Malcolm X

In the twentieth century, the doctrine of African American separatism ran a straight line from Marcus Garvey, through Malcolm X's activist parents, to their son. After his father died and his mother was committed to a mental hospital, Malcolm Little, as he was then known, became a criminal and was imprisoned in 1946. There, his exposure to Nation of Islam teachings led to his rehabilitation, and later to his ordination as Minister Malcolm X. His spellbinding oratory quickly gained him national attention as he declared all whites "devils" and urged blacks to form a separate state and win their freedom "by any means necessary." Malcolm X dismissed Martin Luther King's strategy of nonviolence as ineffectual, but in 1964 he broke off from the Nation of Islam, rejecting its racialist ideology after a pilgrimage to Mecca, in which he viewed Muslims of all colors worshipping together. He was assassinated on February 21, 1965.