Chuck Bryan

You're an uncommon podcaster.

So, yeah, he dropped the name Little because, and a lot of people in the Nation of Islam did and do this because that was, he thought that was his slave name.

So he rid himself of that name and replaced it with an X.

Yeah.

I mean, they were Muslim, but, you know, I know you've and this is stuff I didn't know that you found some stuff about Elijah Muhammad's original beliefs that I was sort of shocked by.

Which would have placed at about 1970.

And so white Americans hearing this at the time, they thought that's when like the race war was coming was 1970 or thereabouts.

Yeah, for sure.

That seems like a pretty good place for a break.

All right.

We'll be right back, everybody, with more on Malcolm X.

So Malcolm X is granted parole in 1952.

He gets out of prison, a completely different person than who entered prison almost seven years earlier.

And he was on a mission to recruit and get as many people as he could to join the Nation of Islam and had a direct sort of go-get-em tiger from Elijah Muhammad.

And so as soon as he was paroled, he joined Temple No.

1 in Detroit,

uh he traveled to chicago to meet elijah muhammad in person and he said like i said he said you know go out there and do your thing like he knew he had a sort of a shining star because he was again he was tall he was handsome he was charismatic he was super smart and within a year uh there was there were only about 400 members of the nation of islam at the time uh within a year he brought that to about a thousand

But that would grow to 6,000 by 1955.

And then in the early 1960s, about 75,000 up from 400 when Malcolm X came on the scene.

So a lot of that, not all of it, obviously, but a lot of that is really due to him being the face, you know, I guess sort of the second face and then ultimately the face of the Nation of Islam.