WEBVTT 00:00:01.833 --> 00:00:31.044 [music] 00:00:31.044 --> 00:00:34.526 Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? 00:00:34.526 --> 00:00:38.461 Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? 00:00:38.461 --> 00:00:43.473 Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose, and the shape of your lips? 00:00:43.473 --> 00:00:49.461 Who taught you to hate yourself, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? 00:00:49.461 --> 00:00:52.357 Who taught you to hate your own kind? 00:00:52.357 --> 00:00:55.720 Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to 00:00:55.720 --> 00:00:59.222 So much so that you don't want to be around each other 00:00:59.222 --> 00:01:05.135 You know. Before you come asking Mr. Muhammad does he teach hate, you should ask yourself 00:01:05.135 --> 00:01:11.386 who taught you to hate being what God made you. 00:01:11.386 --> 00:01:14.755 Most of us, blacks, or negroes as he called us, 00:01:14.755 --> 00:01:16.890 really thought we were free, 00:01:16.890 --> 00:01:24.710 without being aware that in our subconscious, all those chains we thought had been struck off were still there 00:01:24.710 --> 00:01:30.463 And there were many ways, where what really motivated us 00:01:30.463 --> 00:01:35.694 was our desire to be loved by the white man. 00:01:35.694 --> 00:01:39.445 Malcolm meant to lance that sense of inferiority. 00:01:39.445 --> 00:01:40.442 He knew it would be painful. 00:01:40.442 --> 00:01:42.594 He knew that people could kill you because of it, 00:01:42.594 --> 00:01:50.235 but he dared to take that risk. 00:01:50.235 --> 00:01:58.515 He was saying something, over and above that of any other leader of that day 00:01:58.515 --> 00:02:05.073 While the other leaders were begging for entry into the house of their oppressor, 00:02:05.073 --> 00:02:10.545 he was telling you to build your own house. 00:02:10.545 --> 00:02:13.779 He expelled fear for African Americans. 00:02:13.779 --> 00:02:16.459 He said "I will speak out loud what you've been thinking" 00:02:16.459 --> 00:02:21.829 and he said "You'll see, people will hear, and it will not do anything to us, necessarily, ok? 00:02:21.829 --> 00:02:25.001 But I will not speak it for the masses of people." 00:02:25.001 --> 00:02:30.886 When he said it in a very strong fashion, in this very manly fashion, in this fashion that says, 00:02:30.886 --> 00:02:34.239 "I am not afraid to say what you've been thinking all these years." 00:02:34.239 --> 00:02:36.150 That's why we loved him 00:02:36.150 --> 00:02:38.853 He said it out loud, not behind closed doors, 00:02:38.853 --> 00:02:43.624 He took on America for us. 00:02:43.624 --> 00:02:49.026 And I, for one, as a Muslim believe that the white man is intelligent enough. 00:02:49.026 --> 00:02:53.689 If he were made to realize how Black people really feel 00:02:53.689 --> 00:02:58.110 and how fed up we are without that old compromising sweet talk 00:02:58.110 --> 00:03:00.903 Why, you're the one who make it hard for yourself. 00:03:00.903 --> 00:03:03.922 The white man believes you when you go through with that old sweet talk 00:03:03.922 --> 00:03:07.039 'cause you've been sweet talking to him ever since he brought you here 00:03:07.039 --> 00:03:08.670 Stop sweet talking him! 00:03:08.670 --> 00:03:10.453 Tell him how you feel! 00:03:10.453 --> 00:03:23.652 Tell him how, what kind of hell you've been catching, and let him know that if he's not ready to clean his house up, if he's not ready to clean his house up, 00:03:23.652 --> 00:03:30.863 He shouldn't have a house. It should catch on fire, and burn down... 00:03:30.863 --> 00:03:39.340 [applause] 00:03:39.340 --> 00:03:51.162 [drums and music] 00:03:51.162 --> 00:03:56.916 On these Harlem street corners, for most of this century, Black people have celebrated their culture, 00:03:56.916 --> 00:04:02.114 and argued the question of race in America. 00:04:02.114 --> 00:04:09.610 It was here that Malcolm first joined the street orators who gave voice to Harlem's hope, and its anger. 00:04:09.610 --> 00:04:20.294 I've taught nationalism, and that means that I want to go out of this white man's country, because integration will never happen 00:04:20.294 --> 00:04:23.738 You will never, as long as you live, 00:04:23.738 --> 00:04:29.470 integrate into the white men's system 00:04:29.470 --> 00:04:31.982 A hundred and twenty-fifth street and Seventh Avenue was 00:04:31.982 --> 00:04:38.758 the center of activity among the black street orators. 00:04:38.758 --> 00:04:42.613 When Malcolm arrived, technically he had no corner. 00:04:42.613 --> 00:04:51.935 So he established his base, you might say, in front of Elder Michaux's bookstore. 00:04:51.935 --> 00:05:09.314 When Malcolm would ascent the little platform, he didn't, he couldn't talk for the first four, five minutes. 00:05:09.314 --> 00:05:15.750 The people would be making such a praise-shout to him 00:05:15.750 --> 00:05:20.425 and he would stand there, taking his due. 00:05:20.425 --> 00:05:24.518 and then he would open his mouth. 00:05:24.518 --> 00:05:28.661 They call Mr. Muhammad a hate-teacher 00:05:28.661 --> 00:05:32.295 because he makes you hate dope and alcohol. 00:05:32.295 --> 00:05:36.088 They call Mr. Muhammad a black supremacist 00:05:36.088 --> 00:05:40.075 because he teaches you and me not only that we are as good as the white man, 00:05:40.075 --> 00:05:44.970 but better than the white man. 00:05:44.970 --> 00:05:47.854 Yes, better than the white man. 00:05:47.854 --> 00:05:49.875 You are better than the white man 00:05:49.875 --> 00:05:51.905 and that's not saying anything. 00:05:51.905 --> 00:05:55.091 That's not saying, you know we're just as equal with him. 00:05:55.091 --> 00:05:57.585 Who is he to be equal with? 00:05:57.585 --> 00:05:59.136 You look at his skin 00:05:59.136 --> 00:06:01.626 You can't compare your skin with his skin, 00:06:01.626 --> 00:06:09.493 Why your skin look like gold beside his skin. 00:06:09.493 --> 00:06:13.417 There was a time when we used to drool in the mouth over white people. 00:06:13.417 --> 00:06:17.576 We thought they were pretty 'cause we were blind, we were dumb. 00:06:17.576 --> 00:06:19.716 We couldn't see them as they are. 00:06:19.716 --> 00:06:24.563 But since the honorable Elijah Muhammad has come and taught us the religion of Islam, 00:06:24.563 --> 00:06:28.808 which have cleaned us up, and made us so we can see for ourselves 00:06:28.808 --> 00:06:33.532 now we can see that old pale thing to look exactly as he look 00:06:33.532 --> 00:06:40.960 nothing but an old, pale thing. 00:06:40.960 --> 00:06:43.997 I came away from that rally feeling that with him 00:06:43.997 --> 00:06:45.968 once you heard him speak, 00:06:45.968 --> 00:06:50.811 you never went back to where you were before. 00:06:50.811 --> 00:06:56.654 You had to, even if you kept your position you had to rethink it. 00:06:56.654 --> 00:06:58.763 We weren't accustomed to being told that we were devils 00:06:58.763 --> 00:07:04.095 and that we were oppressors up here in our wonderful northern cities. 00:07:04.095 --> 00:07:09.210 He was speaking for a silent mass of black people 00:07:09.210 --> 00:07:18.524 and sang it out front on the devil's own airwaves, and that was an act of war. 00:07:18.524 --> 00:07:22.486 When he came off the stage, I jumped off the island, 00:07:22.486 --> 00:07:27.095 walked up to him, and of course when I got to him the bodyguards, 00:07:27.095 --> 00:07:30.654 you know, moved in front, and he just pushed them away. 00:07:30.654 --> 00:07:33.266 And I went in front of him and extended my hand, 00:07:33.266 --> 00:07:41.742 and said "I liked some of what you said. I didn't agree with what, all that you said, but I liked some of what you said" 00:07:41.742 --> 00:07:45.609 And he looked at me, held my hand in a very gentle fashion and says 00:07:45.609 --> 00:07:52.943 "One day you will, Sister. One day you will, Sister", and he smiled. 00:07:52.943 --> 00:07:58.529 To make his message clear, Malcolm used his own life as a lesson for all black Americans. 00:07:58.529 --> 00:08:04.029 He preached it in fables and parables 00:08:04.029 --> 00:08:07.264 and later, in writing his autobiography with Alex Haley, 00:08:07.264 --> 00:08:13.962 he sought some control over how his life would be interpreted in the future. 00:08:13.962 --> 00:08:19.027 I would be rather taken by a statement he would make of himself 00:08:19.027 --> 00:08:21.959 He would say "I am a part of all I have met" 00:08:21.959 --> 00:08:27.945 and by that he meant that all the things he had done in his earlier life had exposed him to things 00:08:27.945 --> 00:08:31.016 and taught him skills of one or another sort, 00:08:31.016 --> 00:08:39.692 all of which had synthesized into the Malcolm who became the spokesman for the Nation of Islam. 00:08:39.692 --> 00:08:41.432 You were born in Omaha, is that right? 00:08:41.432 --> 00:08:42.026 Yes sir 00:08:42.026 --> 00:08:44.861 And you left, your familiy left Omaha when you were about one year old? 00:08:44.861 --> 00:08:46.477 I imagine about a year old. 00:08:46.477 --> 00:08:47.746 Why did they leave Omaha? 00:08:47.746 --> 00:08:54.649 Well, to my understanding, the Ku Klux Klan burned down one of their homes in Omaha 00:08:54.649 --> 00:08:55.605 There's a lot of Ku Klux Klan 00:08:55.605 --> 00:08:57.585 They made your family feel very unhappy, I'm sure. 00:08:57.585 --> 00:08:59.496 Well, insecure, if not unhappy. 00:08:59.496 --> 00:09:01.446 So you must have a somewhat prejudiced point of view, 00:09:01.446 --> 00:09:02.894 a personally prejudiced point of view 00:09:02.894 --> 00:09:07.123 In other words, you cannot look at this in a broad, academic sort of way, really, can you? 00:09:07.123 --> 00:09:10.334 I think that's incorrect, because despite the fact that that happened in Omaha 00:09:10.334 --> 00:09:13.734 and then when we moved to Lansing, Michigan,our home was burned down again 00:09:13.734 --> 00:09:15.942 in fact my father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, 00:09:15.942 --> 00:09:21.000 and despite all of that, no one was more thoroughly integrated with whites than I 00:09:21.000 --> 00:09:24.606 No one has lived more so in the society of whites than I. 00:09:24.606 --> 00:09:28.369 We were the only black children in the neighborhood 00:09:28.369 --> 00:09:33.041 but on the back of our property we had a wooded area, 00:09:33.041 --> 00:09:36.620 so the white kids would all come over to our house and they'd go back and play in the woods. 00:09:36.620 --> 00:09:39.786 So Malcolm would say "Well let's go play Robin Hood" 00:09:39.786 --> 00:09:43.622 Well, so we'd go back there to play Robin Wood 00:09:43.622 --> 00:09:47.108 Robin Hood was Malcolm. 00:09:47.108 --> 00:09:53.154 and these white kids would go along with it. 00:09:53.154 --> 00:09:59.038 Malcolm said he was the lightest skinned of the seven children born to Earl and Louise Little, 00:09:59.038 --> 00:10:09.705 a reminder, he said, of the white man who had raped his mother's mother. 00:10:09.705 --> 00:10:15.291 In 1929, when Malcolm was four years old, his father, a carpenter and preacher, 00:10:15.291 --> 00:10:21.388 moved the family to Lansing, Michigan. 00:10:21.388 --> 00:10:28.926 Lansing was a small town and the west side was the side of town that blacks lived on. 00:10:28.926 --> 00:10:34.992 Malcolm and his family lived outside of the city 00:10:34.992 --> 00:10:40.046 and they had a four-acre parcel with a small house on it, 00:10:40.046 --> 00:10:46.244 so they were sort of considered as farmers. 00:10:46.244 --> 00:10:54.351 Three months after the Littles moved in, white neighbors took legal action to evict them. 00:10:54.351 --> 00:10:59.784 A county judge ruled that the farm property was restricted to whites only. 00:10:59.784 --> 00:11:06.701 But Earl Little refused to move. 00:11:06.701 --> 00:11:14.592 Here in Michigan, Ku Klux Klan membership was at least 70,000, five times more than in Mississippi. 00:11:14.592 --> 00:11:22.233 For Malcolm's family, white hostility was a fact of life. 00:11:22.233 --> 00:11:30.330 Everybody was asleep in our house and all of a sudden, we heard a big boom. 00:11:30.330 --> 00:11:38.661 And when we woke up, fire was everywhere and everybody was running into the walls and into each other, you know. 00:11:38.661 --> 00:11:42.224 Well, what I recall about that was my mother telling us to, 00:11:42.224 --> 00:11:48.122 "Get up, get up, get up, the house is on fire," and to get out. That's what I actually recall. 00:11:48.122 --> 00:11:51.492 I could hear my mother yelling, I hear my father yelling. 00:11:51.492 --> 00:11:56.561 And so they made sure they got us all rounded up and got us out. 00:11:56.561 --> 00:12:02.846 The house burned down to the ground. No firewagon came, nothing, and we were burned out. 00:12:02.846 --> 00:12:09.382 Malcolm's father, Earl Little, accused local whites of setting the fire. 00:12:09.382 --> 00:12:17.748 The police accused Earl and arrested him on suspicion of arson. The charges were later dropped. 00:12:17.748 --> 00:12:22.681 In the city where we grew up, whites could refer to us as "those uppity niggers," or, 00:12:22.681 --> 00:12:27.162 "those smart niggers that live out south of town." 00:12:27.162 --> 00:12:35.456 In those days, whenever a white person referred to you as a "smart nigger," that was their way of saying, "This is a nigger you have to watch because he's not dumb." 00:12:35.456 --> 00:12:41.724 My father was independent. He didn't want anybody to feed him. 00:12:41.724 --> 00:12:46.778 He wanted to raise his own food. He didn't want anybody to exercise authority over his children. 00:12:46.778 --> 00:12:51.022 He wanted to exercise the authority, and he did. 00:12:51.022 --> 00:12:58.864 He was always speaking in terms of Marcus Garvey's way of thinking and trying to get black people to organize themselves, 00:12:58.864 --> 00:13:04.334 not to cause any trouble, but just to do, to work in unity with each other 00:13:04.334 --> 00:13:08.073 toward improving their conditions. 00:13:08.073 --> 00:13:15.566 But in those days if you did that, you were still considered a troublemaker. 00:13:15.566 --> 00:13:18.207 In the 1920's Marcus Garvey, 00:13:18.207 --> 00:13:25.965 a black nationalist, preached that black Americans should build a nation independent of white society. 00:13:25.965 --> 00:13:35.575 With membership in the hundreds of thousands, Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association sought closer ties with African countries. 00:13:35.575 --> 00:13:49.124 The UNIA had its own flag, its own national anthem and an African legion pledged to defend black people at home and abroad. 00:13:49.124 --> 00:13:56.590 The U.S. Bureau of Investigation labeled Garvey, "one of the prominent Negro agitators." 00:13:56.590 --> 00:14:04.514 The federal government deported him in 1927, but Malcolm's parents remained Garveyites. 00:14:04.514 --> 00:14:06.829 Earl recruited new members. 00:14:06.829 --> 00:14:13.004 Louise wrote for the Garvey newspaper. 00:14:13.004 --> 00:14:18.469 My mother is the one who would read to us the Garvey paper, which was called The Negro World. 00:14:18.469 --> 00:14:22.901 and she also would talk to us about ourselves as being independent. 00:14:22.901 --> 00:14:28.808 We shouldn't be calling ourself "Negroes," or "niggers" and that we were black people 00:14:28.808 --> 00:14:33.260 and that we should be proud to call ourself black people. 00:14:33.260 --> 00:14:34.807 What is your real name? 00:14:34.807 --> 00:14:36.734 Malcolm. Malcolm X. 00:14:36.734 --> 00:14:38.137 Is that your legal name? 00:14:38.137 --> 00:14:40.150 As far as I'm concerned, it's my legal name. 00:14:40.150 --> 00:14:42.907 Would you mind telling me what your father's last name was? 00:14:42.907 --> 00:14:44.898 My father didn't know his last name. 00:14:44.898 --> 00:14:50.930 My father got his last name from his grandfather and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slavemaster. 00:14:50.930 --> 00:14:53.404 The real names of our people were destroyed 00:14:53.404 --> 00:14:54.290 Well, was there any 00:14:54.290 --> 00:14:55.544 during slavery. 00:14:55.544 --> 00:15:03.710 Was there any line, any point in the genealogy of your family when you did have to use a last name and if so, what was it? 00:15:03.710 --> 00:15:05.846 The last name of my forefathers 00:15:05.846 --> 00:15:06.405 Yes? 00:15:06.405 --> 00:15:09.910 was taken from them when they were brought to America and made slaves, 00:15:09.910 --> 00:15:16.284 and then the name of the slavemaster was given, which we refuse, we reject that name today and refuse to 00:15:16.284 --> 00:15:22.356 You mean, you won't even tell me what your father's supposed last name was or gifted last name was? 00:15:22.356 --> 00:15:29.054 I never acknowledge it whatsoever. 00:15:29.054 --> 00:15:32.442 September 1931 00:15:32.442 --> 00:15:38.990 Malcolm was six years old when his mother had a premonition. 00:15:38.990 --> 00:15:42.699 We were all at the house and we had dinner, supper together. 00:15:42.699 --> 00:15:46.683 And my mother was holding Wesley, who was my youngest brother. 00:15:46.683 --> 00:15:50.698 And she may have been nursing him, 'cause she was at the table, and she fell asleep, 00:15:50.698 --> 00:15:52.689 nursing, holding the baby. 00:15:52.689 --> 00:15:57.864 And my father had gotten up and went in the bedroom to clean up and to go down and collect money. 00:15:57.864 --> 00:16:02.463 And she woke up and she said, "Earl, Earl, don't go downtown." 00:16:02.463 --> 00:16:06.332 She says, "If you go, you won't come back." 00:16:06.332 --> 00:16:12.617 That night around 11 o'clock, Earl Little was found in an isolated area outside Lansing, 00:16:12.617 --> 00:16:18.716 his body almost cut in two by the wheels of a streetcar. 00:16:18.716 --> 00:16:23.684 The police reported Earl Little's death an accident. 00:16:23.684 --> 00:16:29.531 There was a cloud over that whole issue because, at the time, 00:16:29.531 --> 00:16:42.463 it was perceived that rather than an accident with a streetcar that Earl Little had really been pushed under the wheels of the streetcar. 00:16:42.463 --> 00:16:43.983 As a matter of fact, 00:16:43.983 --> 00:16:47.298 I remember hearing just that language, 00:16:47.298 --> 00:16:53.254 that he was probably pushed under the wheels of that streetcar. 00:16:53.254 --> 00:16:55.485 And my father's death caused a great 00:16:55.485 --> 00:16:57.574 great shock in the family, 00:16:57.574 --> 00:16:59.220 because he was the power. 00:16:59.220 --> 00:17:00.554 He was the strength. 00:17:00.554 --> 00:17:01.673 We were organized, 00:17:01.673 --> 00:17:02.906 we were a structured family. 00:17:02.906 --> 00:17:04.333 When I'd get out of school, 00:17:04.333 --> 00:17:07.124 when we got out of school, me and my brothers and sisters, 00:17:07.124 --> 00:17:08.883 we'd come right home and go to work 00:17:08.883 --> 00:17:11.640 in the garden, clean up the chicken shed and get ready for the night, 00:17:11.640 --> 00:17:13.438 and get up in the morning and all this. 00:17:13.438 --> 00:17:15.279 We'd pump the water and bring it in the house and all this. 00:17:15.279 --> 00:17:17.381 This was while Dad was alive, 00:17:17.381 --> 00:17:21.888 because to not do this brought the consequences of a whipping. 00:17:21.888 --> 00:17:24.687 So we were disciplined. 00:17:24.687 --> 00:17:28.203 And then after my father got killed 00:17:28.203 --> 00:17:33.187 and my mother's inability to run as fast as I could run or Malcolm 00:17:33.187 --> 00:17:35.678 enabled us to get away with a lot of things 00:17:35.678 --> 00:17:38.078 we wouldn't have tried to get away with. 00:17:38.078 --> 00:17:43.364 So we got looser and looser. 00:17:43.364 --> 00:17:48.975 Louise Little struggled to raise her seven children through the years of the Great Depression. 00:17:48.975 --> 99:59:59.999 She's reduced to where she has no income. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 She'd try to get -- she got jobs. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 She was a proud lady. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 She had a lot of pride. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 She sold. She crocheted gloves for people. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 She did a lot of things not to be dependent solely on welfare. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 She didn't like them telling her what she could do and what she couldn't do. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And this is one of the main things that devastated her more than anything else. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 As time went by, you could see she was wearing down. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For seven years, as Malcolm grew into adolescence, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 his mother slowly withdrew from her family. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Two days before Christmas, 1938, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Louise Little was diagnosed as paranoid and was sent to Kalamazoo State Hospital. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And when I came home from school one day and she wasn't there, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I can remember being empty 'cause my mother had never left us. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I felt, you know, the pain of her being gone every day, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it was only going to be a couple of weeks, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you know. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 She was going to get better and come right back home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And it turned into years. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Louise Little would remain at Kalamazoo for the next 26 years. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The 13-year-old Malcolm watched as the court split up his family, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 assigning the younger children to foster homes in Lansing 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and sending him to a white community 10 miles away. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In the past, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If I take my hand and slap you, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you don't even feel it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It might sting you because these digits are separated. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He was a man who, in the eighth grade in Michigan 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a school where I think he was the only black in his class and one of the very few in the school 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 had been an outstanding straight-A student, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you know, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who had been in fact the president of his class, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and all the others were white in the eighth grade. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Obviously, he had to be exceptional to be those things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And then you had the Malcolm who had left school and who had gone to Roxbury, Massachusetts 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 where he had gotten his first exposure to what might loosely be called "hustling." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I called myself little hustler up in Roxbury in those days. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And this particular day, you know, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Malcolm X had come into Boston and he had on his zoot suit with the wide-brim hat 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with the long, three-quarter-length coat with the chain that went down to your ankles. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I don't know, the last time I recall, Cab Callowy used that outfit for his stage uniform. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, when Malcolm left Lansing, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he had nothing but a old square suit on 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "white man's suit," 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as I call it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When he came back from Boston, oh Lord, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Malcolm had a zoot suit on and a wide-brim hat 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and a chain from his hat down onto his lapel 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and he was the talk of the town. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Everybody was talking about Malcolm. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And then when he was dancing on the floor and he was floating around, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 those pants were like he was a floating balloon, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with -- that coat was like a wing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The way he'd be dancing and flying around with the big, 10-gallon hat on and the chain flinging. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And this used to really shake up the girls. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In Boston, they called him "New York Red. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In New York, they called him "Detroit Red." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He had his hair crockonoed, "conked," you know. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It was red and he had pictures of him and Billie Holiday 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and all these people at the time out there who were just being made known to the rest of the black world. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Malcolm worked the kitchen crew on the New Haven Railroad between Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In 1942, he moved to Harlem and at age 17 began traveling in a world of after-hour clubs and small-time hustlers. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He reached a point where he said, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "You'll never make it on these janitor jobs and selling sandwiches on these trains and shining shoes and stuff like." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He says, "You never will get anywhere." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, he had the reputation as being a hustler and he was a street person, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but he wasn't a hustler. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He was a con man, yeah, a con artist. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They called him an artist. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When the white folks came out at night and they wanted black women, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he could arrange for them to get them. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If they wanted bootleg whiskey, he knew where to get it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If they wanted drugs, he knew where to get it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He made it possible that he knew what they wanted and he knew where to get it 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and he would be in the middle where he could make a profit off of it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And this is the way he started doing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Looking back at that time, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Malcolm said only three things worried him 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 jail, a job and the Army. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 To avoid serving in World War II, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he told his draft board that he wanted to organize black soldiers to kill whites. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He was judged unfit for the military. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Malcolm's gambling and drugs and Harlem nightlife were expensive. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He had already been arrested twice for petty crimes. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When he moved back to Boston in 1945, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he organized a gang to burglarize homes of prominent families. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The other gang members included his friend Malcolm Jarvis, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 his white girlfriend, Bea, and two other white women.