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"That White Rapist." The man who lived as Malcolm X and died as John Doe was born Malcolm Little, in Omaha on May 19, 1925. His father was a Baptist preacher and an enthusiast for Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" movement. The family moved to Lansing, Mich., where, Malcolm claimed, white racists set fire to his parents' home in 1929. Two years later, when Malcolm was six, his father was run over by a streetcar, his body cut almost in half. Police called it an accident, but Malcolm insisted that his father had been bludgeoned by whites and placed across the tracks. Soon afterward his mother was committed to a mental asylum in Michigan.
In his youth, Malcolm prided himself on his reddish hair and light skin, an inheritance from his maternal grandfather, a white man. Years later he wrote in his autobiography: "I was for years insane enough to feel that it was some kind of status symbol to be light-complexioned. Now I hate every drop of that white rapist's blood that is in me."
He quit school after the eighth grade, eventually made his way to New York. Nicknamed "Big Red," he was a gangling zoot-suiter who fancied yellow-toed shoes and straightened his hair with lye in a scalp-searing process called "conking." He worked briefly as a waiter at Small's Paradise, still one of Harlem's top nightspots. But an honest dollar was not for Malcolm Little. He was caught pimping on the side and fired. He thereupon turned himself into a full-time hustler whose specialties were fixing up white men with Negro whores and Negro men with white whores. He peddled marijuana, became a cocaine addict and, to satisfy his $20-a-day craving, took to burglary. In 1946 he wound up with a ten-year prison sentence in Boston.
Bleached-Out. At the gloomy state prison in Charlestown, Malcolm copied a dictionary from A to Z. He wanted to improve his vocabulary, and he did. He was to become a spellbinding speaker.
More important, he learned in prison about the Black Muslims, an extremist sect founded in Detroit in 1930 by a shadowy peddler named W. D. Fard, and ruled since Fard's mysterious disappearance in 1934 by Elijah Muhammad. The Muslims offered Malcolm what Marcus Garvey had offered his father—and then some. They had caparisoned their movement with the trappings of religion, along with a mythology holding that the first human beings were Negroes. Other races—red, yellow and white—resulted only after a wicked and long-lived scientist named Yacub succeeded over many generations of genetic experiments in achieving a "bleached-out white race of people."