Malcolm X's dishwashing friend in Harlem became the comedian Redd Foxx
Before he was Malcolm X, he was Detroit Red, a Harlem hustler whose red-haired pal from Chicago later found fame as Redd Foxx. A burglary sentence in 1946 changed everything. In prison he became a ferocious reader, joined the Nation of Islam, and emerged as one of its most powerful voices.
Malcolm Little was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of seven children of Earl Little, a Baptist minister, and Louise, a seamstress born in Grenada. Both admired Marcus Garvey and taught their children black pride. Ku Klux Klan threats pushed the family to Lansing, Michigan, where their house burned in 1929. Earl died in 1931 in what was officially ruled a streetcar accident, though Louise believed a white supremacist group killed him. After Louise was committed to a state hospital in 1938, the children were split among foster homes; she was released 24 years later.
He did well in junior high, but dropped out after a white teacher told him his dream of becoming a lawyer was unrealistic for someone of his race. From Boston he drifted to Harlem in 1943, working on the railway and in the underworld. At Jimmy's Chicken Shack he washed dishes beside John Elroy Sanford, nicknamed Chicago Red, later Redd Foxx. In 1946 he was arrested collecting a stolen watch he had left for repair and was sentenced to eight to ten years.
Prison remade him. A self-taught inmate, John Bembry, impressed him by commanding respect through words alone, and Malcolm began to read voraciously. When his brother Reginald wrote in 1948 telling him to give up pork and cigarettes, he did so almost at once, then wrote to the Nation's leader, Elijah Muhammad. By 1950 he signed himself Malcolm X, the letter standing for an African family name he could never know.
Paroled in 1952, he built temples from Detroit to Harlem and was the organisation's public face for 12 years, arguing for Black separation and criticising Martin Luther King Jr. Disillusioned in the 1960s, he made the Hajj, embraced Sunni Islam and broke away. He was assassinated in New York on February 21, 1965; in 2021 two of the three convictions were vacated.
Source: Malcolm X
