◆ SpookStack

Sev. 5-27-63) bie © Malcolm’ 5 ’ Life— Marked by Irony ' was the son of a minister and he became a dope addict. He was the brightest student in his grammar school classes and he never got through high, schoo]. He hated white people! and he fixed them up with| Negro prostitutes. He was Saint and a former pimp, and even in the last five years of; his life, when he had settled | firmly into the fiery Black Na-} tionalist image he had created || for himself, Malcolm X never escaped the contradictions, His killing today, at 29, was the ultimate irony. Malcolm v ato ¢n oth m= Was shot tw iCal by Ne groes. He hated whites. He insisted he hated whites. But some- how, it was hard to believe him. Always on his face there was the slight smile, the ironic smile that mocked his words even when he has making the most outrageous statements, It was his pitch, his hatred for the white man, but it never seemed to be his conviction. Shows Courtesy I never saw Maleolm X treat a white man unkindly. In the balcony of the Assem- bly chamber in Albany, he was soft and gentle to the! white police guards who sur- rounded him. In a loft above 4 theater in Harlem, he was} courteous to a white man who! considered renting him space.{ In his office, among his aides, he invariebly had time for al visiting white man. He did not offer solutions. He offered |: slogans and shouts of violence} and calls to the street, and, _ Mostly, he offered words. He could talk. He was ob sessed with language, obsessed with words, and he spilled them out, in rallies, in con- versations, in interviews. He rapped himself in words He contradicted himself with’ nre- j dictable regularity. He eo al-| ‘TG MART L196 Q . i Bach when he was still] ! ‘ By Dick Schaap Herald Tribune News Service ' NEW YORK, Feb. 21—He |” He joved Elijah Mubammad| - with a fierce love that no one Black Muslim working in the Black Muslim[ organization. “Elijah Muham-} mad has seen Allah,” he used to say. Then, when Malcoim split ‘with Muhammad, he jated with unequaled passion. Background o Violenga background violence. He was born in Omaha, Neb., one ef 10 children of the Rev. Earl Little, a Baptist minister] whose main faith was in Mar-] cus Garvey, the fierce Black |’ Nationalist. . The Ku Klux Kian marched on Mr, Little’s home shortly before Malcolm was born, and years later, sitting in the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Mal- colm liked to say that he met the white devils while he was still in the womb. ‘My father was the color of this,” he once said, pointing to his black shoes, “and my: mother, whose mother was raped by a white man, was light enough to pass for white. TI hate every drop of white blood in me “because it is the blood of a rapist.” The Little family moved to Milwaukee shorty after Mal- Jop- 37934, NOT PFCORDED 176 FEB 26 1965 a cc Tolson Belmont Mohr Casper Callahan Conrad DeLoach Evans _ QaRosen his elass, and when re anea \” Sullivan down.-A year later, his father Tavel ‘was killed, found dead under Trotter ‘a streetcar. Malcolm always Tele Room [ sisted that his father had Holmes been lynched. Gandy ‘We was separated from his | mother, sent to a school in Michigan where he, again, was the Idne Negro. He did weil, ibut by the age of 16, he had fled to Harlem, and there he became “Big Red.” He was; always tall, and his hair had ‘a red tinge, and the nickname i grew naturally out of his phys- ical appearance. But there was more. He was bad. He smoked marijuana and then he sold it, He ran oum- |bers. He sold bootleg whiskey. 'He conducted tours of Har- jem brothels for visiting, whites. ' He was only a teen-ager, but; ‘he moved fist. He was mak. | jing perhaps ! 2000 a week be- jfore he w; $$ 20. Then he ' planned a big robbery, a rob-. bery in Boston, and he was caught He was sent to a ‘maximum security prison in (Concord, Mass. and it was there, in 1947, "when he was, wonne nla ¢hat he wae enon- ae “A verted to the Black Muslim doctrine. —. ' He worked in Detroit for khington Daily News ,two years after being released. ying star ‘from prison in 1952, then dimes Herald ‘‘eame to New York to head rk Herald Tribune Muslim Mosque No. 7 in 1034. tri Journal-American Malcolm acquired power,'tk Dally News but it was a strange power.|4& Post ‘He hever directly led an in- * York Times cident of violence = preached violence, but no one /*** ever saw him in a fight. ¢ Leader | By the end of the 19508, |) street Journal ‘Malcolm X was, beyond ques- ition, the No, 2 man in the ‘Black Muslim movement, Ell- 4ah Muhammad's most valu- bie lieutenant. He preached his hatred for the whites gtrongest then, in the early p60s and there were rumors that his followers and isan! oe ae ate _ tk Mirror dona] Observer World eee w2e- &3 ?