Welcome to Stuff you should know.
A production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast Son, Josh, And there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, just being quiet as a church mouse. And this is stuff you should know.
It's because he told her to zip it.
I was gonna leave that part out. You're gonna get hate mail for that one.
I'm surprised we're just now getting to this.
I went through a Malcolm X phase in college. I wasn't one of those guys walking around Georgia with a Malcolm X hat on.
You weren't wearing like, Okay, I have a great story, but please go ahead.
It was after I saw the movie because I was a big you still am big Spike Lee guy. So I saw the movie in ninety two and then read the autobiography that with Alex Haley right after that, Yeah, and was just super into a story at the time. It's been a while, though.
Well, I have just entered my Malcolm X's face. I uh, just researching him. I accidentally got radicalized, and I've got
his autobiography on the way. It should get here today. Great, but it's it's crazy, Chuck, because like, especially as just white people of our generation, if you hadn't already gotten into him and like seing the Spike Lee movie and read his autobiography and just started to read his speeches and stuff, if you just kind of knew him like I had up to this point, Like you knew him as the guy who said, like by any means necessary, that he was he was militant, that he was essentially
the foil to doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and that he and King kind of represented these two this fork in the road that America had to kind of choose between, because there was at this point in like the fifties, starting in the fifties, there was no way for America to just stand there at the crossroads any longer. Like like America as a whole had to make a choice which way we're gonna go race war or integration, peaceful integration.
And that's what Malcolm X represented to white America. Race war, like black militants taking over killing white people mercilessly, ruthlessly because white people had it coming. Or you know, everybody's much more familiar with the Martin Luther King Junior way, but there's so much more to it than that, and just researching this this guy, I like, I'm I don't even want to say a fan, because I think that kind of undermines like the respect I have for him now, Like he's 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 eighty nine, the movie was ninety two, 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 eighties. 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 the 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 white washed and sanitized version where it's like, Okay, we'll tell you about Martin Luther King Junior, but don't ask about Malto's. Yes, you don't want to know about him.
He was a rough dude, but he yes, 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. Okay, 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. Well, let's jump in and everybody else can kind of make up their own minds about how you feel about Malcolm X and just kind of asit decide to start. I would definitely recommend going and watching the documentary on him. That American experience
did I think in the nineties, make it plain. And then I read a bunch of articles and the best one I read was the Achievement of Malcolm X by John J. Simon. That was in the Monthly Review. That was a really good comprehensive one too.
Yeah, and see that's Spike Lee movie Exception. I've not seen it, man, you gotta check it out.
That's great.
I will. Okay, So we're talking about Malcolm X. If you hadn't figured that out by now, and you may or may not know that Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little. That was his given name. He was born back in nineteen twenty five in Omaha, Nebraska, and from the outset, he was essentially raised in a very black conscious family, so he was aware of the state of racial affairs in the United States as a very young person and oppression that black people lived under at the time and still do him many ways.
Yeah, for sure. His dad, Earle was a Baptist lay speaker, his mother Louise Little. They were both members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which was a Marcus Garvey joint someone else we never learned about in high school. And
they moved to Milwaukee for a little while. Then eventually in nineteen twenty eight, when little Malcolm was three, landed in Michigan, and they landed in a white neighborhood and that was a big problem because they were not wanted there, and Earle Little was not the kind of guy to just pack up and leave because his neighbors didn't want him there, so he stayed and the community had a clause in their hoa covenant that said that basically no one was allowed to sell a house to non white people,
and so they sued to a victim. And while that was kind of going through, even before the eviction was finalized, a group of white men burned their house to the ground without any firefighters even showing up.
Right, So whether they wanted to move or not, they had to now, and they moved a little further out of where they lived, still in the Lansing area, And I don't know when the house burned, but just within a year or two maybe less. Malcolm was six years old and his father died. He died in a mysterious, bizarre streetcar accident where he was run over by a streetcar. 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 clan 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 forking the road for him, and that his family was left without their dad.
They, like you said, ruled it a suicide.
But I think she got like one thousand dollars in one life insurance payment. Louise did, which would be about twenty five grand a day, but was denied because of the suicide claim, a much larger insurance claim. So she didn't have a lot of dough to feed.
What was eight kids?
Eight kids, man, and now she 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 this state hospital in Kalamazoo where she stayed. This is in the mid thirties. She stayed there until nineteen sixty four, I think like twenty six 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 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, wil Gover's his former formal rap.
Sheet here in a minute.
But he was sent to a juvenile detention center in Mason, Michigan. It was about ten miles south of Lansing, and he went to a white school, and he did a great job. He was he's a really you know, was a really smart guy, a really smart kid, and made really good grades. He was very charismatic from the beginning. He was elected class president. Yeah, and had dreams of going to law school before his white teacher said a pretty terrible thing to him.
Yeah, it was an English teacher. And this is a one of the probably one of the This is the second pivotal moment in his life where he had the rug pull out from under him, He had the wind taken out of his sales. He got punched in the bread basket you want to put it because the English teacher.
He told the English teacher that he was dreaming of becoming a lawyer, and the English teachers like, I think America would accept you more as a carpenter, Like that's the kind of profession you need to go in, you need to be realistic about. And then essentially being a black person in America, it's not, the teacher said, but the point was the same, and it just completely sucked the life and enthusiasm for learning that he had up to that point right out of him.
Yeah, he quit school. He never went to school again after that. And he had a very promising academic career in front of him, which is super sad. So at fifteen he goes to live with his half sister in Boston and eventually would get a job working at the railroad. So he started traveling around some and by seventeen found himself living in Harlem. And this is where he got the name that stuck with him. You know, during his sort of early tea or later teenage years.
I guess Red.
He had this red hair, so he was either Detroit Red or Big Red because he was a tall guy.
He's six foot four.
In just a little fun side note, while he was in Harlem, he was working at a chicken shack with a guy named John Sandford, and he was Chicago Red and Malcolm was Detroit Red. And he was trying. John Sandford was trying to be a stand up comic and that ended up being Red Box.
That's right of Sandford in something. Yeah, I love that little fact. So yeah, he was. He became a I guess he'd call him a petty criminal, but he was. 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, that 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 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 away for myself, and the only way to make away for myself in this situation is crime.
Yeah, for sure. He was arrested a couple of times. He was arrested at nineteen allegedly stealing his half sisters for 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 too 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, and the two men were sentenced to eight to ten in the Hoofscow.
Yeah, and they would have gotten much worse than that documentary make it plain. The other guy, his friend, Malcolm Jarvis. He said that they tried to get the women to say that the Malcolm X and Malcolm Jarvis had raped them and had all they had to do was say that, and they would have been convicted of that and sentenced to a couple more decades for that. And luckily they were tight enough with these women that they said, no, we're not going to do that, despite the pressure that they were under.
Two Yeah, for sure. So prison is where a lot happened to him. In prison sort of one of his first big transformations. He spent about almost seven years there for that burglary, and he was about twenty years old at the time, and it was in prison where he really kind of found himself for the I guess for the first time as an adult, and that he remembered like, Hey, I'm a smart guy, and I used to love academia and learning. So he started he became a voracious reader
again in prison. He apparently tried to memorize the Dictionary in prison and was reading anything he could get his hands on, including, eventually which would really transform his life, the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, who was a leader of the Nation of Islam at the time.
Yeah, and before he kind of came on to those teachings from his siblings, I think who encouraged him to start looking into that. And he had a real aversion to any kind of religion. He was actually known as Satan by the other prisoners in the correctional facility he was in. But the reason he was able to read so much, Chuck, is because he happened to be in MCI Norfolk in Massachusetts, and it's well known to have a lot, like a huge library, connections with like MIT
and Harvard and all that stuff. So it was actually the perfect prison for him to land in. So he was able to kind of educate himself from that point on. And then when he finally did start taking up the teachings of Elijah Mohammad, it just clicked. And it was even further, I guess reinforced when he started writing letters to Elijah Mohammad and Elijah Muhammad started writing back to him. That really encouraged him big time.
Yeah, you know why because he didn't have to write letters to get those books like Andy Defrain, Yeah in the Shawshing.
Redemption, No, they just threw them at you.
Yeah, he was of course because it was Massachusetts.
So yeah, he started, you know basically it became a pinpal with Elijah Mohammed 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, no movies or music, no gambling, no dancing, like the
real straight and narrow. And 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 sort of walking the walk where as he really was from the beginning.
Yeah, for sure, like and he did throughout too. 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.
But maybe not.
I mean, maybe it is, but I'm I'm pretty uncommon, right, 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, if you're not familiar with the Nation of Islam, it is not the same thing as Islam that was that emerged out of the Middle East several hundred years ago.
It bears like a slight resemblance to it, but it is essentially a completely altered version that has a lot of theology that seems very odd to outsiders.
Yeah, I mean they were Muslim, but you know, I know you've and this is stuff I didn't know that you found some stuff about Elijah Muhammad's original beliefs that I was I was just sort of shocked by.
Yeah, so you've heard white devils before. I mean, you have to was listening to like ICEQB. He always talks about white devils. But that is actually a teaching from the Nation of Islam from Elijah Muhammad, and it predates him. The Nation of Islam had been around for a few decades before Elijah Muhammad was its prophet. But the reason that they call white people white devils is because, according
to black Muslim theology. There was a genius named yaka Black Genius who created white people by bleaching black people and he mutated them into white, blue eyed devils. And the reason why is he wanted to basically put the black race to the test, so he put them in a subjugated position because he allowed these white people to be devils, to basically act like white people have treated
black people since time immemorial. And that this rain would last about six millennia, and that the six millennia were almost up, and that this was the time when the black race would rise and take over from the white devils. Who would who would really regret the stuff that they had done up to that point after.
That ye, which would have placed it about nineteen seventy. And so white Americans hearing this at the time, they thought that's when like the race war was coming.
Was was nineteen seventy or thereabouts.
Yeah, and we talked about that before and like, I never really understood it, but this is a big, big reason that white America was like, there's go to be a race war. It's like coming, it's inevitable. That was a big part of it. So, yeah, this was and this wasn't like metaphorical. This is from what I understand, it's a it's a literal interpretation of where white people came from six thousand years ago. So this was the
This was what Malcolm X was being indoctrinated into. And he was a smart guy, so he 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. So Malcolm X is granted parole in nineteen fifty two. He gets out of prison a completely different person than who entered prison almost seven years earlier, and he was on a mission to recruit and get as many people as he could to join the Nation of Islam and had a direct sort of go get him tiger from Elijah Muhammad, And so as soon as he
was paroled, he joined Temple Number one in Detroit. He traveled to Chicago to meet Elijah Mohammad in person, and he said, like I said, he said, you know, go out there and do your thing. Like he knew he had a sort of a shining star because he was again, he was taugh he was handsome, he was charismatic, he was super smart. And within a year there were only about four hundred members of the Nation of Islam at
the time. Within a year he brought that to about a thousand, but that would grow to six thousand by nineteen fifty five, and then in the early nineteen sixties about seventy five thousand, up from a four hundred when Malcolm X came on the scene. So a lot of that, not all of it, obviously, but a lot of that is really due to him being the face you know, I guess sort of the second face and then ultimately the face of the Nation of Islam.
Yeah, for sure, 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 devil's. 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 you know, 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 nineteen fifty nine 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 asceticism. And you know, he went to Philadelphia at one point in nineteen fifty five and said, all right, everyone here is.
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 nineteen fifty six, he met civil rights activists 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 nineteen fifty eight, and later that year had the first of what would be six daughters.
Yeah, all daughters, right, the whole, all 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, they were not happy with this. They did not like to be told that they were dowe and
to diet or else they'd be suspended. 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 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.
Yeah, I mean, Elijah Muhammad told him to stay out of politics because he was a complete separatist. He didn't want to be involved in anything that the White America was doing. But you know, Malcolm X basically started doing his own thing. One of the big sort of early things he did that ended up being a huge deal
was he founded their newspaper. It was called Mohammad Speaks, and it became a really it had a pretty wide distribution, and you know, I remember, even growing up seeing on the streets of Atlanta members of the Nation of Islam. I feel like they were giving him away. I don't think they were selling them. But he had pretty firm quotas established for members to give these things out and had a pretty wide circulation.
Yeah, he also would do things like debate white people. He did at Oxford, he did at Harvard on race relations. He would take questions from white reporters. All of this stuff was like not what Elijah Muhammad was jibing with, but Malcolm X was getting such results that Elijah Muhammad would just kind of be like, I don't want to do in that. But then when Malcolm went ahead and
did it, there wouldn't be any real consequences for it. Right. So, as he's doing this is becoming more and more emboldened. And one of the things he sets his sight on, Chuck, is that the American essentially the racial struggle in the United States that was really beginning to become part of the American preoccupation. At the same time in the fifties, it was really civil rights movement was really starting to
take shape. And this, again, this was totally opposite from what you were saying Elijah Muhammad wanted, which was isolation, separatism not just from white America, from non black Muslim black America too. Like he had no inclination to join the civil rights Elijah Muhammad to join the civil rights fight because they weren't black Muslims. So therefore they were essentially lesser versions of Black Americans.
Yeah for sure.
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 were 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 the white people had taken over and were now steering the boat. So you could not be white and be joined the Nation of Vislam. I'm 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 you, I think you described him as spoils early on in doctor 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 doctor King as a saint, they paid in 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 doctor King was doing. He Doctor King was much more of a threat, if you you know, as 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 at the time, so he was 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. Doctor
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 this 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.
But like you said, this was the media saying, like, you got Malcolm X, you got MLK, and that was like both of them kind of fostered that idea because if you had Malcolm X, and you know, you didn't listen to MLK, then we were going to go the Malcolm X way as far as America was concerned in the near future. So we should probably go the way that Martin Luther King is suggesting.
Yeah, you know, reading this stuff, I always was hoping that I would find out that they were secretly in cahoots with one another, Yeah, doing sort of a good a good cop bad cop thing, because they were both well aware of that, and I think they, judging from what some of the quotes I've seen, they were both
aware that it was helping the cause ultimately. And even Malcolm X, even though that's not what he was after, he knew that there were gains coming on that side because he was so scary to white America exactly.
Yeah. I think it was kind of like how food companies price fixed. They don't have secret meetings, but they just kind of make signals in the market in public, and that's kind of what they think they were doing. They were working together without actively working together.
Yeah, it's like food companies fixing grocery prices.
So yeah, and I mean, he was like really outspoken about what he thought about doctor Martin Luther King. He called them a fool and Uncle Tom. He also said that he was subsidized by the white man, that the essentially again that white people had taken over the real levers of power with the civil rights movement and that
it was completely useless now. But even if that weren't the case, he was such a critic of the civil rights movement because he's he was basically saying, like, if you're starting a revolution and the revolution's goal is to love your enemy, like that's ridiculous, that's stupid, Like that's never going to work. It doesn't even make sense. So
what are you doing? Like, all you're doing is distracting and continuing to keep subjugated the people who you're supposedly trying to liberate and integrate.
Yeah, he called the March on Washington the farce on Washington. Malcolm X did, and he said the quote was, whoever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing we shall overcome while tripping and swaying along arm in arm with the very people they're supposed to be angrily revolting against. Right, So, you know, I'm not taking sides, but he's making a
lot of good points at the time. You know, I think the idea that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar is true, But it was I think they almost needed there almost needed to be two sides of the same coin happening at the same time.
Yeah, I no know.
It's pretty interesting how it all worked out. And if you're wondering if the federal government was concerned, they absolutely were. This started in nineteen fifty, when Malcolm X was still in prison. He wrote a letter to Harry Truman, who was president, and said, I'm a communist, I'm a post of the Korean War, and President Truman said, maybe we should get a file going on this guy with the FBI, and they did that a couple of years later.
Yeah, he had also captured the attention of the NYPD around that time where there was a protest because the Harlem police had brutalized a member of the Nation of Islam and there was just a bunch of people came out on the street and were shouting about it because the guy had been beaten so badly, off skull been
cracked open, and they wouldn't disperse. So Malcolm X was inside essentially negotiating that the guy should get care and taken to the hospital with the police officials and managed to get them to agree to that, but the crowd was still angry, wouldn't disperse, and the cops were trying it wasn't very effective. So Malcolm X went outside and apparently didn't say a word, just waved his hand and
the crowd stopped yelling and just dispersed. And apparently the I think the police commissioner witnessed this and was like that that's too much power for any one man to have, especially somebody who believes that the black race is going to take over from the white race, and that the white races all devils like that scared them tremendously and it also really caught their attention. He It put him on their radar essentially forever.
Yeah, for sure.
And as far as the FBI goes he you know, like I said, they started a file on him, which they also had on Martin Luther King and you know, John Lennon and everybody else. We've talked about all this stuff.
But there was something they found out later from the files was at one point Jay Edgar Hoover told the New York Agency Office they needed to do something about Malcolm X. But like you said, early on, they had a hard time doing anything because in nineteen fifty eight, an informant said that Malcolm X was of high moral character. He doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink, he's always on time for appointments. He's kind of a stand up guy if you if you're not listening to what he's saying.
White America. Of course, that didn't matter.
But they couldn't pin anything on him essentially, and they even think, and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that he was assassinated. But I feel like everyone knows that, but they even think that the FBI, because they had so many informants inside the Nation of Islam, that they knew about the plot to assassinate him and just let it happen.
Yeah, I saw that too, and not just the FBI, but also the NYPD just let it happen. So just real quick, Chuck, I say, we take a break in a second and talk about his break with the Nation of Islam. But I just wanted to kind of give a thumbnail catch of like what he was saying. You can go listen. You should start with maybe the ballot or the bullet It is a great speech that gets his point across from this era. But essentially what he was saying is black people have to learn to do
for themselves. Integrating and then saying like you know, hey, let's all just share from the same pot with white people isn't going to work because white people will always hang it over you. So we have to figure out how to do it ourselves. Using the Nation of Islam.
That's how you prop somebody up, get them on the right path, put them on the moral path in a way from temptation, and then after that, you teach them black nationalisms, so now they feel good about being a black person, and then from that point on they have the dignity and the motivation to make something for themselves as a community. That was his goal. That's ultimately what he was preaching. That was the kernel of the whole thing.
That's right.
So we're going to take that break and we're going to come back with the sad end and the split from the Nation of Islam right after this.
So Chuck Malcolm X has become He's the face of the Nation of Islam to the press, to the public. People like they know the name Elijah Muhammad. You might even have seen him speak, but it's way likeli er that you've seen Malcolm X speak, and that's who you associate is the head. So if you're the protege and you become that the power kind of shifts like that.
The mentor doesn't usually like that kind of thing. Then on top of it, the mentor Elijah Muhammad was starting to get on in age, and so the people around Elijah Muhammad, including his blood family, were worried that Malcolm X would actually take over. So there was a lot of reason for there would be jealousy, backbiting, court intrigue, and get rid of Malcolm X one way or another, and that's essentially what happened.
Yeah, I mean, his kids thought that they were going to be next in line basically. And you know, I mentioned the FBI had lots of people on the inside of the Nation of Islam. They use those people to kind of stoke that strife internally and you know, try and disrupt it from within, and we're fairly successful at that because it was not smooth sailing at this point.
So you know, the real fracture comes. You know, all this is sort of leading up to what I think was the real fracture was when Malcolm X finds out about Elijah Muhammad having three children out of wedlock with three very young members of the Nation of Islam and essentially started looking upon him as a false prophet that was just sort of a guy in power that was using that power to Philander and he was like, I don't think he's fit to lead the Nation of Islam anymore.
And in nineteen sixty three of April of that year, he can fronted Elijah Muhammad about this, and that was not something that Elijah Muhammad wanted to hear.
No for sure, and now like now, Malcolm X was a big problem because this is not something that Elijah Muhammad wanted out to the public. It would immediately discredit him. And so do you remember kind of at the beginning, I was saying how Malcolm X had to kind of compartmentalize and turn off critical thinking and stuff like that
to allow himself to submit to Elijah Muhammad. After this, after he realized that this guy's actually not the real deal, he was able to kind of grow and spread like one of those sponge dinosaurs that you put water on and they grow, or a different analogy would be like Apache Chief in the Justice League when he grows like really really big. Essentially, that happened the moment he realized that Elijah Muhammad was a false prophet and he was able to finally grow and become the Malcolm X that
he always had the potential to be. He had thrown off the shackles placed on him. He gotten out from under the thumb of the leader of the Nation of Islam. But that also, unfortunately meant he had no place in the Nation of Islam any longer.
Yeah, I think the final nail in the coffin was when Kennedy was assassinated, he got explicit direction from Elijah Muhammad to shut up about it, to not say anything to the press, to just let this pass because it was such a monumental thing for all of America, certainly for white America. And he was like, we need to stay out of this if we know it's good for us.
And Malcolm X did not do that. He went to the reporters and he said that Kennedy's death was quote a case of chickens coming home to roost end quote and Elijah Muhammad was super upset. He said, you're suspended for three months. A month into that, he removed him from most of his leadership roles and that was the writing was on the wall that that was really the beginning of the final split.
Yeah, and just one little aside about that, chuck him saying a case of chickens coming home to rest. There is so much more background and subtext to it and all the stuff he was saying that led up to that. But that's the pull quote, right, that's the thing that
you just pull in. It sounds like a pretty awful thing to say, or at least heartless, but if you go back and read that stuff you like, you find there's so much more context to the stuff he was he's quoted for, and like you said, kind of toward the beginning, a lot of it seems pretty reasonable when you listen to the words he's saying.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, after he was expelled basically not formally expelled, but you know, removed from his formal duties, he went down to stay with Cassius Clay future Muhammad Ali at his place in Miami, and he stayed there per week.
He was giving him a spiritual guidance leading up to his heavyweight bout with Sonny Liston, and he had not cleared this with Elijah Mohammad, and Elijah Muhammad got mad about that as well and left him off the guest list for convention in February, where Cassius Clay you know, had his coming out as Muhammad Ali.
So that was a very meaningful snub at the time.
Yeah, I was disappointed in Muhammad Ali because he was basically like, oh that sucks, man, Sorry, see you. Yeah. So now this was the break, This was the schism, and at this point now the Nation of Islam is doing everything they can to mock and discredit Malcolm X and say that he was a turncoat and a Benedict Arnold and a hypocrite, and Malcolm xis gave it right back. One of the first things he did was to tell the media that Elijah Muhammad had kids out of wedlock
with teenage girls that were around him. He said that he had eight kids with six teenage secretaries, and he just told it to the press and that was a really big deal. And I think at that point he realized like he had just taken his life into his own hands.
Yeah, So that's all basically sort of early through spring nineteen sixty four. Later in nineteen sixty four, a very important trip happened when he made the Haj to Mecca, and this was, you know, kind of the final, big life changing moment for him. He came back a Sunni Islam member and he had changed his name from Malcolm X to El Haj Malik l Schabaz, and I believe even his wife and daughters took the name Shabbaz, like you know, throughout the rest of their lives as well.
And while he was there, he had a transformation, another transformation kind of like he did in prison. But the other way, he came full circle and said, quote, he had encountered pilgrims of all colors from all parts of this earth, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood like I've never seen before. And he essentially flipped and said, you know what, there are good white people and we
can and should work together. And he came back and started to do that work and really poured himself for the first time into the legit official civil rightsman.
Yeah, he told Martin Luther King, like I'm all in. He founded the Organization of Afro American Unity. He was trying to essentially teach Black Americans about their African heritage, but that at the same time he had also zoomed in on this idea that he needed to take this struggle for American civil rights to the world like the UN or the African Congress and basically say, hey, this is the same thing. This is part of the black struggle worldwide, Like this is part of this global problem.
It's not separate, it's not its own thing. So we need to figure out like all these other countries need to get involved too and start pressuring the US to do something about it, which is a pretty clever idea actually, and it was not something that Martin Luther King was doing at the time from what I understand.
Yeah, for sure they would eventually meet. That was a very famous single meeting with Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X. It was not something they planned because it's not like Martin Luther King Junior got on board immediately and was like, oh, great, you're joining the movement. Like I don't think he still really liked him that much.
But they literally bumped into each other in the hallway when they were at the Senate when the Civil Rights Bill was being debated there at the Capitol Building, and it was like, oh, it's you, and they shook hands. I think he told him in person, I'm throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights struggle face to face. There was a photographer there, so there's a very famous picture of them together. And then later that year in July sixty four's when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act
and it was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. And that was not the end for Malcolm X though he thought he was just getting started.
Very sadly, Yeah, so this was you said, that was May of nineteen sixty four. Within just a few months, he would be dead. And it's just so sad that he underwent that transformation and all of a sudden his potential is really starting to blossom. He turned into like a full butterfly for the first time, and he's struck down. The first thing that happened that kind of just foreshadowed his death was his house was firebombed by he was
quite sure members of the Nation of Islam. Apparently one of the bombs was thrown through a window that would have landed in and on the three of his little girls in their room, but luckily it shattered on the outside of the window and didn't make it through, but
it burned his house essentially down. And this was a house that was owned by the Nation of Islam, so they went as far as to accuse him of burning it down because they had evicted him from the house, and so out of spite, he burned it down, which was obviously not true.
Yeah, which is full circle because I don't think we mentioned that when their house was burned down when he was a little kid, they actually accused his dad, Earl of burning his own house down. So the same thing happened all those years later. That was on February fourteenth, nineteen sixty five. On February eighteenth, they formally evicted him, and then on February twenty first, he was murdered. He was shot and killed in front of his in front
of Betty, in front of the girls. I think there were four girls at the time, because Betty was pregnant with the twins that would be born after his death. And this was in Harlem at an organization of Afro American Unity meeting, and they arrested three members of the
Nation of Islam. One confessed and said the other two weren't involved, but the all three were convicted, even though later on, I think in twenty twenty one, the other two were exonerated after the Attorney General of New York saw that they had buried some exculpatory evidence back when it happened.
Right, So you were talking about how the FBI let it happen. The NYPD apparently helped pave the way by arresting a couple of his bodyguards on bs charges. So he was short security on that day and at his funeral, like he had made quite a name for himself. I think fifteen hundred people showed up, which is a pretty
good turnout for your funeral. And Ossie Davis, who was very much in with the Martin Luther King version of the civil rights movement, he led at Malcolm X's funeral because he was just that moved by him, even though he didn't see eye had eye on a bunch of stuff, Like, he realized what a loss this was for the black community in the world.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, I mentioned that the twins were born after he died. They you know, obviously grew up without their dad, and the other girls weren't that much older, and they always just knew him as dad. He you know, I think the ones that were kind of didn't even know him at all. They weren't raised by Betty as like, hey, your dad was a revolutionary, he was this or that. Apparently they'd learned about him mainly in school because Betty always wanted him just to be a dad and my husband,
and so they were. You know, they went on to do a lot of great things as well. We should probably do one on Betty Shabaz at some point. She was a great woman, and his daughters all, you know, became activists in their own way as well.
So yeah, I kind of mentioned like how just sad this is that he was struck down, especially at the time he was struck down. But if you look back at like the timeframe of all this stuff, this guy changed the world or left such an indelible mark that people are still learning from him all these years later, over essentially the course of ten years. That was about the timeline that we're talking about, from when he took up the Nation of Islam's teachings to when he was
assassinated by the Nation of Islam. It was just about a decade and that's how much of an impact that he made over just that time.
Yeah, there was a pretty great quote that who is this was this Julia.
That helped us with you, Yeah, Julia helped uspeak time.
Yeah, she found a great quote from a poet Maya Angelou, who Malcolm X visited in at her home in Ghana at one point and basically kind of summarizing what guts it took to make that transformation in full public public view, after being so public and militant. She said that it takes an incredible amount of courage to be able to say say everybody, you remember what I said yesterday, Well I found out that's wrong, and she just thought that was an amazing thing to be able to do. And
it really was. You know, not a lot of people can can own up to kind of being on what they thought later was the wrong path.
You know. Yeah, it is remarkable. So you can go read the autobiography of Malcolm X. Also, I've seen that Malcolm X be is a really great book. I think it's his collected speeches. There's the Spike Lee movie, there's Make It Plain, the PBS documentary, and then there's just tons of like his speeches are just all over YouTube. So if you're interested in this at all, like there's a lot you can still learn from Malcolm X, even with him being dead all these years.
Yeah, I can't recommend the book and the movie enough. The book sold four hundred thousand copies. The Year was released in nineteen sixty seven and has sold five million to date. And the movie was a big kit too. It grows close to fifty million bucks, which is not bad for a long, you know, true story biopic like you know, with political overtones. It had a couple of Academy Award nominees. Certainly Denzel because he was amazing as always,
and the great Ruth E. Carter for costume design. Even though neither one would win, it was fairly controversial when al Pacino won for Scent of a Woman over Denzel Real.
Yeah, it was.
People thought it was a pretty big snub, including Spike Lee. He thought it was due to the controversy of the film, obviously in the character, and he also thought it was a bit of a makeup call for Pacino losing so many times, so he would get some due though later in twenty ten, when the film was added to the National Film Registry as being culturally, historically, or esthetically significantly beautiful.
That's a great ending, Charles, You got anything else?
That's it?
Well, that's it for Malcolm X. Chuck just said that's it, So obviously everybody, it's time for a listener mail.
Yeah, this one's a little long, but it's one of the great emails we've gotten. Because after we did our what I think was a really fun episode on the Fire Festival debacles, we heard, you know, in that we talked about the Magnesis credit card and we heard from an actual holder of that credit card, which was great.
Did you see this, so I haven't seen that yet.
It's pretty fantastic.
So hey, guys here and you talk about this credit card brought me back to some very special memories of my early days in New York. When I first moved there in twenty fourteen, I stumbled upon the Magnesis and thought it sounded like the perfect way to meet new people. Since I was new, there in excess the cool and exclusive parties and parts of the city, so I applied and was surprised.
To be accepted as a member.
I quickly found myself at fun rooftop parties with open bars, great tickets to shows and sports games, and snagging reservations for restaurants that were impossible to book, all of which seemed to be too good to be true for the two hundred and fifty dollars annual feet, which should have
been my first clue that something was wrong. The first reel crack came when I took advantage of an offer to get floor seats to a Beyonce concert for only two hundred dollars and had to obtain the tickets by meeting a quote Magnesis concierge and the parking lot outside.
Of the indue.
The tickets I got felt like they had just been bought from a scalper, and they probably were.
But it did work out and it was a great show. Not long after, I had.
Will call tickets to an NBA game through a quote partnership they had with the team. When my friends and I showed up to grab the seats, know and behind the ticket counter, I had ever heard of Magnesis. That was a moment I started asking questions, and when I reached out about the issue and about canceling my membership, they actually refunded it almost immediately. In fact, they refunded my fees so quickly it was almost alarming, like they were hoping I'd just.
Quietly go away.
Thankfully, I managed to exit the whole thing before the house of cards came crashing down. So hearing you guys explain how the whole thing worked was fascinating and weirdly nostalgic. Despite the sketchiness at the end, I actually do have some pretty fun memories from that brief period when it felt like I had unlocked some secret VIP version of New York City.
Look forward to your next stop at the Bell House, and that is from Kevin.
Kevin, that really was one of the all time best emails we've gotten.
Yeah, I was hoping a Magnusis member would write in, and we got it.
Look at you. You should be playing the lotto.
That probably should.
Thanks a lot, Kevin. If you want to be like Kevin and send us one of our all time great emails, we always love those. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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