ather was also a minister. The Reverend Earl Little was dedicated to organizing for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association:
With the help of such disciples as my father, Garvey, from his headquarters in New York City's Harlem, was raising the banner of black-race purity and exhorting the Negro masses to return to their ancestral African homeland--a cause which made Garvey the most controversial black man on earth.
Malcolm X grew up in a world where being black was a handicap, and indeed where being black was denigrated. It could lead to one's death at the hands of an angry mob, something he knew from his childhood. At the time, this implanted in his mind a subtle sense of shame at his blackness, something he could not have articulated but which influenced his development as a human being and his choices as a young man. He tried to be as white as he could be both culturally and physically, a route which led him into criminal behavior that only emphasized his lack of a positive identity in the white world. Like many other young black
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