Chapter 1: What are the key events in Malcolm X's early life?
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Chapter 2: How did Malcolm X's time in prison change him?
He's an amazing figure, it turns out.
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, when I was in high school, there was a big, this is, you know, I graduated in 89, the movie was 92. So this was leading up to the film, which obviously put things on a much bigger sort of platform. But it was a big deal in the 80s.
Like there was a big sort of, at least in the South, I don't know how it was everywhere else, but there was a big movement among, you know, the black students at my school to get in touch with their African heritage. Malcolm X hats were all over the place in my school. And he was just sort of in the forefront, I guess, kind of like my junior and senior year.
So it was striking to me that we didn't learn about him in high school.
Yeah. But if you step back and really think about it, it's not very surprising, you know.
Well, I mean, looking back at the substandard public school education I got, correct.
Yeah, but also the whitewashed and sanitized version where it's like, okay, we'll tell you about Martin Luther King Jr., but don't ask about Malcolm X. You don't want to know about him. He was a rough dude.
Yeah, or anyone else. It was just Martin Luther King.
Exactly. Yeah. He did the whole thing by himself, it turns out. Yeah. So, yeah, I remember that same era as well. OK, so I say we get into this because we could probably sit here and do an intro and it would end up being the entire thing.
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Chapter 3: What role did Malcolm X play in the Nation of Islam?
And that's just the official line on the whole thing. In fact, I think it was it ended up being ruled a suicide. But according to Malcolm, his family, his mother, like his father was murdered probably by a Klan affiliated group called the Black Legion who operated in Michigan back then. And that was pretty much what the family was convinced of, that his father had been murdered.
Then on top of that, no one would admit that his father was murdered, which I'm sure makes that kind of experience that much harder.
Yeah, I mean, there was actual evidence that was ignored. He had clearly been beaten and placed on the tracks. So it was kind of just brushed under the table. It was very upsetting for a young Malcolm because that was like the rumor. It was all around the school and everything. So he was hearing all these stories.
And it was, you know, definitely a big early sort of kind of fork in the road for him in that his family was left without their dad. They, like you said, ruled it a suicide, but I think she got like $1,000 in one life insurance payment, Louise did, which would be about $25,000 today, but was denied because of the suicide claim, a much larger insurance claim. I see.
She didn't have a lot of dough to feed what was eight kids.
Eight kids, man. And now she's suddenly on her own. And she had a nervous breakdown is what you would call it. I think that she was diagnosed as paranoid and was transferred to the state hospital in Kalamazoo where she stayed. This is in the mid-30s. She stayed there until 1964. I think like 26 years or something like that. And All of a sudden, Malcolm and his seven siblings are without parents.
They're orphans, essentially. And they become wards of the state, and they're broken up. So just in a very short time, couple of years, Malcolm goes from having a stable home life to his father being murdered, his mother having a nervous breakdown and being institutionalized, and his siblings being spread out throughout the foster system around Lansing. That's just what happened to him.
And if you know a little bit about Malcolm X, you might know that he started out as a criminal. What's astounding, Chuck, is this is not when his life of crime began. He actually went the exact opposite route.
Well, a little of both. He started stealing stuff when he was nine because he had to do something to provide for their family, but he never got caught there. And, you know, we'll go over his formal rap sheet here in a minute, but... He was sent to a juvenile detention center in Mason, Michigan. It was about 10 miles south of Lansing. And he went to a white school and he did a great job.
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Chapter 4: How did Malcolm X's views on race evolve after his pilgrimage to Mecca?
And just a little fun side note, while he was in Harlem, he was working at a chicken shack with a guy named John Sanford. And he was Chicago Red and Malcolm was Detroit Red. and John Sanford was trying to be a stand-up comic, and that ended up being Red Fox.
That's right. Of Sanford and something.
Yeah.
I love that little fact. So, yeah, he became a, I guess you'd call him a petty criminal, but he took all of that kind of charisma and charm and initiative and turned it, he directed it toward a life of crime. He's often described as a pimp, although he was never a pimp. He seemed more like the kind of guy who just knew where to get whatever you wanted. And that included sex workers.
It included drugs. He loved pot. He loved gambling. And he actually committed a lot of his crimes, like burglary, theft, that kind of stuff, just to support his habits, which pot eventually turned into cocaine, which even back then was more expensive. And again, he loved to gamble. So he needed to keep both of those things up. And that was a large reason why he was...
such a prolific criminal during this time. Another reason is that he just, the options that he had hadn't really panned out very well for him. Like he had a few jobs up to this point, but he realized like, I'm not going to get anywhere serving sandwiches on a train. I'm not going to get anywhere shining shoes. Like I might as well make a way for myself.
And the only way to make a way for myself in this situation is crime.
Yeah, for sure. He was arrested a couple of times. He was arrested at 19, allegedly stealing his half-sister's fur coat, whom he lived with. Pretty low-hanging fruit. Got arrested again when he allegedly mugged a friend of his at gunpoint And neither one of those amounted to much.
But finally, he was arrested for a third time after he'd been doing a series of burglaries of wealthy homes with a kind of a small crew. It was him. It was another black man and three white women. Yeah. And I mentioned everyone's race there because when they got caught on this one, the three white women just got slaps on the wrist and basically got let go.
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Chapter 5: What were the tensions between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad?
And then when he finally did start taking up the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, it just... clicked. And it was even further, I guess, reinforced when he started writing letters to Elijah Muhammad, and Elijah Muhammad started writing back to him. That really encouraged him big time.
Yeah. You know why? Because you didn't have to write letters to get those books like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. No, they just threw them at you. Yeah, he was, of course, because it was Massachusetts.
So, yeah, he started, you know, basically he became a pen pal with Elijah Muhammad and really became a hardcore Muslim pretty quickly after reading, you know, his works and became an ascetic. So that means no drugs, no booze, no pork. Um, no movies or music, no gambling, no dancing, like the real straight and narrow.
And, uh, you know, we'll later find out that that became a bit of a riff later on because he didn't think Elijah Muhammad at one point was, um, sort of walking the walk, whereas he really was from the beginning.
Yeah, for sure. Like and he did throughout to like the FBI tried and tried and tried to get something on him. And they couldn't get anything like he's just that upstanding and moral from that point on. I also I had never even thought to wonder, but I had no idea why his last name was X. I was pretty surprised to learn this, but it makes a lot of sense.
You didn't know that? No. Okay. I thought that would have been sort of just the basic common knowledge. No. But maybe not.
I mean, maybe it is, but I'm pretty uncommon, Chuck.
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. He also, one of the reasons he despised religion, he despised Christianity in general because he considered that the slave religion that was given to the African slaves to essentially keep them in line. And so it was actually, it was a big deal that he became this devotee of this religion. And this particular religion, just really quick,
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Chapter 6: How did Malcolm X's assassination impact the civil rights movement?
And he was a smart guy. So he had to submit himself, like he had to take parts of his brain and just turn them off. The suspicious part of him as far as like what he was being taught had to be turned off. The critical thinking part, as far as anything goes with the religion that he took on, he was able to compartmentalize, turn it off and throw himself fully into it.
And he was, for the first decade, essentially, that he was a black Muslim, the best thing that ever happened to the nation of Islam by far.
Yeah, for sure. That seems like a pretty good place for a break.
I agree.
All right. We'll be right back, everybody, with more on Malcolm X.
I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is It Girl. You may know me from my It Girl series I've done on the streets of New York over the years. Well, I've got good news. I am bringing those interviews and many more to this podcast. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work with the women shaping culture right now.
As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated. So you have to work extra hard and you have to push the narrative in a way that doesn't compromise who you are and your integrity. You know, I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja.
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Chapter 7: What legacy did Malcolm X leave behind after his death?
His rhetoric, the things he was saying, and like you said, the charisma and just how well-spoken he was. And the points he makes, it's like, you can be white and he's talking about you being a white devil. Sorry, you. All white people are white devils. He was uncompromising in that, right? It wasn't like, yeah, I mean, some of them are okay. No white people were okay in this philosophy.
And he, in addition to that rhetoric, he also just knew how to work the media and what levers to pull. And he pushed Elijah Muhammad way out of his comfort zone to allow him to do new stuff with the Nation of Islam that helped bring in tons and tons of people. One of the first big ones was a documentary from Mike Wallace, of all people, back in 1959 called The Hate That Hate Produced.
And it just basically said, look at these guys, but at the same time, listen to what these guys have to say. And it exposed the world to black Muslims and it really helped drive up membership.
Yeah, for sure. He was not trying to make friends in his job, even within his own community. You know, we talked about him being a hardliner and ascetic, and he said that everyone should practice ascetism. And, you know, he went to Philadelphia at one point in 1955 and said, all right, everyone here needs to get their act together. You need to lose weight even.
He had leaders in Philadelphia weighing their members twice a week. And there were penalties if you didn't lose the poundage that he required because he wanted everyone to look a certain way. About a year later, in 1956, he met civil rights activist Betty Sanders when she joined his temple.
And two years later, when he called her from a gas station phone and proposed, they married in January 1958. And later that year had the first of what would be six daughters. Yeah.
All daughters, right? The whole along the way. Even twins, I think the last ones born were twin daughters. So, yeah, you said that he wasn't really trying to make friends and he didn't care whether he ticked people off. So the old guard, the existing guard of the Nation of Islam, who had been around long before Malcolm X came along. Um, they were not happy with this.
They did not like to be told that they were doughy and had to diet or else they'd be suspended. Um, but he was attracting people who were very much in line with himself. So very quickly, as he started to build up the roles of the members of Nation of Islam, the
the philosophy and the viewpoint of that group started to shift away from the establishment that had been there up to that point to this much more radical, much more politically active version of the Nation of Islam that was the Malcolm X brand of Nation of Islam.
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Chapter 8: What can we learn from Malcolm X's speeches and writings today?
You know, part of the complications of Malcolm X is that he had some anti-Semitic views at times. He had some pretty dark views of Jews in America, and I guess all over the world, but specifically America. And this was especially sort of a...
You know, a thumb in the eye of Jewish people because they were a lot of Jewish people were the white people that were kind of really heavily involved in the civil rights movement. Obviously, there are all kinds of people, but Jewish people were leading the charge for white America and the civil rights movement for the most part.
Yeah, that's why they were also really highly critical of the NAACP is because they essentially said white people had, they'd allowed white people to join and the white people had taken over and were now steering the boat. So you could not be white and be, join the Nation of Islam. Sorry, they would not let you in, still won't as far as I know.
Yeah, for sure. But the media was loving this. The media loves to pit people against one another. So they had two really clear, like I think you described in the spoils, early on in Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, because it couldn't be any more different, not only in kind of the way they looked and how they talked and the things they were saying, but their ultimate goals.
So, you know, they painted Dr. King as a saint. They painted Malcolm X as a pariah. And the, I don't know if it's irony, but something you can't forget is that, you know, Malcolm X was making some waves, but his reach was nothing compared to what, uh, Dr. King was doing.
Um, he, Dr. King was much more of a threat if you, you know, is how they would have called it back then to white America and integration than Malcolm X was because he was, he was a fringe revolutionary, uh, at the time. So he was, uh,
you know, he was kind of fortunate to be in the newspapers at all, even though, you know, the media was painting them as enemies and they kind of, you know, enemies is a weird word. They didn't hang out. Dr. King didn't return calls. He was offered like debates for Malcolm X and stuff like that.
And he kind of just didn't want anything to do with that brand because he had such a sort of a good thing going. He had some momentum.
Yeah. And he was worried also that, you know, it would it would scare the white coalition that he'd helped build to support the civil rights movement away from the civil rights movement. All of a sudden he's like, oh, yeah. And also this guy's philosophy, too. We're going to incorporate the race war. Yeah. He had every reason to stay away from Malcolm X and frankly, kind of wisely did.
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