Don Wildman

How had Black nationalism in America addressed those issues differently than elsewhere?

Yeah, it's a fascinating time because, I mean, this is all against the backdrop, of course, of segregation and Jim Crow, as far as the American story goes in the first half of the 20th century.

It's about asserting, as you say, self-determination politically, economically, culturally, outside the constraints necessarily of white dominated society.

Fair to say?

That's correct.

And it's important to me to sketch this because there's a lot of people that don't understand how much was happening in this world, certainly in the in those decades among black communities spurred on by the Great Migration, which was happening around the World War One time frame and before that.

This enormous amount of migration northward.

And as families took root in these new places and there's generations happening, a new sensibility was happening in American black communities as far as how do we move onward.

And there was kind of a split.

There was sort of a fork in the road between the Booker T. Washington school of thinking where you kind of assimilate or accommodate versus reforming the world that you're in.

Am I correct in how I'm framing this?

As we speak about Malcolm X, there is an enormous context to Malcolm X, and that is what is so remarkable about him, how he distinguishes his argument from what is so rich and layered in his youth, even with his own father, who was a Garveyite himself, right?

So let's talk about his early life, and we will probably circle back to a lot of this kind of talk just so the audience understands this.

Malcolm X comes along, fourth of seven children, born May 19, 1925, Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska.

His father was Earl Little, originally of Georgia, mother Louise from the Caribbean island of Grenada.

They had met in Montreal.

This is a fascinating chapter.

I mean, I can't tell you.

I, of course, read so much earlier in my life as part of history classes and so forth.

But coming back to it as an older man, it is so interesting to see the paths of so much going on that laid the groundwork for experiences we all had inside and outside that world in the 20th century.