Malcolm X, one of the most influential African American leaders of the 20th Century, was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19 Shortly after Malcolm was born the family moved to Lansing, Michigan. Earl Little his father joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) where he publicly advocated black nationalist beliefs, prompting the local white supremacist Black Legion to set fire to their home. Little was killed by a streetcar in 1931. Authorities ruled it a suicide but the family believed he was killed by white supremacists.

Malcolm dropped out of high school after a teacher ridiculed his aspirations to become a lawyer. Malcolm worked odd jobs in Boston and then moved to Harlem in 1943 where he drifted into a life of “hustling.” He avoided the draft in World War II by declaring his intent to organize black soldiers to attack whites which led to his classification as “mentally disqualified for military service.”

Malcolm was arrested for burglary in Boston in 1946 and received a ten year prison sentence. There he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI). Upon his parole in 1952, Malcolm was called to Chicago, Illinois by NOI leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Like other converts, he changed his surname to “X,” symbolizing, he said, the rejection of “slave names” and his inability to claim his ancestral African name.

Recognizing his promise as a speaker and organizer for the Nation of Islam, Muhammad sent Malcolm to Boston and then in 1954 to Temple Number Seven in Harlem. Although New York’s one million blacks comprised the largest African American urban population in the United States, Malcolm noted that “there weren’t enough Muslims to fill a city bus. “Fishing” in Christian storefront churches and at competing black nationalist meetings, Malcolm built up the membership of Temple Seven. He also met his future wife, Sister Betty X, a nursing student who joined the temple in 1956.

Malcolm X quickly became a national public figure in July 1959 when CBS aired Mike Wallace’s expose on the NOI, “The Hate That Hate Produced.” This documentary revealed the views of the NOI, of which Malcolm was the principal spokesperson and showed those views to be in sharp contrast to those of most well-known African American leaders of the time.

Soon, however, Malcolm was increasingly frustrated by the NOI’s bureaucratic structure and refusal to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. His November 1963 speech in Detroit, “Message to the Grass Roots,” a bold attack on racism and a call for black unity, foreshadowed the split with his spiritual mentor, Elijah Muhammad. However, Malcolm on December 1 was suspended from the NOI for his comments in responce to JFK Death, “chickens coming home to roost” which to Muslims meant that Allah was punishing white America for crimes against black people.

Malcolm used the suspension to announce on March 8, 1964, his break with the NOI and his creation of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. Three months later he formed a strictly political group, called the Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU) which was roughly patterned after the Organization of African Unity (OAU).

His dramatic political transformation was revealed when he spoke to the Militant Labor Forum of the Socialist Worker’s Party. By April 1964, while speaking at a CORE rally in Cleveland, Ohio, Malcolm gave his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech in which he described black Americans as “victims of democracy.”

Malcolm traveled to Africa and the Middle East in late Spring 1964 and was received like a visiting head of state in many countries including Egypt, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ghana. While there, Malcolm made his hajj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia and added El-Hajj to his official NOI name Malik El-Shabazz.

The transformed Malcolm reiterated these views when he addressed an OAAU rally in New York, declaring for a pan-African struggle “by any means necessary.” Malcolm spent six months in Africa in 1964 in an unsuccessful attempt to get international support for a United Nations investigation of human rights violations of Afro Americans in the United States. Upon his return to New York, his home was firebombed. Events continued to spiral downward and on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

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  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    22 hours ago

    Not one of those has a close language in the group you got going lol. At least since you picked up French and wanted to learn Spanish you’d have a headstart. But Korean is a language isolate, and Japanese, Russian, Mandarin, French have almost nothing to do with each other. This is almost like wanting to learn Finnish, Hungarian, Basque and Haida or something lol

    • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      13 hours ago

      Korean is a language isolate, but from experience learning Korean will help you with Japanese and vice versa. The basic grammar is incredibly similar and they’ve got a lot of shared Sinitic vocabulary, although it might take a little getting used to the sound correspondences since Korean has more phonemes and more complex syllables than Japanese[1]. At the broadest level, both languages have subject-object-verb order and are agglutinative—both quite different from English, but you only have to get used to it once. Topic particles 은/는/は, subject 을/를/を and object 가/이/が particles, and possessive particles 의/の all work nearly identically, and both languages have a propensity for noun phrases with tons of modifiers stacked on top. Even something as specific as how (and when) to modify a noun to become “[noun]-like” 같은/みたい works similarly. Anyway, I could just keep listing things, but the point is that while they’re not related on paper, there’s a reason they were once theorized to be in the same language family.

      But for everything else…yeeeeeah, that’s a tall order. You get the same shared Sinitic vocab advantage with Chinese, but grammatically and phonologically it’s in another universe compared to Japanese and Korean. And after being coddled by the simple conjugation of Japanese (no verb agreement! No grammatical gender! No cases! Only two irregular verbs!), the mere idea of tackling Russian with its six cases makes me want to cry.

      1. Take these two cognates: 비술 bi-sul = 美術 bi-jutsu (“(fine) art”), 수줄 su-jul = 手術 shu-jutsu (surgery). The pronunciation of 術 (“technique; skill; art”) is pretty different in both languages, but it’s consistent across compounds. You can use this knowledge to guess words in both directions. Also, fun fact: 비술/美術 is formed and pronounced like any normal Sinitic word, but it’s actually a word that was coined in Japan during the Meiji Restoration and then seamlessly borrowed back into both Chinese and Korean. ↩︎

    • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      15 hours ago

      It’s pretty damn rough. But I have at least found already that dabbling with Chinese has helped me sus out the meaning of a few Kanji, so it’s not totally distinct, but yeah, big gaps here.

      French is also similar enough to English that even with my limited learning of the language I’m able to discern the meaning of a sentence here and there, but that’s also the one I’m least interested in learning just by nature of the fact that I’m not listening to a lot of French these days.