is no longer the “mastered
but the master” (79). After learning his lessons
well, Malcolm, whose street name was “Detroit
Red,” eventually landed in prison, having “sunk to
the very bottom of the American white man’s soci-
ety” (150), where he remained from 1946 to 1952.
While in prison Malcolm reeducated himself
by reading the dictionary and the works of the old
philosophers, “Occidental and Oriental,” and was
introduced to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad,
the leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Black
Muslims. According to Michael Eric Dyson, “Mal-
colm was drawn to the Nation of Islam because
of the character of its black nationalist practices
and beliefs: its peculiar gift for rehabilitating black
male prisoners; its strong emphasis on black pride,
history, culture, and unity; and its unblinking as-
sertion that white men were devils” (Dyson, 6).
Literacy, for Malcolm, as for FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
became his key to his desired freedom and trans-
formation. Malcolm writes, “I knew right there in
prison that reading had changed forever the course
of my life” (Autobiography, 179). Upon his release,
Malcolm, who at his conversion to Islam changed
his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X and
was personally mentored by Elijah Muhammad,
his new surrogate father, became the assistant
minister of the Detroit Temple Number One, a
minister of Harlem’s Temple Number Seven, and,
within a short time, the NOI’s most visible leader
and powerful spokesperson, preaching to the black
masses across the nation that “Our enemy is the
white man!” (251). This transformation began the
second phase of his life.
Distraught when a personal rift between him
and Elijah Muhammad—over Muhammad’s al-
leged extramarital affairs, as well as their growing
political differences—led to his ouster and silenc-
ing, Malcolm took the requisite pilgrimage, the
Hajj, to the Muslims’ holy city, Mecca. This spiri-
tual journey initiated the final phase of Malcolm’s
life; he became El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz. In Mecca,
where he had witnessed “The people of all races,
color coming together as one!” (338), Malcolm
discovered the true brotherhood of humankind
as taught by orthodox Islam, which encouragesAutobiography of Malcolm X, The 23