My class was cancelled this evening. So I had some unexpected time on my hands. I went to Bingo. I didn’t win. I explained to the man calling out the numbers that I hadn’t gone to Bingo to sit next to a bunch of old giffers and put ink splots on a numbered sheet. That, I explained, was not my idea of six dollars worth of fun. I didn’t want to fund some coffin-dodger’s latest nostril hair perm with my six dollars. I had gone there to win, and given that I hadn’t, I wanted my money back.
I decided to learn about Malcolm Xmas after I got thrown out of the Bingo. This is what I found out.
Malcolm Little was sentenced to ten years in the big house because some dudes found him guilty of burglary in 1946. This was just after some war in which it turns out it is okay to steal some land if you have ‘United’ in your name, but not ‘Adolf’. Malcolm watched the success of the United Nations, and resolved to change his name. ‘Little’ wasn’t really helping him in his career in any case. (Top tip kids, if you hang out on the East coast of the US, don’t choose a size based moniker – look what happened to Biggie Smalls in 1997, and to Malcolm Little in 1965, but now I’m getting ahead of myself).
Before his arrest in 1946, Malcolm is alleged to have coordinated a prostitution ring in Harlem New York. A prostitution ring is where a rich business-man is surrounded by a chain of naked prostitutes all holding hands. If they are facing him, this is a regular prostitution ring. If they are all facing outwards, it is known as goofy.
His brother, Reg Little had converted to the Muslim religion and had joined the Nation of Islam organisation. He progressed quickly through its ranks due to his ability to spot smiliar characters and get them hooked up. Afraid of the curse of the ‘Little’, Reg Little changed his name to Reg Ex. Many years later, the makers of a programming language who lived on an Indonesian island named a set of classes ‘java.util.regex’ in his honour.
Back when Malcolm Little was in chokey, Reg Ex would go and visit him and tell him how bonza the whole Muslim gig was – all virgins in heaven and stuff like that. Malcolm got out of the pen in 1952, joined up, and changed his name to match that of his brother. Unfortunately, due to a grave spelling mistake, Malcolm took the name ‘X’, which many people at the time took as a tribute to Xmas – a common shortening of christmas. “Anyone with Christ in their name can’t be all bad,” they thought.
Malcolm X was a talented and charismatic activist and spokesman, and is credited with swelling the number of members of the Nation Of Islam from 500 in 1952 to 30,000 some 11 years later. This is much better than the Burning Man cult of the 1990s, which had to provide a big wooden man in a dusty lake bed in Nevada each year to get this many people into into its ranks. What’s more they hadn’t invented the interweb then, so hats off to Malcolm X.
Doing this much stuff was getting Malcolm some big attention from the F of B.I. They infiltrated the Nation Of Islam and started to place bugs and cameras around Malcolm to get footage for a reality activist show. The show was going to show the conflicts of Malcolm with the authorities and also with his original mentor in the NOI, Elijah Muhammad. The show’s working title was ‘X in the Middle’. The FBI collected months of footage, but failed to sell the idea to TV executives. They said it was ahead of its time.
Malcolm was disappointed to find that Elijah was having furtive liaisons with multiple chickadees in the NOI and grew disillusioned. Mr. X had chosen a righteous path and eschewed hanky panky until his marriage in 1958 to Betty Shabazz. Her parents were magicians.
In 1964, Malcolm left the NOI and set up two new institutions; one was his own religious organization, the Muslim Mosque, Inc. The other was a joint venture with Professor Charles Xavier and was an academy for hero mutant children who protected the world from other mutants and mutant-haters.
Malcolm also went to Saudi Arabia in 1964 to visit a place called Mecca. Mecca was propping up the Saudi Arabian tourist industry – the only other reason to visit was to watch pikies have their hands cut off for thieving. And that gets old pretty quick.
Even the psychic abilities of his friend Professor Xavier could not protect Malcolm from his enemies, and one week after Valentine’s Day in 1965, he was shot 15 times by three gunmen in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom.
In 1992, Spike Lee made a film called Malcolm X which received an Oscar nominated for Best Costume Design.