Excerpts

ARREST AND PRISON Malcolm's move to the Roxbury district of Boston opened his eyes to a world drastically different from that of the rural Midwest. Over the next four years, he held a variety of jobs that introduced him to urban nightlife and black celebrities, as well as to dope peddlers and pimps. As a shoe shiner at the Roseland State Ballroom, he met jazz musicians and entertainers; as a cook on the New Haven railroad, he traveled to Harlem, where he worked at the notorious jazz club Small's Paradise and the less glamorous Jimmy's Chicken Shack; he even performed part-time at Abe Goldstein's Lobster Pond in midtown Manhattan under the stage name Jack Carlton. In addition to this string of odd jobs, Malcolm also continued the life of petty crime he had begun in Lansing. His first arrest came at the age of nineteen, when he stole his aunt's fur coat and pawned it for five dollars. For this indiscretion, his sister Ella promptly called the police and turned him in. The following year he brazenly robbed an acquaintance, Douglas Haynes, at gunpoint in Detroit, prompting his brother Wilfred to post a bond of a thousand dollars before Malcolm then fled Michigan and the warrant for his arrest. What sealed Malcolm's criminal fate, though, was a string arrest and prison 35 of robberies in the Boston area during the Christmas season of 1945. His prison record suggests that he, along with his Armenian girlfriend, Bea Caragulian; her younger sister, Joyce; a third woman, named Kora Marderosian; and two of his friends, Francis "Sonny" Brown and Malcolm "Shorty" Jarvis, robbed as many as eight homes between December 11, 1945, and his arrest on January 12, 1946. They stole a motley assortment of goods, ranging from clocks, jewelry, and fur coats to twenty pounds of sugar and a swig of whiskey, ultimately valued at over ten thousand dollars, from Boston-area homes and resold the wares in New York City. Ultimately, it was Malcolm who was responsible for the group's arrest (with the exception of Brown, who somehow eluded police). He amateurishly took a stolen watch to a repair shop and the police were waiting when he came to pick it up. Since he was carrying a loaded, unregistered gun, the offi cers agreed to waive the charge if he would turn in the rest of the gang, which he did. Malcolm and his partner in crime Shorty Jarvis were incarcerated at the oldest penitentiary in continuous use, Charlestown State Prison. The prison, best known for having held anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti before their execution, was decrepit and offered few common areas for prisoners to interact. Malcolm later recalled that his fi rst year was spent berating visiting family members and smuggling hallucinogens, such as nutmeg, into his cell. A prison interview from this period deemed him "calculating and cautious . . . has fatalistic views, is moody, cynical, and has a sardonic smile which seems to be affected because of his sensitiveness to his color." In 1947, though, Malcolm met a fellow inmate and former burglar named John Elton Bembry, who encouraged him to use his time in prison for intellectual pursuits. After a brief stay at Concord Reformatory in 1947, Malcolm secured a transfer to Norfolk Prison Colony. Norfolk was the brainchild of penologist Howard Belding Gill and was considered first and foremost a reformatory. It was arranged like a college campus, with dormitories around a central quadrangle, and allowed inmates to wear normal clothing and use the remarkably well-stocked library. There Malcolm enrolled in and completed courses in elementary German and Latin, also earning superior scores on a psychometric test in "arithmetical ability" and "abstract reasoning ability." Norfolk also allowed Malcolm more flexible visitation and correspondence, of which he quickly took advantage. Likewise, the Little family recognized this new opportunity and set about revealing to Malcolm the tenets of the Nation of Islam, which they had recently joined. After some initial resistance, Malcolm converted and began an intense correspondence with both the members of his family and Elijah Muhammad, the sect's prophet and leader. He also began a campaign within the prison to convert inmates and incorporated many of the Garveyite notions of racial pride instilled by his parents into his letters to government offi cials. In 1950 he refused a typhoid inoculation on religious grounds, prompting a transfer back to Charlestown State Prison. He also wrote a letter on behalf of a Muslim being held in solitary connement at Norfolk for four months. With his small following growing, Malcolm got the attention of the local press when he and fellow Muslims demanded a menu without pork and prison cells facing east; after an initial refusal, the warden consented when Malcolm threatened to appeal to the Egyptian consul. In 1952, after six years of incarceration, Malcolm was arrest and prison 37 granted parole and secured a job through his brother Wilfred as a porter at a Detroit department store. It was there, while living with Wilfred's family and attending Detroit's Temple No. 1, that Malcolm became one of Muhammad's most devoted and loyal followers. Excerpted from The Portable Malcolm X Reader: A Man Who Stands for Nothing Will Fall for Anything All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.