MalcolmX — from a Harlem junkie to the greatest African American leaders

Marius Jora
Sep 2, 2018 · 10 min read
Police mug shot of MaloclmX at 25 yers old. Picture credit: Aljazeera America

It is hard to portray anyone who hit bottom so hard to then set out the fight for civil rights in America.

Those who’ve read the biography of MalcolmX know about his ascent from the world of drugs and crime to one in which millions of blacks and whites, during the fifties and sixties, come to see X a unforgiving civil rights leader.

The story of someone who couldn’t read or write to later give now iconic speeches, is truly inspiring.


From his infancy, X was exposed to racial violence. It was X still was in the womb, when whites of the Klu Klux Klan threatened his family that lived in Omaha, Nebraska. MalcolmX was born on May 19, 1925 in Philadelphia. If this time Klansmen broke their windows, when X’s family moved to Lansing, Michigan, two whites set their house on fire, completely destroying it, while X and his family stood in the yard in their underwear watching the terror.

This was all against his father who according to The Black Legion — a hate society — he was spreading unrest among “the good negroes.”

X’s dad believed that blacks in America have no future, and they’d be better off moving back to Africa altogether. A belief he formed and advocated for after three of his brothers were killed by white racists. Later whites killed him, too.

So, for X racial violence against his family was normal, so much so he went saying,

“It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence.”

Even so, his dad campaigning for the black cause during the 1920s inspired X. But X campaign later was opposite to his dad’s; X didn’t see it why blacks must run away to Africa from whites, so he set out on a long journey to make America at home for blacks.

But until Malcom became such an activist, he was a legit junky.

“Through all of this time of my life, I really was dead — mentally dead. I just didn’t know that I was.”

One of the changing moments for X was when he took the bus to Boston at 16 to visit Ella, his sister. There, he suddenly felt immersed in what seemed to him an affluent black community.

“I didn’t know the world contained as many Negroes as I saw thronging downtown Roxbury at night, especially on Saturdays. Neon lights, nightclubs, poolhalls, bars, the cars they drove!”

It was when X saw blacks in Boston are realizing themselves, while at home his English teacher Mr. Ostrovski told X becoming a lawyer “was no realistic goal for a nigger” that his disdain for whites grew. So, by the end of his eighth grade, X was moving from Michigan to Boston, on the Weumbeck Street (the Harlem of Boston) taken in custody by Ella, his sister.

Ella not charging X for rent or any expenses, instead encouraging him first to get knowing the town, allowed X to understand how life works in Boston.

X met Shorty who also happened to be from Lensing, Michigan, in a pool bar who introduced X to how life in Boston works— about the slang, the Italian and Irish prostitutes. Shorty was the guy who found X the first job as a shoeshine boy in the Roseland State Ballrom.

However, X quickly learned that part of the money as a shoe shine came came as much as from hustles, such as selling liquor, weed joints, and hooking up whites with black whores as from mastering the tools of trade.

Although X polished the shoes for some famous musicians in the 60s like Johnny Hodges who jazzed for Duke Ellington, and other bands such as Count Boise, at the same time he indulged in his first booze, cigarette, and weed which accompanied playing cards and betting numbers.

All coming easy with the thrill of being accepted in spite of his country image, into the Shorty’s friends circle. “It all felt so great because I was accepted” X recalls.

So begun his transformation of blending in. The new hat and sky-blue suit he bought on credit and getting a painful conk (straighten the natural curly hair) like many blacks X saw getting. This is something years later he will had hated ever doing because he copied the way whites looked, instead of being proud of his black natural hair.

At sixteen but advantageously looking like 21, X did gigs in a drugstore selling soda, as a busboy, and finally in railroad as a dishwasher — which allowed him travel for free beyond Boston to Washington and New York.

It was in New York that X begun to spiral downwards. First, he was fired from the railroad because of loads of complaints and warnings— he cursed costumers, let alone he showed half-high on booze and weed to work.

Even so, as long as it lasted, the railroad allowed X to know New York, and particularly fall in love with Harlem. There at the Small’s Paradise bar, where since he went so often, the boss offered X a job as a waiter. It was 1942, X was 17.

In this job the young X was socialized and eventually nudged into a world of survival by various Harlemits.

I was schooled well, by experts in such hustles as the numbers, pimping, con games of many kinds, peddling dope, and thievery of all sorts, including armed robbery.

Althout Small’s was far from a criminal hangout, X recounts in his biography that the “world of hustlers” fascinated him, so he listened, secretly wanting to become one.

Again in his book this fascination comes again when X tells he quite enjoyed his first visit to Harlem one night, where pimps were looking to hook him up with white women.

“In one night New York and Harlem had just about nartcotized me.”

When X was fired from Small’s for offering to hook up an undercover agent with prostitutes, he fell back on this petty network, and started to sell weed joints to musicians he knew from the shoeshine job, while getting high himself.

“Suddenly, now, I was the peer of the other young hustlers I had admired.”

The $50–60 a day he made from weed at 17, allowed X to taste freedom insomuch as he came to dread a regular job.

But selling joints put X on the police watchlist. He begun to carry a gun and sleep in different rooms. From there on, X became a full-time junkie.

“I was a true hustler — uneducated, unskilled at anything honorable, and I considered myself nervy and cunning enough to live by my wits, exploiting any prey that presented itself. I would risk just about anything”

Being unable to peddle weed anymore because detectives knew him too well, X started to rob in the nearby town, sniff cocaine to numb his morals, carry multiple guns, run from police and bullets with his best pimp-friend Sammy, and finally steering rich and perverted white men to exclusive black prostitutes in Harlem, making as much as $100 dollars a night.

Now a thug on Harlem streets, it gotten to a point where X smoked opium and weed, taken Benzedrine, sniffed cocaine, and was sleep deprived — all in one evening.

I felt sensations I cannot describe, in all these different groves at the same time.

When Shorty picked X up back to Boston, because Harlem became dangerous for X and he for Harlem. After sleeping for days to revitalize, X continued the same notorious lifestyle in Boston.

So what changed X from a hustler to become the civil rights leader?

Back in Boston he involved Shorty, a friend of his, and two white women to burglarize rich houses. As the business was going well, it was when X made a foolish mistake. He turned out an expensive watch he’d stolen to fix in a shop, and the owner alerted the police. X was going to jail for ten years on an impossible $10,000 bail. This was February, 1946.


Repeatedly in his biography, X says that Harlem for him was survival.

“Full-time hustlers never can relax to appraise what they are doing and where they are bound”

If life in Harlem was incessant survival, in jail X had time to stop and reflect on his actions. Before prison and after his eight grade, anything X learned was related to hustling.

“And the streets had erased everything I’d ever learned in school”

He could barely write, let alone the English grammar.

Except family, virtually everyone in his network were hustlers of some kind. Once behind bars, however, X was lucky to meet Bambi, a read inmate who encouraged X to make use of the prison library.

That’s not to say prisons were ok. Rather luck was on X’s side.

Luck struck X again when his sister Ella was able to transfer X to an experimental jail, the Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts. For one, it had flushing toilets instead of covered buckets, but most importantly a rich library with vast collection on history inmates could freely walk in.

In this library X discovered what it truly meant to be a black person in America. He learned about the hundreds of slave ships brought to the West. X understood that his own misery in Harlem was due the white men oppression.

The truth was so bitter it made X unable to eat.

“I was going through the hardest thing […] for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.”

The history of racism made X see himself a victim of a bigger systemic problem. History promised an explanation that the street days aren’t his sole fault. He craved to forget the old and forge a truer identity.

“It is as though someone else I knew of had lived by hustling and crime.”

So, X set out to study. But since his language was slang, he couldn’t read books that contained words he’s never heard of.

“I’d never realized so many words existed! ”

Through a long and arduous journey X copied a whole dictionary, trying to understand words. He practiced writing by writing letters to his siblings. Later he was ready to begin to dig those books.

The new world books opened, made X forget he was in jail. He was even free.

“Up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.”

A life of books were infinitely more liberating for X than whatever sense of liberty the money he made from drugs or burglary previously offered him. If his old life of hustling made X sleep 3–4 hours a night, now books did the same. He read day and night in poor lighting which gave him astigmatism, thus his glass-thick eyeglasses. For one, the humble dark prison room gave X a space free of distractions which otherwise plagued the outside modern world.

As I mentioned, X developed a like for history, particularly black history, because it had given him the opportunity to create a new identity that had unbeatable historical evidence behind it. He read only nonfiction. Having had a history of drugs that were critical to escaping feeling bad about his crimes, a new form of escapism in form of novels was the least thing X wanted. In a way, books were his new high, the prison his college.

He read works, such as “Souls Of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois.

“Bois gave me a glimpse into the black people’s history before they came to this country.”

Then Frederick Olmstead, reporting on the horrors of the slave trades to the United States.

“Frederick Olmstead opened my eyes to the horrors suffered when the slave was landed in the United States.”

In the seminars of American history, being from an ex-soviet country, I was shocked to learn about the details of slavery horrors. The pictures bellow speak for themselves. The University of Virginia put together a bigger collection here.

The severe whipping of a slave, 1863.

And that’s what X discovered too, but his discovery was way more deep and earth-shuttering, since he was the suffering child of such slaves, with a vivid and on-ground experience of systemic racism in the cities of Boston and New York.

“I read descriptions of atrocities, saw those illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged off, never to be seen by their mothers again; of dogs after slaves, and of the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men with whips and clubs and chains and guns. ”

Whipping a Slave, Virginia, 19th cent.

Of course, there were other works X read. Yet many led him to the same conclusion.

“Those books were in providing indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world’s collective non-white man.”

Since the prison had a debate session once a week, X got his first tastes of public speaking there. “My baptism into public speaking” as X would say. He seized on any opportunity to bring up topics that involve black history, slavery, colonization, and the like, to give other “negroes” food for thought. At those debates he also realized that none among his inmates fellows knew what he knew, so right there he dedicated himself to enlighten the black folk as his lifelong journey.

Once he got out of prison after seven years, all this knowledge simply broke free. X now had an infinitely bigger audience.

“My reading had my mind like steam under pressure. ”


MalcolmX’s story shows awareness of ourselves through history, and the ability to see injustice in our everyday life, can uphold us from our most ignorant selfs to actors who fight for what’s right in our societies.

Marius Jora

Written by

Americanist from Europe. Focus on political economy, social change, and dignity for all. The Savage Blog —> http://mariusjora.com

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