Don Wildman

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.

If you were lucky

enough to be this old.

Earl Little was a Baptist lay preacher, leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA.

There was a chapter in Omaha.

So Malcolm is surrounded by these ideas of Garveyism as a youngster.

And when he's six, the Littles moved to Lansing, Michigan, and in the years following, run into that which so many Black families ran into in those days, the housing restrictions imposed upon them by municipalities in the North.

Can you explain how these experiences affected the family

and Malcolm?

All of this before he is 10 years old, death of his father, the breaking up the family, a lot of moving around, all against a very proud story of resistance and understanding this world through the eyes of self-determination and so forth.

And that's an incredible, what a brew, what a cauldron to grow up in.

His response to this, we will talk about in a moment, but I want to circle back to more discussion about what we were saying before, because we're going to run into something called the Nation of Islam.

And I want to understand, we're in Michigan at this point in his childhood, and Michigan is so much of what's going on in this world for black America.