Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, our mission
is to unpack the life of one of the most explosive
and genuinely transformative figures of the 20th
century, Malcolm X. We're not just looking at
a biography here, but at an identity mosaic,
a life that changed names, religions, and philosophies
at a speed that it's hard to find parallel. It's
an incredible challenge. I mean, you're talking
about a life packed into just 39 years, a life
that went from you know, utter poverty and crime
to becoming a revolutionary and then finally
a global human rights advocate. The real story
here is the sheer velocity of his evolution.
The names themselves, they really tell the whole
story, don't they? Oh, absolutely. You start
with Malcolm Little, that's just his given name.
Right. But then he becomes Malcolm X. Yeah. And
that's a powerful symbolic rejection of the...
You know, the slave master's name. And it doesn't
even stop there. Not at all. After his pilgrimage,
his Hajj, he becomes El Hajj Malik El Shabazz.
It's a total spiritual and political rebirth.
But the sources point to one name that he treasured,
one that maybe captures his final vision best.
Omowale. Omowale. It's Yoruba, given to him by
Nigerian students. And it means the son who has
come home. And that really speaks to his final
global Pan -African vision. It's amazing. And
for all that complexity, he was, of course, a
giant of the civil rights era. For 12 years,
from 1952 to 1964, he was the voice of the Nation
of Olives. The undeniable voice. I mean, he was
the public face of the NOI. You could argue he
built it into what it became. He absolutely did.
And then when he leaves, he doesn't slow down
for a second. He immediately creates this dual
structure for his work. Yeah, that's right. He
founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc., the MMI. for
his religious followers under Orthodox Sunni
Islam. And then for the political side, he creates
the Organization of Afro -American Unity, the
OAAU. So it's this incredibly strategic move.
It allows him to shift from what had become a
pretty rigid religious movement into a much broader
secular global political strategy just overnight.
But to really understand where that fire, that
drive came from, you can't start in Harlem or
in prison. You have to go back, back to his childhood
in the Midwest. Right. Back to Omaha, Nebraska.
Born May 19, 1925, he was the fourth of seven
children to Earl and Louise Little, and this
family from day one was political. Deeply political.
I mean, his parents, Earl and Louise, were devoted
followers of Marcus Garvey. And Earl wasn't just
some casual supporter, was he? No, not at all.
He was a local leader for the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, the UNIA, and his mother,
Louise, was just as involved. She was a secretary
and a branch reporter for the UNIA's newspaper,
The Negro World. So this wasn't just a casual
political interest. This was the family's core
belief system. It was their ethos. Garveyism
was baked into Malcolm's childhood. The ideas
of self -reliance, of black pride, of economic
independence without needing any kind of white
validation. That was the bedrock of his youth.
But holding those beliefs in the 1920s came at
an immediate and very high price. A terrible
price. The family was constantly on the run from
white violence. They had to leave Omaha, then
Milwaukee, then they settled in Lansing, Michigan,
all because of direct threats from the Ku Klux
Klan. And in Lansing, the harassment just continued.
It got worse. They were targeted by the Black
Legion, another one of these vicious white racist
groups. And the threats became reality in 1929
when their family home was burned to the ground.
Earl accused the Legion of setting the fire.
So for young Malcolm, racism wasn't an abstract
idea. It was literal warfare against his family.
And the defining trauma of his childhood, of
course, was his father's death. Earl died when
Malcolm was just six years old. And the official
story was that it was a streetcar accident. Officially,
yes. But you have to understand, Louise Little
and the entire black community there were convinced
that he was murdered by white racists. And that
gap, you know, between the official story and
the community's lived truth, that's a critical
moment for him. It cemented a lifelong distrust
of the system, didn't it? It had to. Malcolm
himself went back and forth on it his whole life,
sometimes accepting the accident, sometimes claiming
it was murder. But that fundamental doubt, that
deep suspicion of the white world's institutions,
that never left him. And the system just kept
failing them. After Earl's death, the family's
financial support just sip evaporated. It was
devastating. Louise got a very small life insurance
payout, but the larger policy refused to pay.
They claimed his death was a suicide, not an
accident or murder. So the system not only fails
to deliver justice, but it uses its own ruling
to financially ruin the survivors. Precisely.
Think about the message that sends to a child.
Louise tried everything. Farming, renting out
parts of the garden, her sons were out hunting
for food. But the weight of the violence, the
poverty, the constant instability, it was just
too much. And it led to her nervous breakdown
in 1938. She was committed to a state hospital.
And the children were all separated, sent to
different foster homes. But here's a detail that
really speaks to the man he would become. He
and his siblings never gave up on her. It took
them 24 years. but they eventually secured her
release. It's just, you can't understand the
Malcolm X of the 1960s without understanding
that his family was systematically destroyed
piece by piece long before he ever committed
a crime. Exactly. And that feeling of being totally
failed by the system, that set the stage for
this pivotal moment in 1941 that pushed him away
from education for good. This wasn't just a kid
dropping out of school. No. This was a formative
act of racial disillusionment. He was doing really
well in junior high. He was one of the top students.
He told a white teacher he trusted, Mr. Ostrowski,
that he wanted to be a lawyer. And the teacher's
response? The teacher told him that being a lawyer
was no realistic goal for a nigger. Wow. And
that one comment just shattered his ambition.
It confirmed everything he had already experienced.
That no matter how smart you are, no matter how
hard you work, the white world offered no place
for a career -oriented black man. So he left
school. He was done. He heads for the city, first
to Roxbury in Boston to live with his half -sister
Ella, and then in 1943 to Harlem. He basically
decides that if the system won't let him succeed
legally, he'll do it illegally. And that's where
the identity of Detroit Red is born. Right. He
had jobs. Sure, he worked on the railroad. But
his real energy, his real ambition went into
the hustle. We're talking drug dealing, gambling,
racketeering, robbery, pimping. Get the name
Detroit Red because of his reddish hair. And
it's a fascinating side note that one of his
close friends in that world was another red.
Yeah, John L. Roy Sanford, who they call Chicago
Red. He would later become, of all people, the
legendary comedian Red Fox. It just paints a
picture of that underground world. We also see
his calculated defiance during this time with
how he handled the World War II draft. Oh, that
was pure performance art. Yeah. He wanted out
of the military, but he also wanted to express
his absolute contempt for the government. So
when he went for his interview, he acted mentally
unstable. He said outrageous things. He told
him he wanted to go south and organize black
soldiers. He did. He said, I want to be sent
down south, organize them nigger soldiers, steal
us some guns, and kill us some crackers. He was
immediately declared mentally unfit for service.
It was a brilliant strategic move to defy the
system. But that life couldn't last. He went
back to Boston, got involved in a string of burglaries,
and in 1946, he was arrested. He got a harsh
sentence, eight to ten years in prison. And that
arrest is the hard stop. It's the end of Detroit
Red, and it's the beginning of Malcolm X's intellectual
awakening. But before we get to that... We do
have to touch on a really contentious historical
claim from this period. The allegations of bisexuality.
Right. This comes mainly from the work of historian
Manning Marable. It adds this layer of complexity
to a man who would later champion a very, very
strict moral code. So what exactly did Marable
claim? Marable argued that Malcolm. kind of exaggerated
parts of his criminal life for the autobiography.
But the main claim was that he had an early homosexual
relationship with a white businessman for money.
It's framed as something transactional, not about
his orientation. Exactly. What some would call
straight trade. Yeah. But it's a very specific
claim and it's not based on, you know, Malcolm's
own words. It's historical interpretation. And
his family has pushed back on this hard. Fiercely.
His daughter, Ilyasa Shavaz, has been very clear.
She argues that her father was brutally honest
about his past in the autobiography. I mean,
he included all sorts of embarrassing details.
Her point is, if he had a gay encounter, he likely
would have talked about it. So for them, it feels
like an attempt to sensationalize that period
of his life. That seems to be their view. But
regardless of that specific debate, the man who
walked into prison in 1946 was not the man who
walked out. And that brings us to the Nation
of Islam. His conversion, his incredible rise,
and the core beliefs that would define him for
more than a decade. Prison for him wasn't an
end. It was, in his own words, a kind of freedom.
It's amazing, isn't it? He wrote that being in
prison gave him a freedom he'd never known on
the streets. He said, I had never been so truly
free in my life. He would get so lost in reading
that he'd forget he was even locked up. And that
fire for learning, it was lit by another inmate,
right? By a man named John Bembry. Bembry was
self -educated and Malcolm was just in awe of
how he could command respect just with his words,
with his vocabulary. And Malcolm saw that and
realized that's real power. It's not in a gun.
It's in the mind. So that's what sparked his
famous project to educate himself. That was the
turning point. He started by literally copying
the entire dictionary word for word onto a tablet
just to absorb the language. He took all that
energy he'd put into hustling and channeled it.
with incredible discipline, into mastering his
own mind. The actual conversion to the Nation
of Islam, though, that came through his family.
It did. It was a letter from his brother Reginald
in 1948. And the instruction was so simple. Don't
eat any more pork and don't smoke any more cigarettes.
I'll show you how to get out of prison. And Malcolm
did it instantly. It was this immediate act of
discipline. At first, he was skeptical of the
core NOI teaching. You know, the idea that white
people were literally devils. But his own life
experiences made him receptive to it. They did.
He sought about all the white people who had
betrayed him or hurt his family. And he already
hated Christianity. They called him Satan, imprisoned
because of it. So he was ready for a completely
new way of seeing the world. And by 1950, he's
writing back and forth with the leader of the
Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. Yes. And Muhammad
tells him to renounce his past, to pray, to submit.
And this is when he makes that huge symbolic
break. This is when he becomes Malcolm X. The
X symbolizing the lost African name. Exactly.
Muhammad taught that their family names were
slave names imposed by their masters. The X was
to represent the true ancestral name they could
never know. Malcolm was very clear. His X replaced
the white slave master name of Little. It's just
incredible that in the exact same year he's having
this profound internal transformation, the U
.S. government starts a file on him. It's so
significant. The FBI opened their file in 1950.
And this is before he's anybody. It was just
because he wrote a letter to President Truman
opposing the Korean War and calling himself a
communist. It shows you they were watching from
the very, very beginning. So he's paroled in
1952 and his rise within the NOI is just meteoric.
He was a phenomenon. He goes from being an assistant
minister in Detroit. to starting new temples
in Boston and Philadelphia. By 1954, he's leading
temple number seven in Harlem, which was the
most important mosque in the country. And his
charisma was a huge part of it. A huge part.
He was this incredibly commanding figure. Six
foot three, always perfectly dressed, an absolutely
electrifying speaker. He radiated discipline
and power. And the numbers speak for themselves.
He's credited with the NOI's explosive growth
in this period. It was exponential. The estimates
say the membership went from maybe... 1 ,200
people when he joined to somewhere between 50
and 100 ,000 by the early 60s. He brought in
huge figures like Muhammad Ali. He was a star
maker. And that power he had, it was put on stunning
public display in 1957 during the Hinton Johnson
incident. Ah, yes. This is the moment that really
put him on the map for the authorities. Hinton
Johnson, an NOI member, was brutally beaten by
the NYPD. Malcolm X gets the call. He goes down
to the police station. And by the time he gets
there, a huge angry crowd of thousands has gathered
outside. Ready to explode. Absolutely. But he
handles it with this chilling level of control.
He goes inside, negotiates to get Johnson to
a hospital. Then he comes back out, faces this
massive seething crowd, and just raises one hand.
And what happens? The Nation of Islam members,
the Fruit of Islam, they turn and walk away.
Silently. In perfect formation. And then the
rest of the crowd just sort of dissolves. They
follow their lead. And the police reaction to
that silent display of power is the real story.
It is. A police officer was overheard saying,
no one man should have that much power. And that
wasn't just an observation. That was a threat
assessment. Within a month, the NYPD had undercover
officers infiltrating the Nation of Islam, specifically
targeting Malcolm X. So let's talk about the
ideology he was preaching at this time. It was
radical. It was separatist. It was a direct inversion
of white supremacy. That's a perfect way to put
it. Yeah. The core teaching was that black people
were the original people of the earth. And the
counter narrative was the story of Yakub, an
evil black scientist who... thousands of years
ago, created the white race, a race of devils
whose time on Earth was now coming to an end.
And he justified using that explosive language
by pointing directly to history. He did. He said,
you just have to look at the historical record.
Yeah. He would list the actions of European colonialism.
Anybody who rapes and plunders and enslaves and
steals and drops hell bombs on people is nothing
but a devil. For his audience, this was incredibly
powerful. The NOI also presented a completely
new theology. A total rejection of Christianity.
They called it the white man's religion, something
imposed on slaves to keep them docile. Instead,
they taught that the founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad,
was God in person, that Elijah Muhammad was his
chosen messenger or prophet. And this put him
on a direct collision course with the mainstream
civil rights movement and Martin Luther King
Jr. Their goals were polar opposites. Malcolm
X rejected integration completely. He wanted
a separate black nation carved out of the United
States, and he demanded reparations for slavery.
He called leaders like King Chumps and Stooges?
He did. He felt they were begging the white establishment
for rights that were already theirs. And he completely
rejected nonviolence. He argued that black people
had every right to defend themselves by any means
necessary. Which is why he had such contempt
for the 1963 march on Washington. He dismissed
it entirely. He called it the farce on Washington.
He saw it as a feel -good spectacle that had
been co -opted and controlled by white liberals.
He famously asked why black people were celebrating
in front of a statue of Lincoln, a president
who didn't like us when he was alive. That brings
us to the breaking point, the disillusionment,
the departure, and the incredible global transformation
of his final year. And this all starts with betrayal.
His absolute faith in Elijah Muhammad was completely
shattered by two events that exposed a deep,
deep hypocrisy at the heart of the Nation of
Islam. The first was the Ronald Stokes killing
in Los Angeles in 1962. A brutal incident. LAPD
officers beat and shot several unarmed Muslims
outside their mosque. A Korean war vet named
Ronald Stokes was shot in the back and killed
while he had his hands up. Another man was paralyzed
for life. And Malcolm demanded action. He was
furious. He wanted to retaliate or at least organize
a massive political response. He was ready to
go to war for them. But Elijah Muhammad shut
him down. He forbade any action at all. Why?
It stunned Malcolm. He realized Mohammed cared
more about protecting the organization's money
and stability than he did about getting justice
for a murdered follower. That was the first major
crack in his faith. But the final fatal blow
was discovering Elijah Mohammed's sexual misconduct.
This was the crisis of conscience he couldn't
overcome. Rumors were spreading that Mohammed
was having affairs with his young secretaries,
which was a grave violation of the NOI's strict
moral code. He didn't want to believe it at first.
No, he was completely loyal. But he investigated.
He talked to the young women involved, and then
he confronted Elijah Muhammad himself, who admitted
it was true. He even tried to justify it by citing
the polygamy of prophets in the Bible. And Malcolm's
investigation uncovered something even darker
than just affairs. That's right. He later testified
publicly that his investigation confirmed multiple
counts of child rape, and that several of the
girls became pregnant. This wasn't just hypocrisy.
This was profound corruption by the man he viewed
as a divine messenger. And when he tried to expose
this, the organization turned on him. Immediately.
He started getting death threats. They found
a bomb in his car. The very machine he helped
build was now trying to kill him. And all this
is boiling under the surface when he makes his
infamous comment about the Kennedy assassination.
Right. In December 1963, he says JFK's murder
was a case of Chickens coming home to roost,
meaning the violence the US government exported
was now coming back to haunt it. The public outrage
was immense and the NOI used it as their opportunity.
It was the perfect excuse for Elijah Muhammad
to silence him. The NOI publicly censured him
and banned him from speaking for 90 days. It
was a way to push him out. And Malcolm knew it.
So on March 8, 1964, he makes it official. He
leaves the Nation of Islam. He does. He announces
that the organization has gone as far as it can,
that it's too rigid. And he immediately says
he's forming a new black nationalist organization.
And a huge shift that he's now willing to work
with other civil rights leaders. He was free.
And that year of freedom was one of the most
intense periods of growth for any public figure
in history. It starts with his famous the ballot
or the bullet speech. That speech laid out his
new strategy. Use the vote, he said. But if the
government keeps denying you your rights, you
may have to use the bullet. It was a pragmatic
warning. And he framed it under a flexible black
nationalism that could work with other groups
on specific goals. In the middle of all this,
he has that one brief meeting with Martin Luther
King Jr. Just a fleeting moment. They met at
the U .S. Capitol just long enough for that iconic
photograph. But it's telling that King later
said he had deep affection for Malcolm and that
Malcolm had this incredible ability to diagnose
the root of the problem. But the truly life altering
event was his pilgrimage to Mecca in April 1964.
The Hodge. This is what transforms Malcolm X
into al -Hajj Malik al -Shabazz. This was the
experience that she just demolished the NOI's
racial theology for him. He wrote back in these
amazing letters about seeing Muslims of all colors,
from blue -eyed blondes to black -skinned Africans,
all praying together as equals. And that forced
him to completely reevaluate his entire worldview
on race. Completely. He said he had to toss aside
his previous conclusions about all white people
being devils. He converted to Orthodox Sunni
Islam and immediately set up his new organizations,
the Religious MMI and the Secular OAAU. And he
used the OAAU to make a brilliant strategic move,
reframing the civil rights struggle as a human
rights struggle. This was revolutionary. By doing
that, he was arguing that the U .S. treatment
of its black citizens was a violation of international
law. It meant he could take the United States
before the U .N. Before the world court, it was
a way to bypass the American system entirely
and shame it on a global stage. Which is why
he started this extensive tours of Africa and
the Middle East. Exactly. He is connecting the
struggle at home to the anti -colonial struggles
all over the third world. And he was welcomed
like a head of state. Leaders like Nkrumah in
Ghana, Nasser in Egypt, they all met with him.
Some even offered him positions in their governments.
He used that platform to go after Western imperialism,
especially in the Congo. He was furious about
the situation in the Congo. He called the Western
-backed leader Mwisichombe the worst African
ever born for hiring white mercenaries to kill
his own people. And he accused President Johnson
and the U .S. of propping up this murderous regime.
He also called out the media bias in how the
conflict was being covered. A blatant double
standard. He pointed out how the Western press
obsessed over atrocities committed by African
rebels against white missionaries, but completely
ignored the war crimes being committed by the
white mercenaries and CIA -backed pilots. It
was only an emergency when white lives were at
stake. And all of this global exposure forced
him to reconsider his old hardline stance on
race and integration. It did. In his last year,
he started speaking with regret about how rigid
he'd been. He told a story about turning away
a young white college girl who wanted to help.
He said his time in the NOI was like being a
zombie, like he was hypnotized. He realized racism
was a global problem, not just a black and white
American one. His travels also took him to Gaza,
where he engaged with the Palestinian cause.
Yes, he met with the PLO and visited a refugee
camp. He wrote an essay called Zionist Logic,
where he argued that the occupation of Palestine
had no intelligent or legal basis in history
and called Zionism another form of European imperialism
designed to divide the Arab world. And finally,
he even opened the door to socialism. He did.
After criticizing capitalism, he was asked if
he was a socialist, and his answer was purely
pragmatic. He said, if socialism is good for
black people, then I'm for it. It shows how far
he'd come from a rigid theology to a flexible,
results -oriented political strategy. Which brings
us tragically to the end. The assassination,
the conspiracy, and his legacy. The moment he
left the NOI, the threats became constant and
very, very real. The escalation was terrifying.
Just a month after he left, someone was ordered
to bomb his car. The NOI's own newspaper, Muhammad
Speaks, was publishing what were basically open
calls for his death. The rhetoric from people
like Louis X, who had been his protege, was chilling.
Elijah Muhammad himself told Louis X that hypocrites
like Malcolm should have their heads cut off.
And then they published that horrific cartoon
showing Malcolm's severed head bouncing down
the street. It was a public death sentence. And
a week before his death, his house was firebombed.
On February 14th, 1965, he and his family barely
escaped. He was certain it was the Nation of
Islam. It's why that famous photo of him holding
a rifle at his window is so powerful. He was
a man under siege, defending his family. And
seven days later, on February 21, 1965, at the
Audubon Ballroom, it happened. He was just about
to start his speech. A fight was staged in the
audience to create a distraction. As Malcolm's
security moved toward it, a man rushed the stage
with a sawed -off shotgun and fired into his
chest. Two other men then opened fire with handguns.
He was hit 21 times. He was 39 years old. The
crowd managed to catch one of the gunmen, an
NOI member named Talmadge Heyer, or Thomas Hagen.
Herein two other NOI members were eventually
convicted, but that was never the whole story.
No. This is where the conspiracy theories begin,
and many of them have turned out to be true.
For decades, Heyer, the one shooter who was caught
at the scene, always confessed to his role. But
he also always insisted that the other two men
convicted with him, Butler and Johnson, were
innocent. He named other people. He did. He named
four other members from the Newark Mosque as
the real accomplices. But for decades, nobody
listened. Until 2021, when the two men were finally
exonerated. Finally. A review found that the
FBI and the NYPD had withheld crucial evidence
at the original trial. Evidence that proved their
innocence. So you have two men who spent decades
in prison for a murder they did not commit. Which
has led to these massive lawsuits against the
government. Absolutely. The family filed a $100
million wrongful death suit against the CIA,
the FBI, and the NYPD, alleging that they were
not just negligent, but were actively involved
in the conspiracy to have him killed. So who
do these theories point to? Well, there's a lot
of focus on John Ali, a top NOI official, who
was widely suspected of being an FBI informant.
He apparently met with the shooter the night
before the assassination. And then there's Louis
Farrakhan, who has admitted that his fiery rhetoric
at the time may have been complicit in creating
the atmosphere that led to the murder. The reaction
to his death was just as polarized as his life
had been. It really was. In America, the mainstream
press was brutal. The New York Times called him
a twisted man whose life was pitifully wasted.
But internationally, it was a different story.
Completely. Across Africa and the third world,
he was mourned as a revolutionary martyr, killed
by American racists. And at his funeral, the
actor Ozzie Davis gave that beautiful eulogy,
calling him our shining black prince. Even Martin
Luther King Jr., his great rival, expressed a
profound sense of loss. He did. He called his
murder a tragedy and acknowledged Malcolm's unique
power to diagnose the core of America's racial
sickness. And today, his legacy is just. It's
immense. He's seen as one of the most influential
African -Americans in history. Undeniably. He's
largely responsible for the spread of Islam in
the black community. His philosophy directly
inspired the black power movement, black arts
movement, the whole idea that black is beautiful.
And so much of that legacy is preserved in his
autobiography. The autobiography of Malcolm X
is a monumental book, and he knew he wouldn't
live to see it published. He told Alex Haley,
if I'm alive when this book comes out, it will
be a miracle. It's one of the most important
nonfiction books of the century. His life continues
to inspire art and culture, from the X -Men's
Magneto to characters in movies like Black Panther.
It's an archetype now, the revolutionary who
speaks truth to power. He's been formally recognized
with street names, holidays, and just recently,
induction into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. So
when you look at the whole arc, from Malcolm
Little's shattered childhood, to Detroit Red's
criminal life, to Malcolm X's radical ministry,
and finally to El -Haj Malik El -Shabazz's global
humanism, it's just a stunning story of evolution.
A story about the cost of intellectual freedom
and the relentless pursuit of truth. And it leaves
us with this profound question. Think about his
final year. He was simultaneously trying to take
on the entire U .S. government by bringing it
before the World Court for human rights violations.
And at the same time, he was trying to expose
the deep criminal corruption inside the nation
of Islam. Two incredibly dangerous fronts. The
most dangerous. So what does it tell you about
the nature of power when you have to challenge
both the state and the church, so to speak? He
proved that challenging a sacred internal power
structure could be just as deadly as challenging
the massive external one. He died because he
refused to stay quiet, pursuing justice by any
means necessary. And as a final thought for you,
we've looked at these four distinct identities.
the hustler, the NOI minister, the global pilgrim,
and the martyr, will leave you to think about
which of those four identities has had the most
profound and lasting impact on the idea of Black
identity and political self -determination, both
in America and around the world today. Thank
you for joining us for The Deep Dive. We'll see
you next time.