of oratory.
White racists burned down the Little home in 1929; they moved to Lansing, Michigan. Two years later, Malcolm's father was killed in a bizarre streetcar accident. Factual accounts vary, but the family believed he was murdered for racial reasons. Malcolm's mother was committed to a mental asylum a short while later.
When analyzing the influence and appeal of the civil rights leaders of the 1960s, here is where the first comparisons begin. Martin Luther King, of course, was the undisputed champion of the mainstream, integrationist cause. Yet, always, his appeal was as much to the middle-class white population as it was to African-Americans. King was solidly Black bourgeoisie - the values he spoke for were American middle-class values. Malcolm X, by contrast, represented a "mainstream" of African-American society that whites could not easily understand: the urban, start-at-the-bottom culture of the ghetto Black. "Malcolm X was able to appeal to ghetto residents in a way that Martin Luther King could not" (Black Revolt).
Malcolm Little was smart, a fact recognized by all of his teachers, but that did not stop him from dropping out of school in the eighth grade. And who was to care? In those years there was no need for an "educated nigger"; there were no counsellors or work-study programs aiming to keep Black youths in school, at least not in the school systems Malcolm attended. Nicknamed "Big Red," he drifted to Harlem and a hustler's life - until, in 1946, a drug habit led to burglary and a ten-year prison sentence in Bos
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