Malcolm X Research Paper

Victoria Borichevskiy

History 17B

4 May 2015

Malcolm X: A Conviction of Faith

Malcolm X (also known as Malcolm Little and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) was born in Nebraska in 1925. According to The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, he first-handedly experienced and witnessed what it was like to grow up poor and black in America in the time before the Civil Rights Movement. Born to a family of seven children and having become nearly orphaned at a young age, he suffered the brutal realities of the foster care system. When he finally turned 14, he moved to Boston to live with his half-sister, Ella. Most of his experiences in these following years were due to him being submerged in these culturally dense areas, especially in New

He spent the next decade being a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam. This was around the time that Martin Luther King, Jr. was becoming a prominent leader in the Civil Rights Movement. Their ideas on how to fix the problems brought forth in the movement were very different, as evident by Malcolm X’s criticisms of Martin Luther King, Jr. King was fighting along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They wanted to ensure the political and social freedoms and equality for all people and planned to achieve this through peaceful protests, such as the March on Washington, or the “Farce on Washington,” as Malcolm X called it. “Groups of Negroes were talking of getting to Washington in any way they could… they envisioned thousands of black brothers converging together upon Washington – to lie down in the streets, on airport runways, on government lawns – demanding of the Congress and the White House some concrete civil rights action. This was a national bitterness; militant, unorganized, and leaderless” (Malcolm X, 284). Contrary to popular belief, even though he didn’t fully agree with King’s strategy to help the African Americans, he did respect him as a leader. “Now my feeling was that although the civil rights ‘leaders’ kept attacking us Muslims, still they were black

are very prominent and respected figures of the 20th century. Although their ideologies clashed more often than not, their hearts were in the right places and they did what needed to be done, as seen from their points of view. Personally, it is difficult for me to say which leader I would choose to follow. Both of these brilliant men put forth strong arguments which can only be outweighed by a person’s current situation and their experiences. While the blacks of America were fighting for their stolen rights by the whites, my people were being massacred by the millions in the Holocaust. My grandparents were left orphaned at a young age and my family has struggled to make it to where we are today. We lost everything; we lost our homes, our families, our pride, and our conviction. Seeing family killed before one’s eyes has a lasting effect on a person, as it did to my relatives, and it changed the way they raised their children and what values they passed on. To this day, I struggle to come to peace with all that has happened. All sense of culture was lost in the war; I grew up not even knowing how to speak Polish because my grandparents were relocated into a Russian community. It is very easy for me to understand and sympathize with Malcolm X’s ideology, as I also feel a rage to the people who can so shamelessly destroy human lives without any remorse and guilt. I do believe I would have it in me to find an inner wrath