Malcolm X & His Conversions

A detailed Summary of Malcolm X & His Conversions

Malcolm X is still an icon today for the impact he had on the world over 25 years ago and in this essay I will provide a brief summary of his life along with an analysis of his character next to that of the convert social type. I will focus mainly on two times in his life. His conversion to Islam from within prison and his reaction to arriving in Mecca - some say his second conversion.

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was born in 1925 in northern USA. While still very young his family was chased from their home by the Klu Klux Klan. The next home they moved to was burned to the ground by another racist group. They were left standing outside their home wearing nothing but the underwear they were sleeping in. Being the child with the lightest coloured skin in the family was, for Malcolm, both a blessing and a curse. His mother was harder on him because he served as a reminder of the white slave owner that raped her mother. His father was easier on him seeing him as comanding more respect for his light skin - a fact that Malcolm would later see as the brainwashing. When Malcolm was six his father was killed - run over by a car. The white-owned insurance company didn't pay out. After using all their savings and credit to support the

This conversion was obviously inspired by the political and economic conditions in which Malcolm was placed. He grew up in poverty and on the street, having to turn to crime. The obvious target to blame for this were the people in control - the people who wouldn't give black men equal chances and held them down - the white men. When a religion came along that could give him purpose and drive against the white man and unity with his black brothers, who wouldn't find a way to believe?

After being relising quite what being black meant, he dropped out of school, only 15 years old, to become a hustler. By 20 he was in prison. While in prison he was converted to the Nation of Islam, an Islamic sect that views whites as devils. This is what Gallagher (1990) refers to as his first conversion. From Travisano's (1970) point of view it appears to have been a genuine conversion, in that his universe of discourse seems to have been completely disrupted, but the problem with Travisano's defintion is that it lacks an empirical, quantitative way to evaluate the credibility of conversion. For this reason I will use Snow and Machalek's (1983) definition of conversion.

Their second formal property of conversion is the adoption of a master attribution scheme. This is the fact that converts start to explain the things in their lives by their religion. That is, they find a definite locus of blame. Snow and Machalek (1983) claim that the locus of blame shifts during a conversion from blaming external factors to blaming internal factor or vice versa. I completely disagree with this. In Malcolm's case his locus of blame was just made more solid - less blurry. He now knew that the white man was the root of evil in society - for example, even the black people who couldn't see their point of view where considered to have been brainwashed by the whites. I see this shifting of the locus of blame as just as valid for conversion, because the fact that this religion had a similar locus of blame to him seems to have been one of the most appealing factors to him in 'choosing' to convert. So Malcolm adopted a master attribution scheme.

In terms of Snow and Machalek's (1983) formal properties of conversion there simply isn't enough information to make an acurate judgement. Even Gallagher(1990) seems to realise that it wasn't a true conversion as everytime he writes 'second conversion' he places 'conversion' in quotation marks. It seems highly likely that this change in attitude caused biographical reconstruction (the first of the four forma

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Approximate Word count = 1704
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People