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Malcolm X: Black Muslims
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Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. At that time there were around 13 million blacks in America—the majority of them in the Southern States. They were mainly farmers and sharecroppers. In the North the blacks were concentrated in the industrial communities as industrial workers. In the South the Jim Crow laws had established a regime of apartheid, dividing Afro-Americans from the rest of society. The practical consequences of this law meant that black housing was separated from white housing, black kids had to study apart from white kids, and even public toilets were divided.
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Malcolm X was a fervent supporter of black separatism and spoke eloquently and bitterly against white people. A trip to Mecca in 1964 caused him to modify these views and he announced that he now embraced world unity. On February 21, 1965, he was assassinated at the Audobon Ballroom in Harlem by members of a rival organization.
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Lansing did not hold many opportunities of any kind for a young black man then, so without a particular plan, Malcolm X went to live with his half-sister, Ella, in Boston. Ella encouraged him to look around the city and get a feel for it before trying to land a job. Malcolm X looked, and almost immediately found trouble. He fell in with a group of gamblers and thieves, and began shining shoes at the Roseland State Ballroom. There he learned the trades that would eventually take him to jail--dealing in bootleg liquor and illegal drugs. Malcolm X characterized his life then as one completely lacking in self-respect.
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Although Malcolm X left no real institutional legacy, he did exert a notable impact on the Civil Rights Movement in the last year of his life. Black activists in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who had heard him speak to organizers in Selma, Alabama, in February 1965, began to support some of his ideas, especially on armed self-defense, racial pride, and the creation of black-run institutions. He ... gained a small following of radical Marxists, mostly Trotskyists in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Malcolm X convinced some SWP members of the revolutionary potential of ordinary black ghetto dwellers, and he began to speak more critically of capitalism.
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Though many believed that such an initiative signified racial progress, Malcolm X disagreed. Not only did conservative whites fail blacks, he maintained, so did "all these white liberals" who were supposedly allies. As he explains in this speech, many white liberals belonged to the Democratic party, which was often dominated by southern segregationists. Unlike white liberals and the NAACP, Malcolm X did not want blacks to integrate white hotels. He wanted blacks to own the hotels.
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The story of the Malcolm X Lounge extends back in history to a time when it was an office for the Navy Reserve Officers Training Corps. According to the Columbia archives, the University decided to end its NROTC program in 1968, and the room soon sank into abandonment. On April 20, 1970, six months after the Student Afro-American Society called for the creation of a black students' space, several students occupied the empty NROTC office and renamed it the Malcolm X Liberation Center, according to Christien Tompkins, CC '08, historian for the Black Students Organization.
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