Malcolm X

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Recommended: Impact race has on an individual

Can you recall a memory from your early childhood? Did you think about the first time you fell off your bike, getting stung by a bee or your big brother teaching you how to get the football to spiral when you throw it? Can you imagine that your first memory that can come to mind is living every night in fear, the burning down of your home by the Ku Klux Klan and the “accidental” death of your father who’s head was detached from his own body? This is the only memory that comes to Malcolm Little from his childhood.

Malcolm Little who is famously recognized as Malcolm X was born into a world of hatred on May 19, 1925 in Omaha Nebraska. His father was a freelance Baptist Preacher who incorporated the teaching of Black Nationalist leader Marcus Gravey. With continuous threats to the Little family by the KKK, they moved and settled in Lansing Michigan. With his father still urging the African American race to take control of their lives, he was murdered in 1931 (Pendergast). Among the death of his father at a young age, Malcolm was only six years old. This is where bad luck of faith took its toll. Lisa Little Malcolm’s mother couldn’t handle the death of her husband by herself with eight children to raise alone with no Insurance clam and fear. Being unstable welfare workers removed all the children from her care. They were all separated and placed in different foster homes. She later faced a mental breakdown that hospitalized her for twenty- six years. In 1941 around the age of sixteen with many hopes and dreams of becoming a successful lawyer, an English teacher of Malcolm’s told him to be “realistic” implying that black men couldn’t be lawyers that black men were only good enough to work with their hands not intelligence. He dropp...

... middle of paper ...

...t influential assets to the success of the African American race.

Works Cited

“Malcolm X.” American Decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Gale Biogtaphy

In Context. Web. 17 Feb. 2011.

“Malcolm X.” Contemporary Heros and Heroines. Vol. 2. Gale, 1992. Gale Biography In Context.

Web. 17. 2011

“Malcolm X”. Encyclopedia of World Biography. (December 12, 1998): Gale Biography In Context.

Web. 17 February 2011.

“Malcolm X”. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 17 Feb. 2011.

Turner, Richard Brent. “Makcolm X.” Contemporary American Religion. Ed. Wade Clark Roof. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2000. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 17 Feb. 2011.

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