Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough Read Free Book Online Page A

and King and most other black leaders seen on American television, Malcolm was a native of cold Northern slums, where blacks faced conditions every bit as daunting as those in the Jim Crow South: poverty, widespread unemployment, poor housing, and rampant police brutality. A black man arrested in Harlem in the 1960s could routinely expect a beating; when policemen killed a black citizen, there was rarely a successful prosecution. It was no accident that when underground groups began forming in 1970 and 1971, their targets were rarely slumlords or army barracks or politicians. They were almost always policemen.
    Focusing on these issues, Malcolm X had an exponentially greater influence on blacks than on whites. This was in large part because he never seriously engaged with the Southern civil rights movement (always the primary focus of white interest). He spent much of his career performing in a rhetorical theater that few whites even knew was open.
    Malcolm was born in Omaha in 1925, one of eight children. His father, Earl, was a Baptist lay preacher and an ardent member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; from an early age, Earl’s sense of black pride and self-reliance was instilled in Malcolm. Legend holds that theKlan harassed Earl Little for his views and forced the family to flee Omaha; they settled in Lansing, Michigan, in 1928.
    As Malcolm later told his story, he was among the better students at his junior high school but became withdrawn after a teacher told him that his idea of becoming a lawyer was not a “realistic goal for a nigger.” After eighth grade he moved to a half sister’s home in Boston; at seventeen he fled to Harlem, where he became a street hustler, dealing drugs, robbing stores, and working as a pimp. Back in Boston, he began burglarizing the homes of wealthy whites; arrested in 1946, he was sentenced to eight to ten years at the Charlestown State Prison.
    Like many blacks who would go underground in the 1970s, Malcolm was radicalized behind bars, poring over nationalist texts recommended by older inmates. It was his brother, Reginald, who drew him into an obscure sect called the Nation of Islam. The Nation had been founded in 1930 by a Detroit clothing salesman named Wallace D. Fard, who preached that blacks had ruled the earth six thousand years ago, until their destruction by a renegade black wizard named Yakub, who then created the white man—the “white devil,” in the Nation’s mythos; blacks, Fard prophesied, would destroy the white devil in a future apocalypse. Until his disappearance and presumed death in 1934, Fard imbued his disciples with a message of racial pride, economic equality, and personal discipline. Over the next twenty years his protégé, Elijah Muhammad, quietly built the Nation into a small but vocal group of clean-cut, impeccably dressed black separatists, including a paramilitary wing called the Fruit of Islam. Still, by 1952, when Malcolm emerged from prison, Muhammad had only a few hundred followers.
    Malcolm changed everything. Six-foot-three, handsome, intense, and bursting with charisma, he immediately became Muhammad’s protégé. At a storefront mosque in Detroit, on street corners, and later in Chicago and Boston, Malcolm mesmerized black crowds. His sermons, while ostensibly religious, were ringing anthems of black empowerment, pride, and self-defense, concepts many blacks had never heard aired in public. The Muslims dressed neatly and forbade drugs and alcohol. A mosque typically featured a blackboard Islamic flag with the words FREEDOM, JUSTICE AND EQUALITY beneath, alongside an American flag with the words CHRISTIANITY, SLAVERY, SUFFERING, AND DEATH . Men and women sat separately. There were typically no hymns, only an occasional soloist singing a Nation song, such as one written by Louis X (later Louis Farrakhan), “A White Man’s Heaven Is the Black Man’s Hell.” 1
    Malcolm’s fame grew when he took command of