Clarence Lang

even with all of the hardship he had experienced, there had been the possibility of maybe a different life path for him.

So he ended up in a school where he was very popular.

He was an athlete.

He was voted class president.

He enjoyed school.

He was in a sense in what we might call an integrated environment.

And so, but he has this encounter with one of his teachers who he tended to think of as a good person.

And this teacher asked him what his aspirations were and he hadn't thought much about it, but he sort of, the first thing that came to his mind was being a lawyer.

And his teacher, this person who he thought he could trust, that he thought he knew, basically told him that his goals were not realistic for a Black person.

Of course, he didn't use the word Black, and that he should think about a more practical life course that would involve working with his hands.

And so here you have this individual who could see a broad horizon of possibilities, and that was extinguished in his own telling in that particular moment.

So he became incorrigible

in school, he got involved in petty crimes, and then there was the possibility of his going to reform school, and there was another family that intervened.

But his trust, and this is why in part he was so rabid a critic of racial integration, because he had himself experienced it and saw the flaws, but the trust that he had in those interactions with a white majority were pretty much dashed.

And so he became from that standpoint cynical,

And I'm making a long story short, right?

But that led to his drift into petty hustling, the idea that there was not a legitimate path for him to succeed.

And so better to live by one's wits, by being crafty, cagey, you might say,

And that set him on a course to becoming Detroit Red, right?

So, you know, Malcolm Little gives birth to Detroit Red, the hustler, first in Boston, where he ended up moving to live with his older half-sister, and then Detroit Red in Harlem, New York as well.