Clarence Lang

And so it's through those kinds of connections, thanks to his half sister.

And then of course his eventual conversion, which in the context of the politics of the prison actually make him more dangerous rather than less dangerous because he's initially an incorrigible prisoner.

He's called Satan because of how he interacts with other inmates and how he interacts with the prison guards and the staff.

but his commitment to a life of a mind and then his commitment to Islam as practiced by the Nation of Islam have a salutary effect.

To some extent, they want to get rid of him because he becomes a threat in terms of being able to organize other prisoners who he begins to try and convert, so on and so forth.

And so he is paroled in 1952 and begins his career in the Nation of Islam.

Now, Don, if I may, I'd like to back up and make this point.

because I think we do have to take seriously the experiences that he had as a small time hustler in terms of how that helps to seed the soil for the kind of political organizer he becomes.

One of the things that's most remarkable about the autobiography, that you have to read it a couple of times to get this, is that Malcolm pretty much did every kind of work that a black male of his age and generation would have done.

So he shined shoes.

He sold sandwiches on the train.

He was a Pullman porter and he engaged in petty crimes, right?

Hustling, right?

Robbery and what have you.

And so that gave him, in a sense, a broad palette of experience that allowed him to relate to a broad swath

of black urban America, many of whom had had similar experiences as well, including the experience of being incarcerated.

He had a set of experiences that grounded him in the lives and experiences of the black working class majority in the United States.

And that served him well as an organizer because he could then go into alleys, to pool halls.

He could speak among folks that more respectable leaders could not make the same connections with.

Yeah, that's correct.