The Slacker's Guide to U.S. History: The Bare Minimum on Discovering America, the Boston Tea Party, the California Gold Rush, and Lots of Other Stuff Dead White Guys Did (33 page)

With the sequel to the Great War over and the Korean conflict fading in the rearview mirror, black American men began to develop a call-the-doctor itch for equality. After Harry S. Truman ordered the integration of the United States military in 1947, black men were given the opportunity to live, work, and die with the more popular and more highly regarded white man.

Witnessing the ease in which a white man could get a table at a restaurant, tickets to a ball game, and purchase a car, men with African heritage took an interest in the benefits of the white man's lifestyle. Using the momentum developed by the Supreme Court ruling of 1954 calling for desegregation of U.S. public schools, black people across the United States took up the tussle for minority equality.

Instead of using the threat of death that gun-in-hand armed Robin Hoods use today to influence convenience store workers to politely and quickly put the day's revenue in a brown bag and graciously give it to them, African Americans in the earlier sixties began a much quieter movement centered on peaceful marches. Tens of thousands and at times hundreds of thousands of black people would congregate in political epicenters to kindly ask for the same opportunities that the American majority were experiencing.

Leading the way was a charismatic brutha named Martin Luther King. King met great resistance for his cause from the Confederate flag — worshipping southern males. It was obvious that King and his movement had a chance to become more than just a nuisance, threatening a real possibility of long lines at newly ordained mixed-race water fountains all around the country.
FEARING THIS OUTCOME, DEER-HUNTING, TOBACCO-CHEWING, BUSCH LIGHT — DRINKING REDNECKS PUT FORTH THE THEOLOGICAL PROPOSITION THAT GOD NEVER INTENDED TO CREATE ALL MEN EQUALLY.

Unfortunately for the white southerners, the attempt to equalize the races had the support of gigolo John, the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Many people hypothesized that JFK truly cared about the equality of African Americans. Others felt that he had yet to score with a woman of color and was simply using his presidential influence to equalize the rights of minorities in order to win the favor of black women. Although anxious to see the passage of a Civil Rights Act to boost his luck with black women, JFK never realized his dream, as former New Orleans resident and self-proclaimed Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald shot him dead in Dallas, Texas.

With the president dead, former vice president turned president Lyndon B. Johnson capitalized on the sympathies of legislators in the House and Senate to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a final tribute to JFK's wishes of equalizing the rights of minority Americans. Subsequently, tables at restaurants and tickets to ball games became increasingly more difficult to get with the added competition of hungry African American sports fans across the country.

Malcolm was one bad-ass non-Caucasian. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, Malcolm was Earl and Louise Little's bundle of joy. Malcolm's father was a Baptist minister who had developed a nonsexual crush on Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. The man who caught Earl's platonic eye headed up the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a national organization focused on parlaying blacks' favored wartime draft status into an improved draft status for African Americans in the National Basketball Association, along with civil rights for those not talented enough to play basketball at the highest level.

Fueling Earl's passion for equality was his mistrust of the white man. At the time of Malcolm's birth, three of Earl's brothers had already met an untimely death, including a Southern-style lynching at the suspected hands of the American majority. On a personal level, Earl also experienced a number of death threats that caused Louise and him to relocate the Little family several times.

While Malcolm was still a young child, his father met his own untimely death when he was hit by a streetcar named Ivory. Fortunately for the black community, the police reported that when they arrived at the scene Earl was conscious enough to tell them he had clumsily slipped and fell underneath the streetcar's wheel all on his own. He told the police to make sure everyone knew that no white man was involved in his death and that he apologized for any inconvenience his self-inflicted, yet accidental death would cause. Even with Earl's attempt to head off any issues, many people in the black community suspected that a white supremacist group called Black Legion was responsible for his death.

With Malcolm's father suffering the same fate as three of his brothers and his mother earning residency at a mental hospital, Malcolm spent the next several years being passed around like a joint at a high school party as he went from foster home to foster home. Despite his difficult upbringing, he excelled academically and finished at the top of his class in junior high. Benefiting from a chance career counseling session with one of his favorite teachers, he was famously told by his “white is better” educator that his goal of becoming a lawyer was “no realistic goal for a nigger.”

Malcolm quickly embraced the wise advice he received and lost interest in school. With the inconvenience of school out of his life, Malcolm began an apprenticeship in narcotics, gambling, and prostitution. Unfortunately for Malcolm, before he could complete his studies he was convicted of burglary charges in Boston and sentenced to ten years in prison.

While incarcerated, Malcolm read like a man with nothing to do. During his imprisonment, his brother Reginald would visit and discuss his conversion to the Muslim religion. Malcolm quickly became drawn to the teachings of the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Elijah M. had very little love for those who were not black and advocated that black people should have their own nation uninhabited by white people and polar bears. Paroled in 1952, Malcolm dropped his surname, Little, in favor of X in an effort to represent his lost tribal name as well as to intimidate white people. With an intimidating name and black power on his mind Malcolm prepared to fight the civil rights fight.

Malcolm's charisma and message drew frustrated African Americans to him as his reputation grew across the country as a radical civil rights leader. His outspoken nature and strong words led to government surveillance. On April 3, 1964, Malcolm gave his most famous speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet” in a church in Cleveland, Ohio. The speech centered on Malcolm X imploring African Americans to exercise their right to vote and to realize that those whom they had voted for in the past had not taken care of them.

The “Bullet” part of the speech was a message to blacks that if they were not given the equality they deserved, they should take up arms and fight for the rights promised to them as Americans. Malcolm X's support of violence turned full circle when he fell victim to sixteen bullets during a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Three members of the Nation of Islam were later convicted of his murder.