Malcolm X was an African-American Muslim minister and civil rights activist in the 1950's and 1960's. He followed the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, who encouraged self-reliance and empowerment. Many people don't know this, but as a young person, Malcolm had an academic goal to study law, but a white teacher told him that his goal was impossible. So he dropped out of school.
Here are 10 more things that many people don't know about Malcolm X:
#1 - His real name was Malcolm Little who was born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska.
#2 - His father, Earl, was a Baptist lay speaker and the leader of a controversial group called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
#3 - Their family was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, forcing them to move Wisconsin, where his family’s home was burned by a racist group in 1929.
#4 - Malcolm's father died when he was only 3-years old, and when he was 13, his mother ended up in a psychiatric hospital where she remained for 24 years.
#5 - Malcolm spent many years living in foster homes.
#6 - He moved to New York in 1943 and lived a criminal life of drug dealing, gambling, pimping, robbery, and racketeering. He later moved to Boston and ended up in prison for breaking and entering and stealing property.
#7 - While in prison, Malcolm X started reading about the Nation of Islam. He also changed his last name to X because he thought the name Little most likely came from a slave owner.
#8 - One of the famous people that he converted was Cassius Clay, better known as Muhammad Ali.
#9 - In 1958, he married Betty Shabazz and they had six daughters, including a set of twins.
#10 - Sadly, he was killed in 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, New York where a man with a sawed off shotgun shot him to death as he was giving a speech.
Watch his mini documentary on the Biography channel:
