Malcolm: The Boston years

Malcolm: The Boston years
How life in the Hub shaped a historical icon

Kenneth J. Cooper

After a long trip from Michigan, the red-haired teenager stepped down from the Greyhound bus, starting his walk into history with those first steps at the terminal at Park Square in Boston.

The dozen years he spent living in Massachusetts prepared Malcolm Little to become Malcolm X, the black Muslim feared in his own time but so respected in death that an Ivy League college, Columbia University, established a research center to study his life.

It was here in Boston that he went from being a partying teenager who couldn’t keep a job to a street hustler who got busted and imprisoned as inmate number 22843. Behind the bars of Massachusetts prisons, he educated and remade himself into a disciplined, religious man with the backbone to stand up for his people. Continue...