Malcom X

12:56Chuck Bryant:I love that little fact. So, yeah, he was he became a I guess you'd call him a petty criminal, but he was he took all of that kind of charisma and charm and initiative and turned it. He directed it toward a life of crime. He's often described as a pimp, although he was never a pimp. He seemed more like the kind of guy who just knew where to get whatever you wanted. And that included sex workers. It included drugs. He loved pot. He loved gambling. And he actually committed a lot of his crimes, like burglary, theft, that kind of stuff, just to support his habits, which pot eventually turned into cocaine, which even back then was more expensive.

13:38Chuck Bryant:And again, he loved to gamble. So he needed to keep both of those things up. And that was a large reason why he was such a prolific criminal during this time. Another reason is that he just, the options that he had hadn't really panned out very well for him. Like he had a few jobs up to this point, but he realized like, I'm not going to get anywhere serving sandwiches on a train. I'm not going to get anywhere shining shoes. Like I might as well make a way for myself. And the only way to make a way for myself in this situation is crime.

14:10Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. He was arrested a couple of times. He was arrested at 19, allegedly stealing his half-sister's fur coat, whom he lived with. Pretty low-hanging fruit. Got arrested again when he allegedly mugged a friend of his at gunpoint. And neither one of those amounted to much. But finally, he was arrested for a third time after he'd been doing a series of burglaries of wealthy homes with kind of a small crew. It was him. It was another black man and three white women.

14:41Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

14:41Josh Clark:And I mentioned everyone's race there because when they got caught on this one, the three white women just got slaps on the wrist and basically got let go. And the two men were sentenced to eight to 10 in the hoof scowl.

14:53Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And they would have gotten much worse in that documentary, Make It Plain. The other guy, his friend Malcolm Jarvis, he said that they tried to get the women to say that Malcolm X and Malcolm Jarvis had raped them. and had all they had to do was say that and they would have been convicted of that and sentenced to a couple more decades for that. And luckily, they were tight enough with these women that they they said, no, we're not going to do that, despite the pressure that they were under, too.

15:22Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. So prison is where a lot happened to him in prison, sort of one of his first big transformations. He spent about almost seven years there for that burglary. and he was about 20 years old at the time. And it was in prison where he really kind of found himself for the, I guess, for the first time as an adult. Yeah. And that he remembered like, hey, I'm a smart guy and I used to love academia and learning. So he started, he became a voracious reader again in prison. He apparently tried to memorize the dictionary in prison and was reading anything he could get his hands on, including eventually, which would really transform his life, the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, who was the leader of the Nation of Islam at the time.

16:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And before he kind of came on to those teachings from his siblings, I think, who encouraged him to start looking into that. And he had a real aversion to any kind of religion. He was actually known as Satan by the other prisoners in the correctional facility he was in. but the reason he was able to read so much Chuck is because he happened to be in MCI Norfolk in Massachusetts and it's well known to have a lot like a huge library connections with like MIT and Harvard and all that stuff so it was actually the perfect prison for him to land in so he was able to kind of educate himself from that point on and then when he finally did start taking up the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, it just clicked.

16:57Chuck Bryant:And it was even further, I guess, reinforced when he started writing letters to Elijah Muhammad, and Elijah Muhammad started writing back to him. That really encouraged him big time.

17:09Josh Clark:Yeah. You know why? Because you didn't have to write letters to get those books, like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. No, they just threw them at you. Yeah, he was, of course, because it was Massachusetts. So, yeah, he started, you know, basically became a pen pal with Elijah Muhammad and really became a hardcore Muslim pretty quickly after reading, you know, his works and became an ascetic. So that means no drugs, no booze, no pork, no movies or music, no gambling, no dancing, like the real straight and narrow. and, you know, we'll later find out that that became a bit of a rift later on because he didn't think Elijah Muhammad at one point was sort of walking the walk, whereas he really was from the beginning.

17:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. Like, and he did throughout, too. Like, the FBI tried and tried and tried to get something on him, and they couldn't get anything. Like, he's just that upstanding and moral from that point on. I also, I had never even thought to wonder, but I had no idea why his last name was X. I was pretty surprised to learn this, but it makes a lot of sense.

18:17Josh Clark:You didn't know that? No. Okay. I thought that would have been sort of just the basic common knowledge. No.

18:25Chuck Bryant:But maybe not. I mean, maybe it is, but I'm pretty uncommon, Chuck.

18:30Josh Clark:You're an uncommon podcaster. So, yeah, he dropped the name Little because, and a lot of people in the Nation of Islam did and do this because he thought that was his slave name. So he rid himself of that name and replaced it with an X.

18:45Chuck Bryant:Yeah. He also, one of the reasons he despised religion, he despised Christianity in general because he considered that the slave religion that was given to the African slaves to essentially keep them in line. and so it was actually it was a big deal that he became this devotee of this religion and this particular religion just just really quick if you're not familiar with the nation of islam it is not the same thing as islam that was that emerged out of the middle east several hundred years ago it bears like a slight resemblance to it but it is essentially a completely altered version that has a lot of theology that seems very odd to outsiders.

19:33Yeah.

19:34Josh Clark:I mean, they were Muslim, but, you know, I know you've, and this is stuff I didn't know, that you found some stuff about Elijah Muhammad's original beliefs that I was sort of shocked by.

19:46Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So you've heard white devils before. I mean, all you have to do is listen to like Ice Cube. He That is actually a teaching from the Nation of Islam, from Elijah Muhammad, and it predates him. The Nation of Islam had been around for a few decades before Elijah Muhammad was its prophet. But the reason that they call white people white devils is because, according to Black Muslim theology, there was a genius named Yaakob, a Black genius, who created white people by bleaching Black people. And he mutated them into white, blue-eyed devils. And the reason why is he wanted to basically put the black race to the test.

20:32Chuck Bryant:So he put them in a subjugated position because he allowed these white people to be devils, to basically act like white people have treated black people since time immemorial, and that this reign would last about six millennia, and that the six millennia were almost up, and that this was the time when the black race would rise and take over from the white devils, who would really regret the stuff that they had done up to that point after that.

21:05Josh Clark:Yeah, which would have placed it about 1970. And so white Americans hearing this at the time, they thought that's when, like, the race war was coming, was 1970 or thereabouts.

21:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and we talked about that before. Like, I never really understood it, But this is a big, big reason that that white America was like, there's going to be a race war. It's like coming. It's inevitable. That was a big part of it. So, yeah, this is and this wasn't like metaphorical. This is from what I understand. It's a it's a literal interpretation of where white people came from six thousand years ago. So this was the this was what Malcolm X was being indoctrinated into. And he was a smart guy. So he he had to submit himself like he had to take parts of his brain. and just turn them off. The suspicious part of him, as far as like what he was being taught had to be turned off, the critical thinking part, as far as anything goes with the religion that he took on, he was able to compartmentalize, turn it off and throw himself fully into it.

22:08Chuck Bryant:And he was for the first decade, essentially, that he was a black Muslim, the best thing that ever happened to the nation of Islam by far.

22:18Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. That seems like a pretty good place for a break.

22:22Chuck Bryant:I agree.

22:23Josh Clark:All right. We'll be right back, everybody, with more on Malcolm X.

22:35Chuck Bryant:Hey, everybody, we're hitting the road again, starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026. And eventually, Canada will tell you your dates, too.

22:45Josh Clark:That's right. We're going to do at least three legs. And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th. And then finally back at Sketch Fest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

23:01Chuck Bryant:Yep. And then April 16th, 17th, and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at StuffYouShouldKnow.com. Click on the tour button and thank us later.

23:19Josh Clark:That's right. Can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

23:34Josh Clark:So Malcolm X is granted parole in 1952. He gets out of prison, a completely different person than who entered prison almost seven years earlier. And he was on a mission to recruit and get as many people as he could to join the Nation of Islam and had a direct sort of go-get-em tiger from Elijah Muhammad. And so as soon as he was paroled, he joined Temple No. 1 in Detroit. He traveled to Chicago to meet Elijah Muhammad in person. and he said, like I said, he said, you know, go out there and do your thing. Like he knew he had a sort of a shining star because he was, again, he was tall, he was handsome, he was charismatic, he was super smart.

24:18Josh Clark:And within a year, there were only about 400 members of the Nation of Islam at the time. Within a year, he brought that to about 1 ,000, but that would grow to 6 ,000 by 1955. and then in the early 1960s, about 75 ,000 up from, you know, 400 when Malcolm X came on the scene. So a lot of that, not all of it, obviously, but a lot of that is really due to him being the face, you know, I guess sort of the second face and then ultimately the face of the Nation of Islam.

24:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. His rhetoric, the things he was saying, and like you said, the charisma and just how well-spoken he was and the points he makes, it's like, you can be white and he's talking about you being a white devil. Sorry, you. All white people are white devils. He was uncompromising in that, right? It wasn't like, yeah, I mean, some of them are okay. No white people were okay in this philosophy. And he, in addition to that rhetoric, he also just knew how to work the media and what levers to pull. And he pushed Elijah Muhammad way out of his comfort zone to allow him to do new stuff with the Nation of Islam that helped bring in tons and tons of people.

25:31Chuck Bryant:One of the first big ones was a documentary from Mike Wallace, of all people, back in 1959 called The Hate That Hate Produced. And it just basically said, look at these guys, but at the same time, listen to what these guys have to say. And it exposed the world to black Muslims and it really helped drive up membership.

25:53Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. He was not trying to make friends in his job, even within his own community. You know, we talked about him being a hardliner and ascetic, and he said that everyone should practice asceticism. And, you know, he went to Philadelphia at one point in 1955 and said, all right, everyone here needs to get their act together. You need to lose weight even. He had leaders in Philadelphia weighing their members twice a week, and there were penalties if you didn't lose the poundage that he required because he wanted everyone to look a certain way. About a year later, in 1956, he met civil rights activist Betty Sanders when she joined his temple.

26:37Josh Clark:And two years later, when he called her from a gas station phone and proposed, they married in January 1958. And later that year had the first of what would be six daughters.

26:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah. All daughters, right? The whole along the way. Even twins, I think the last ones born were twin daughters. so yeah you said that he wasn't really trying to make friends and he didn't care whether he ticked people off so the old guard the existing guard of the nation of islam who had been around long before malcolm x came along they were not happy with this they did not like to be told that they were doughy and had to diet or else they'd be suspended but he was attracting people who were very much in line with himself. So very quickly, as he started to build up the roles of the members of Nation of Islam, the philosophy and the viewpoint of that group started to shift away from the establishment that had been there up to that point to this much more radical, much more politically active version of the Nation of Islam that was the Malcolm X brand of Nation of Islam.

27:46Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, Elijah Muhammad told him to stay out of politics because he was a complete separatist. He didn't want to be involved in anything that the white America was doing. But Malcolm X basically started doing his own thing. One of the big sort of early things he did that ended up being a huge deal was he founded their newspaper. It was called Mohammed Speaks. And it became a really, it had a pretty wide distribution. And I remember even growing up seeing on the streets of Atlanta, members of the Nation of Islam, I feel like they were giving him away. I don't think they were selling him. But he had pretty firm quotas established for members to give these things out and had a pretty wide circulation.

28:30Yeah.

28:30Chuck Bryant:He also would do things like debate white people. He did at Oxford. He did at Harvard on like race relations. He would take questions from white reporters. All of this stuff was like not what Elijah Muhammad was jibing with. but Malcolm X was getting such results that Elijah Muhammad would just kind of be like, I don't want you doing that. But then when Malcolm went ahead and did it, there wouldn't be any real consequences for it, right? So as he's doing this, he's becoming more and more emboldened. And one of the things he sets his sights on, Chuck, is the American, essentially the racial struggle in the United States that was really beginning to become part of the American preoccupation at the same time in the 50s.

29:18Chuck Bryant:It was really civil rights movement was really starting to take shape. And this, again, this was totally opposite from what you were saying Elijah Muhammad wanted, which was isolation, separatism, not just from white America, from non-black Muslim black America too. Like he had no inclination to join the civil rights, Elijah Muhammad to join the civil rights fight because they weren't black Muslims. So therefore, they were essentially lesser versions of black Americans.

29:48Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. You know, part of the complications of Malcolm X is that he had some anti-Semitic views at times. He had some pretty dark views of Jews in America and I guess all over the world, but specifically America. And this was especially sort of a, you know, a thumb in the eye of Jewish people because they were a lot of Jewish people were the white people that were kind of really heavily involved in the civil rights movement. Obviously, there were all kinds of people, but Jewish people were leading the charge for white America and the civil rights movement for the most part.

30:25Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's why they were also really highly critical of the NAACP is because they essentially said white people had, they'd allowed white people to join and the white people had taken over and were now steering the boat. So you could not be white and be joined the Nation of Islam. Sorry, they would not let you in. Still won't as far as I know.

30:44Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. But the media was loving this. The media loves to pit people against one another. So they had two really clear, like I think you described them as spoils early on in Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X because it couldn't be any more different, not only in kind of the way they looked and how they talked and the things they were saying, but their ultimate goals. So, you know, they painted Dr. King as a saint. They painted Malcolm X as a pariah. And the, I don't know if it's irony, but something you can't forget is that, you know, Malcolm X was making some waves, but his reach was nothing compared to what Dr.

31:23Josh Clark:King was doing. He, Dr. Dr. King was much more of a threat, if you, you know, is how they would have called it back then to white America and integration than Malcolm X was because he was he was a fringe revolutionary at the time. So he was, you know, he was kind of fortunate to be in the newspapers at all, even though, you know, the media was painting them as enemies and they kind of, you know, enemies is a weird word. They didn't hang out. Dr. King didn't return calls. He was offered like debates for Malcolm X and stuff like that. And he kind of just didn't want anything to do with that brand because he had such a sort of a good thing going.

32:05Josh Clark:He had some momentum.

32:06Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And he was worried also that, you know, it would it would scare the white coalition that he'd helped build to support the civil rights movement away from the civil rights movement. All of a sudden he's like, oh, yeah. And also this guy's philosophy, too. We're going to incorporate the race war. Yeah, he had every reason to stay away from Malcolm X and frankly, kind of wisely did. But like you said, this was the media saying like, you got Malcolm X, you got MLK. And that was like both of them kind of fostered that idea because if you had Malcolm X and, you know, you didn't listen to MLK, then we were going to go the Malcolm X way as far as America was concerned in the near future.

32:52Chuck Bryant:So we should probably go the way that Martin Luther King is suggesting.

32:56Josh Clark:Yeah. You know, reading this stuff, I always was hoping that I would find out that they were secretly in cahoots with one another. Yeah. Doing sort of a good cop, bad cop thing. Because they were both well aware of that. And I think they, judging from some of the quotes I've seen, they were both aware that it was helping the cause ultimately. And even Malcolm X, even though that's not what he was after, he knew that there were gains coming on that side because he was so scary to white America.

33:29Chuck Bryant:Exactly. Yeah. I think it was kind of like how food companies price fix. They don't have secret meetings, but they just kind of make signals in the market in public. And that's kind of what I think they were doing. They were working together without actively working together. Yeah.

33:44Josh Clark:It's like food companies fixing grocery prices.

33:46Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, and I mean, he was like really outspoken about what he thought about Dr. Martin Luther King. He called him a fool and Uncle Tom. He also said that he was subsidized by the white man, that the essentially, again, that white people had taken over the real levers of power with the civil rights movement and that it was completely useless now. But even if that weren't the case, he was such a critic of the civil rights movement because he was basically saying, like, if you're starting a revolution and the revolution's goal is to love your enemy, like, that's ridiculous. That's stupid. Like, that's never going to work.

34:26Chuck Bryant:It doesn't even make sense. So what are you doing? Like, all you're doing is distracting and continuing to keep subjugated the people you're supposedly trying to liberate and integrate. Yeah.

34:38Josh Clark:Yeah, he called the March on Washington the farce on Washington, Malcolm X did. And he said the quote was, whoever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing, we shall overcome while tripping and swaying along arm in arm with the very people they're supposed to be angrily revolting against. So, you know, I'm not taking sides, but he's making a lot of good points at the time. You know, I think the idea that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar is true. But it was, I think they almost needed, there almost needed to be two sides of the same coin happening at the same time. I don't know.

35:16Josh Clark:It was pretty interesting how it all worked out. And if you're wondering if the federal government was concerned, they absolutely were. This started in 1950 when Malcolm X was still in prison. He wrote a letter to Harry Truman, who was president, and said, I'm a communist. I'm opposed to the Korean War. And President Truman said, maybe we should get a file going on this guy with the FBI. And they did that a couple of years later.

35:40Chuck Bryant:Yeah. He had also captured the attention of the NYPD around that time where there was a protest because the Harlem police had brutalized a member of the Nation of Islam. And there was like just a bunch of people came out on the street and were shouting about it because the guy had been beaten so badly, a skull bin cracked open. And they wouldn't disperse. So Malcolm X was inside, essentially negotiating that the guy should get care and take into the hospital with the police officials and managed to get them to agree to that. But the crowd was still angry, wouldn't disperse. And the cops were trying.

36:22Chuck Bryant:It wasn't very effective. So Malcolm X went outside and apparently didn't say a word, just waved his hand and the crowd stopped yelling and just dispersed. And apparently the, I think the police commissioner witnessed this and was like, that's too much power for any one man to have, especially somebody who believes that the black race is going to take over from the white race and that the white race is all devils. Like that, that scared them tremendously. And it also really caught their attention. It put him on their radar essentially forever.

36:57Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And as far as the FBI goes, he, you know, like I said, they started a file on him, which they also had on Martin Luther King and, you know, John Lennon and everybody else. We've talked about all this stuff. But there was something they found out later from the files was at one point J. Edgar Hoover told the New York agency office they needed to do something about Malcolm X. but like you said early on, they had a hard time doing anything because in 1958, an informant said that Malcolm X was of high moral character. He doesn't smoke. He doesn't drink. He's always on time for appointments.

37:34Josh Clark:He's kind of a stand-up guy if you're not listening to what he's saying, white America. Of course, that didn't matter, but they couldn't pin anything on him, essentially. And they even think, and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that he was assassinated, But I feel like everyone knows that. But they even think that the FBI, because they had so many informants inside the Nation of Islam, that they knew about the plot to assassinate him and just let it happen.

38:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I saw that too. And not just the FBI, but also the NYPD. Just let it happen. So just real quick, Chuck, I say we take a break in a second and talk about his break with the Nation of Islam. But I just wanted to kind of give a thumbnail sketch of like what he was saying. You can go listen. You should start with maybe the ballot or the bullet is a great speech that gets his point across from this era. but essentially what he was saying is black people have to learn to do for themselves integrating and then saying like you know hey let's all just share from the same pot with white people isn't going to work because white people will always hang it over you so we have to figure out how to do it ourselves using the nation of islam that's how you prop somebody up get them on the right path put them on the moral path in a way from temptation and then after that you teach them black nationalism so now they feel good about being a black person and then from that point on they have the dignity and the motivation to make something for themselves as a community.

39:00Chuck Bryant:That was his goal. That's ultimately what he was preaching. That was the kernel of the whole thing.

39:06Josh Clark:That's right. So we're going to take that break, and we're going to come back with the sad end and the split from the Nation of Islam right after this.

39:23Chuck Bryant:Hey, everybody, we're hitting the road again, starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026. And eventually, Canada, we'll tell you your dates, too.

39:34Josh Clark:That's right. We're going to do at least three legs. And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th. And then finally, back at Sketch Fest on the 29th at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.

39:49Chuck Bryant:Yep. And then April 16th, 17th, and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at stuffyoushouldknow.com. Click on the tour button and thank us later.

40:08Josh Clark:That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

40:22Chuck Bryant:So, Chuck, Malcolm X is the face of the Nation of Islam to the press, to the public. People, like they know the name Elijah Muhammad. You might even have seen him speak, but it's way likelier that you've seen Malcolm X speak, and that's who you associate as the head. So if you're the protege and you become that the power kind of shifts like that, the mentor doesn't usually like that kind of thing. Then on top of it, the mentor, Elijah Muhammad, was starting to get on in age. And so the people around Elijah Muhammad, including his blood family, were worried that Malcolm X would actually take over.

40:58Chuck Bryant:So there was a lot of reason for there to be jealousy, backbiting, court intrigue, and get rid of Malcolm X one way or another. And that's essentially what happened.

41:08Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, his kids thought that they were going to be next in line, basically. And, you know, I mentioned the FBI had lots of people on the inside of the Nation of Islam. They used those people to kind of stoke that strife internally and, you know, try and disrupt it from within. And we're fairly successful at that because it was not smooth sailing at this point. So, you know, the real fracture comes, you know, all this is sort of leading up to what I think was the real fracture was when Malcolm X finds out about Elijah Muhammad having three children out of wedlock with three very young members of the Nation of Islam and essentially started looking upon him as a false prophet that was just sort of a guy in power that was using that power to philander.

41:57Josh Clark:and he was like, I don't think he's fit to lead the Nation of Islam anymore. And in 1963, April of that year, he confronted Elijah Muhammad about this and that was not something that Elijah Muhammad wanted to hear.

42:11Chuck Bryant:No, for sure. And now, Malcolm X was a big problem because this is not something that Elijah Muhammad wanted out to the public. It would immediately discredit him. And so do you remember kind of at the beginning I was saying how Malcolm X had to kind of compartmentalize and turn off critical thinking and stuff like that to allow himself to submit to Elijah Muhammad. After this, after he realized that this guy is actually not the real deal, he was able to kind of grow and spread like one of those sponge dinosaurs that you put water on and they grow. Or a different analogy would be like Apache Chief in the Justice League when he grows like really, really big.

42:49Chuck Bryant:essentially that happened the moment he realized that Elijah Muhammad was a false prophet and he was able to finally grow and become the Malcolm X that he always had the potential to be he had thrown off the shackles placed on him he'd gotten out from under the thumb of the leader of the nation of Islam but that also unfortunately meant he had no place in the nation of Islam any longer

43:15Josh Clark:Yeah, I think the final nail in the coffin was when Kennedy was assassinated. He got explicit direction from Elijah Muhammad to shut up about it, to not say anything to the press, to just let this pass because it was such a monumental thing for all of America, certainly for white America. And he was like, we need to stay out of this if we know what's good for us. And Malcolm X did not do that. But he went to the reporters and he said that Kennedy's death was, quote, a case of chickens coming home to roost, end quote. And Elijah Muhammad was super upset. He said, you're suspended for three months.

43:54Josh Clark:A month into that, he removed him from most of his leadership roles. And that was the writing was on the wall that that was really the beginning of the final split.

44:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And just one little aside about that, Chuck, him saying a case of chickens coming home to roost. there is so much more background and subtext to it and all the stuff he was saying that led up to that. But that's the pull quote, right? That's the thing that you just pull and it sounds like a pretty awful thing to say, or at least heartless. But if you go back and read that stuff, you find there's so much more context to the stuff he's quoted for. And like you said, kind of toward the beginning, a lot of it seems pretty reasonable when you listen to the words he's saying.

44:38Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure.

45:06Josh Clark:left him off the guest list for a convention in February where Cassius Clay, you know, had his coming out as Muhammad Ali. So that was a very meaningful snub at the time.

45:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I was disappointed in Muhammad Ali because he was basically like, oh, that sucks, man. Sorry. See ya.

45:24Josh Clark:Yeah.

45:25Chuck Bryant:So now this is the break. This is the schism. And at this point now, the Nation of Islam is doing everything they can to mock and discredit Malcolm X and say that he was a turncoat and a Benedict Arnold and a hypocrite. And Malcolm X just gave it right back. One of the first things he did was to tell the media that Elijah Muhammad had kids out of wedlock with teenage girls that were around him. He said that he had eight kids with six teenage secretaries. And he just told it to the press. And that was a really big deal. And I think at that point, he realized like he had just taken his life into his own hands.

46:07Josh Clark:Yeah. So that's all basically sort of early through spring 1964. Later in 1964, a very important trip happened when he made the Hajj to Mecca. And this was, you know, kind of the final big life changing moment for him. He came back a Sunni Islam member and he had changed his name from Malcolm X to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. And I believe even his wife and daughters took the name Shabazz throughout the rest of their lives as well. And while he was there, he had a transformation, another transformation, kind of like he did in prison. But the other way, he came full circle and said, quote, he had encountered pilgrims of all colors from all parts of this earth, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood like I've never seen before.

46:54Josh Clark:and he essentially flipped and said, you know what, there are good white people and we can and should work together. And he came back and started to do that work and really poured himself for the first time into the legit official civil rights movement.

47:09Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he told Martin Luther King, like I'm all in, he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He was trying to essentially teach black Americans about their African heritage, But then at the same time, he had also zoomed in on this idea that he needed to take the struggle for American civil rights to the world, like the U.N. or the African Congress, and basically say, hey, this is the same thing. This is part of the black struggle worldwide. Like this is part of this global problem. It's not separate. It's not its own thing. So we need to figure like all these other countries need to get involved, too, and start pressuring the U.S.

47:51Chuck Bryant:to do something about it. which is a pretty clever idea, actually. And it was not something that Martin Luther King was doing at the time, from what I understand.

48:00Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. They would eventually meet. There was a very famous single meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. It was not something they planned because it's not like Martin Luther King Jr. got on board immediately and was like, oh, great, you're joining the movement. Like, I don't think he still really liked him that much. But they literally bumped into each other in the hallway when they were at the Senate, when the civil rights bill was being debated there at the Capitol building. And it was like, oh, it's you. And they shook hands. I think he told them in person, I'm throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights struggle face to face.

48:39Josh Clark:There was a photographer there. So there's a very famous picture of them together. And then later that year in July 64, that's when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. And it was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. And that was not the end for Malcolm X, though. He thought he was just getting started very sadly.

49:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So this was, you said that was May of 1964. Within just a few months, he would be dead. And it's just so sad that he underwent that transformation. and all of a sudden his potential is really starting to blossom. He turned into like a full butterfly for the first time, and he's struck down. The first thing that happened that kind of just foreshadowed his death was his house was firebombed by, he was quite sure, members of the Nation of Islam. Apparently one of the bombs was thrown through a window that would have landed in and on the three of his little girls in their room, But luckily, it shattered on the outside of the window and didn't make it through.

49:46Chuck Bryant:But it burned his house essentially down. And this was a house that was owned by the Nation of Islam. So they went as far as to accuse him of burning it down because they had evicted him from the house. And so out of spite, he burned it down, which was obviously not true.

50:03Josh Clark:Yeah, which is full circle because I don't think we mentioned that when their house was burned down when he was a little kid, they actually accused his dad Earl of burning his own house down. So the same thing happened all those years later. That was on February 14th, 1965. On February 18th, they formally evicted him. And then on February 21st, he was murdered. He was shot and killed in front of his, in front of Betty, in front of the girls. I think there were four girls at the time because Betty was pregnant with the twins that would be born after his death. And this was in Harlem at an organization of Afro-American unity meeting.

50:40Josh Clark:And they arrested three members of the Nation of Islam. One confessed and said the other two weren't involved, but all three were convicted, even though later on, I think in 2021, the other two were exonerated after the Attorney General of New York saw that they had buried some exculpatory evidence, you know, back when it happened.

51:00Chuck Bryant:Right. So you were talking about how the FBI let it happen. And the NYPD apparently helped pave the way by arresting a couple of his bodyguards on BS charges. So he was short security on that day. And at his funeral, like, he had made quite a name for himself. I think 1 ,500 people showed up, which is a pretty good turnout for your funeral. And Ossie Davis, who was very much in with the Martin Luther King version of the civil rights movement, He led Malcolm X's funeral because he was just that moved by him, even though he didn't see eye to eye on a bunch of stuff. Like he realized what a loss this was for the black community in the world.

51:45Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. You know, I mentioned that the twins that were born after he died, they, you know, obviously grew up without their dad and the other girls weren't that much older. And they always just knew him as dad. He, you know, I think the ones that were kind of didn't even know him at all. They weren't raised by Betty as like, hey, your dad was a revolutionary. He was this or that. Apparently they learned about him mainly in school because Betty always wanted him just to be dad and my husband. And so they were, you know, they went on to do a lot of great things as well. We should probably do one on Betty Shabazz at some point.

52:23Josh Clark:She was a great woman and his daughters all, you know, became activists in their own way as well. Yeah.

52:29Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, I kind of mentioned like how just sad this is that he was struck down, especially at the time he was struck down. But if you look back at like the time frame of all this stuff, this guy changed the world or left such an indelible mark that people are still learning from him all these years later over essentially the course of 10 years. That was about the timeline that we're talking about from when he took up the Nation of Islam's teachings to when he was assassinated by the Nation of Islam. It was just about a decade, and that's how much of an impact that he made over just that time.

53:08Josh Clark:Yeah, there was a pretty great quote that—who is this? Was this Julia that helped us with this?

53:13Chuck Bryant:Yeah, Julia helped us big time.

53:14Josh Clark:Yeah, she found a great quote from poet Maya Angelou, who Malcolm X visited at her home in Ghana at one point. And basically kind of summarizing what guts it took to make that transformation in full public view after being so public and militant. she said that it takes an incredible amount of courage to be able to say, say everybody, you remember what I said yesterday? Well, I found out that's wrong. And she just thought that was an amazing thing to be able to do. And it really was. You know, not a lot of people can own up to kind of being on what they thought later was the wrong path, you know?

53:56Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it is remarkable. So you can go read the autobiography of Malcolm X. Also, I've seen that Malcolm X Speaks is a really great book. I think it's his collected speeches. There's the Spike Lee movie. There's Make It Plain, the PBS documentary. And then there's just tons of like his speeches are just all over YouTube. So if you're interested in this at all, like there's a lot you can still learn from Malcolm X, even with him being dead all these years.

54:25Josh Clark:Yeah, I can't recommend the book and the movie enough. The book sold 400 ,000 copies the year it was released in 1967. and has sold$5 million to date. And the movie was a big hit, too. It grossed close to$50 million, which is not bad for a long, you know, true story biopic, like, you know, with political overtones. It had a couple of Academy Award nominees, certainly Denzel, because he was amazing, as always. And the great Ruth E. Carter for costume design, even though neither one would win, it was fairly controversial when Al Pacino won for Scent of a Woman over Denzel. Yeah, people thought it was a pretty big snub, including Spike Lee.

55:08Josh Clark:He thought it was due to the controversy of the film, obviously, and the character, and he also thought it was a bit of a makeup call for Pacino losing so many times. He would get some due, though, later in 2010 when the film was added to the National Film Registry as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

55:28Chuck Bryant:Beautiful. That's a great ending, Charles. You got anything else? That's it. Well, that's it for Malcolm X. Chuck just said that's it. So obviously, everybody, it's time for a listener mail.

55:43Josh Clark:Yeah, this one's a little long, but it's one of the great emails we've gotten. Because after we did our, what I think was a really fun episode on the Fyre Festival debacle. Yes. We heard, you know, in that we talked about the Magnesus credit card. And we heard from an actual holder of that credit card, which was great. Did you see this? No, I haven't seen that yet. It's pretty fantastic. So, hey, guys, hearing you talk about this credit card brought me back to some very special memories of my early days in New York. When I first moved there in 2014, I stumbled upon the Magnesus and thought it sounded like the perfect way to meet new people.

56:22Josh Clark:since I was new there and access the cool and exclusive parties in parts of the city, so I applied and was surprised to be accepted as a member. I quickly found myself at fun rooftop parties with open bars, great tickets to shows and sports games, and snagging reservations for restaurants that were impossible to book, all of which seemed to be too good to be true for the$250 annual fee, which should have been my first clue that something was wrong. The first real crack came when I took advantage of an offer to get floor seats to a Beyonce concert for only$200 and had to obtain the tickets by meeting a, quote, Magnus's concierge in the parking lot outside of the venue.

57:02Josh Clark:The tickets I got felt like they had just been bought from a scalper and they probably were, but it did work out and it was a great show. Not long after, I had Will call tickets to an NBA game through a, quote, partnership they had with the team. When my friends and I showed up to grab the seats, no one behind the ticket counter had ever heard of Magnus's. That was the moment I started asking questions. and when I reached out about the issue and about canceling my membership, they actually refunded it almost immediately. In fact, they refunded my fee so quickly, it was almost alarming, like they were hoping I'd just quietly go away.

57:34Josh Clark:Thankfully, I managed to exit the whole thing before the house of cards came crashing down, so hearing you guys explain how the whole thing worked was fascinating and weirdly nostalgic. Despite the sketchiness at the end, I actually do have some pretty fun memories from that brief period when it felt like I had unlocked some secret VIP version of New York City. Look forward to your next stop at the Bell House. And that is from Kevin.

57:55Chuck Bryant:Kevin, that really was one of the all-time best emails we've gotten.

57:59Josh Clark:Yeah, I was hoping a Magnus member would write in and we got it. Look at you.

58:03Chuck Bryant:You should be playing the lotto.

58:06Josh Clark:I probably should.

58:08Chuck Bryant:Thanks a lot, Kevin. If you want to be like Kevin and send us one of our all-time great emails, we always love those. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

58:23Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

58:40Josh Clark:Roll the window down. Do you hear that? It's the sound of spring. So bring on the spring at the Honda Spring Event. Honda's family of hybrids and EVs are ready for wherever spring takes you. Check out the all-electric Honda Prologue, CR-V Hybrid, Accord Hybrid, and Civic Hybrid, all from the 2025 Kelley Blue Book Best Value brand. For great deals, visit your local Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana Honda dealer today. Based on 2025 Consumer Choice Awards from Kelley Blue Book, visit kbb.com for more information.

59:10Chuck Bryant:Hey everybody, we're hitting the road again. And starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026. And eventually, Canada, we'll tell you your dates, too.

59:20Josh Clark:That's right. We're going to do at least three legs. And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th. And then finally, back at Sketch Fest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

59:36Chuck Bryant:Yep. And then April 16th, 17th, and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois. in Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at stuffyoushouldknow.com. Click on the tour button and thank us later.

59:54Josh Clark:That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

59:59Chuck Bryant:This is an iHeart Podcast.

1:00:02Josh Clark:Guaranteed human.