Eventually he settled into the underworld of Harlem, where he came of age as “Detroit Red,” a small-time hustler sporting conked red hair and brightly colored zoot suits. His burglary spree ended in 1946 when the police nabbed him and his partner, Shorty Jarvis, and their white girlfriends. The judge gave the twenty-one-year-old offender concurrent eight-to ten-year sentences. He wound up serving his seventy-seven-month incarceration at three Massachusetts penitentiaries. At the Charlestown State Prison, a dank, century-old fortress without running water, Malcolm festered in a dirty, cramped cell, lying on his cot, staring at the ceiling. In his misery, he yearned for the pleasures of the past: the rush of a robbery, the high from snorting cocaine. “Big Red” bragged about his criminal exploits and offered to acquire whatever the other prisoners needed: reefer, tobacco, liquor. He would later claim that he was an obstinate prisoner, a devout atheist nicknamed “Satan” for his mutinous behavior.21
After Malcolm transferred to Concord Prison, he received a startling letter from his brother Philbert, who explained that he and other members of the family had converted to “the natural religion for the black man”: Islam. Soon, he read more letters from his brothers and sisters, educating him about the movement “designed to help black people.” In 1948, after Malcolm transferred to the Norfolk Prison Colony, his younger brother Reginald, a former hustler, visited him. He told Malcolm that there was a man who knew everything. “Who’s that?” Malcolm asked. “God is a man,” he answered, and “His real name is Allah.” Reginald explained that Allah had come to America and taught everything he knew to his disciple, Elijah, “a black man just like us.” Allah had instructed Elijah that the devil was also a man—the white man.22
Malcolm thought about all the white people who had hurt him and his family: the white supremacists who killed his father; the white doctor who diagnosed his mother as “crazy”; the white social workers who broke up his family; the white kids who called him “nigger” on the playground; the white schoolteacher who told him that he was foolish for thinking that a “nigger” could ever become a lawyer; the white judge who took ten years of his life away; and all the other white folks who had done him wrong.23
His siblings continued to educate him through correspondence and their visits. They urged him to trust the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, the “Messenger of Allah,” a “small, gentle man” who possessed “the true knowledge of the black man.” Reginald advised him to purify his body and avoid cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and pork. Malcolm followed his instructions, accepting Muhammad’s strict rules of morality.24
Like many of Muhammad’s prison converts, he idolized the Nation’s patriarch. After sending Muhammad a letter he’d revised twenty-five times, they enjoyed a regular correspondence. Malcolm could not wait to meet Allah’s prophet and serve his cause. On August 7, 1952, about a month after the Massachusetts Department of Corrections transferred his parole to the State of Michigan, he walked out of prison a new man, wearing a cheap suit and shedding the cloak of Big Red.25
Shortly after his release, Malcolm rode a bus to Detroit. Canvassing the neighborhoods of Black Bottom, he shared his story of self-emancipation, crediting Elijah Muhammad for his liberation from a life of destitution and delinquency. “Before hearing of [Muhammad],” he admitted, “I had nothing, knew nothing, and was nothing. I was addicted to and enslaved by all the evils and vices of this white civilization—dope, alcohol, adultery, thievery, and,” he added hyperbolically, “even murder.” Without Muhammad’s grace, he had “very little hope, desire, or intention of amounting to anything.”26
After Malcolm served as an assistant minister for the Detroit temple and proved himself an effective organizer, in late 1953 Muhammad rewarded his protégé with his own ministry in Boston, where Malcolm established Temple No. 11. Shortly thereafter, Muhammad sent him to Philadelphia to further build the movement’s membership along the East Coast. In just three months, Muhammad promoted his charismatic disciple once again, naming him minister of Temple No. 7 in New York. Muhammad recognized that no one could relate to the “bottom-of-the-pile Negroes” the way that Malcolm did. Those beaten-down, dead-end blacks trusted Malcolm because he also knew life in worn-out shotgun houses and rancid tenements.27
In the tenement neighborhoods of Harlem, Malcolm persuaded many blacks to hear him preach at the temple. But not everyone was easily convinced that Islam was the path to righteousness. When people heard him talk about the Nation’s theology, many just shook their heads in disbelief. One man yelled, “You niggers are crazy!” and marched right past him. On another occasion, when Malcolm tried to convince a Baptist into converting to Islam, the man asked, “What are the rules of your organization?” Malcolm replied, “Well, my brother, you’ll have to stop drinking, stop swearing, stop gambling, stop using dope, and stop cheating on your wife.” The man thought for a moment. “Hell,” he quipped, “I think I better remain a Christian.”28