The racist society that produced and killed Malcolm X is responsible for what he was and for destroying what he could have been. He had the greatest leadership potential of any person to emerge directly from the black proletariat of the century. He was the creation of the interplay of powerful and conflicting forces in mid-century America. No other country or combination of forces could have shaped him the way he was and ultimately destroyed him with such a unique ruthlessness.

Malcolm X knew, before he could explain it to himself and others, that he was living in a society that was engaged in the systematic destruction of his people's self respect. His first memories are of conflict. In this respect his early life was no different than that of most black Americans, where conflict comes early and stays late. In his own words:

When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan raiders galloped u

Defiance- An African View, Macmillan, 1969

A few months after his arrival in Roxbury, a predominantly black section of Boston, Malcolm took a job as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom in Boston's Back Bay section and learned the role of a hustler. Roxbury proved to be too small for him, and in 1942 he took a job as a railroad dining-car porter, working out of Roxbury and Harlem. Settling in Harlem, he became involved in several criminal activities including robbery, prostitution, and narcotics. After a year in Harlem, he returned to Boston and continued a life of crime, forming his own house-robbing gang. Arrested for robbery in February 1946, he was convicted and sentenced to the Charlestown, Massachusetts prison for seven years.

BIOGRAPHY, online, http://www.cmgww.com/historic/malcolm/bio.html

In the few years that Malcolm X held the high office of public spokesman for the Nation of Islam, he gave that enviable position of responsibility a special form adapted to his distinctly African-American heritage, experience, talent, and character. White America and a few of his critics have occasionally, with much bitterness and fear, called him names, but without success, for Brother Malcolm proved to be an indomitable leader and an indefatigable statesman, very well capable of giving the political life in America important impulses and worth.

Malcolm X The Man and His Times, John Henrik Clarke, Introduction,

New York City, November 1968, Macmillan, 1969

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p to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them she was alone with her three small children and that my father was away, preaching, in Milwaukee. The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because "The good Christian white people" were not going to stand for my father's "spreading trouble" among the "good" Negroes of Omaha with the "back to

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)