Following Garvey’s teaching that the Negroes should go into business, Mr. Little then set out to build his own store. Soon after this, according to Malcolm, “my father was found with his head bashed and his body mangled under a streetcar.” Malcolm Shabazz to this day remains convinced that his father was lynched by white people who resented even the prospect of a Negro gaining some economic independence. With his father’s death, Malcolm’s family was forced to separate. In moving terms, clenching his fists, and at times breaking into tears, Malcolm has described to me how his mother boiled dandelion greens from day to day trying to keep her eleven children from starving to death. “We stayed dizzy and sick because we stayed hungry.” At night Malcolm and his brothers would go out and steal what food they could to fill their stomachs. The Littles were a clannish bunch. They struggled to stay together, but the pangs of hunger were too great, and they were ripped apart. Malcolm was sent to an institution for boys.
This turned out to be the second molding factor in the life of Malcolm X. He was one of the few Negroes—if not the only one—in the institution and he developed a warm love for the white matron who defended him when other kids were “kicking him around.” In the only complimentary statement I have heard him make about a white person, Malcolm says of the matron, “She was good to me. I followed her around like a little puppy. I was a kind of mascot.” She arranged for him to attend a near-by school where, although he was the only Negro pupil, his keen mind put him at the head of the class, which only gained him the resentment of both the teacher and the pupils.
“When I was in the eighth grade,” Malcolm says, “they asked me what I wanted to become. I told them I wanted to study law. But they told me that law was not a suitable profession for a Negro. They suggested that I think of a trade such as carpentry.”
That ripped it! Malcolm soon left school and came east to New York, and in a matter of weeks penetrated the underworld where he became a trusted lieutenant. Malcolm’s early days in the underworld are described in unpublished notes by writer Alex Haley in the following words:
Admitted to the underworld’s fringes, sixteen-year-old Malcolm absorbed all he heard and saw. He swiftly built up a reputation for honesty by turning over every dollar due his boss (“I have always been intensely loyal”). By the age of 18, Malcolm was versatile “Big Red.” He hired from four to six men variously plying dope, numbers, bootleg whiskey and diverse forms of hustling. Malcolm personally squired well-heeled white thrill-seekers to Harlem sin dens, and Negroes to white sin downtown. “My best customers were preachers and social leaders, police and all kinds of big shots in the business of controlling other people’s lives.”
His income often reached as high as two thousand dollars a month. And I have heard Malcolm talk of paying off the cops from a thousand-dollar bankroll which he pulled from the pocket of his two-hundred-dollar suit. But not even “Big Red” had enough money to pay all of the policemen and eventually Malcolm X went to prison for burglary.
It was in 1947, in the maximum security prison at Concord, Massachusetts, that Malcolm was converted to the teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad by one of his fellow prisoners who was a member of the Detroit temple. From that moment Malcolm has neither smoked, cursed, drunk, nor run after women. He is the most puritanical man I have ever met. I have interviewed him scores of times but he will not meet me for an interview at any place where liquor is sold. He does not object to my smoking, but in polite terms he makes it understood that he would rather I didn’t smoke around him. I have entertained him in my home along with other guests, and he has sat relaxed on the floor as we drink. He has never taken anything but coffee, although he knows full well that none of us would ever betray him.
Indeed, it is around the widely known and deeply admired morality of Malcolm X that one of the few pieces of humor about the Muslim movement came into being.
The story is that Malcolm was attempting to convert a Negro Baptist to the teaching of Islam.
“What are the rules of your organization?” the Negro asked.