Malcolm X (b. May 19, 1925 - February 21, 1965)
Malcolm Little grew up in foster homes around Lansing, Michigan after his father, a Baptist Minister and organizer for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, was brutally murdered when Malcolm was six years old. He graduated from junior high at the top of his class, but when a favorite teacher told him his dream of becoming a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger," Malcolm lost interest in his studies and was sent to reform school.
As a teenager in Boston, he worked as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom where he heard jazz bands of the day like VIP Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton playing "Flying Home."
"The first liquor I drank, my first cigarettes, even my first reefers, I can't specifically remember," he wrote in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. "But I know they were all mixed together with my first shooting craps, playing cards, and betting my dollar a day on the numbers." Soon, he was jitterbugging in Zoot suits and being taken to "groovy, frantic scenes in different chicks' and cats' pads, where with the lights and juke down mellow, everybody blew gage and juiced back and jumped. I met chicks who were as fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings," he wrote in a paragraph demonstrating he was hip to the hip lingo.
Malcolm soon took off to work for the railroad, selling sandwiches. He excelled at his job for which he would show up "loud and wild and half-high on liquor and reefers." He was given the New York route, which took him to Harlem. There he "drank liquor, smoked marijuana, painted the big Apple red with increasing numbers of friends." He writes of "my reefers keeping me sky-high" and feeling "that marijuana glow where the world relaxes."
After he lost his bartending job in New York for connecting an undercover cop with a prostitute, Malcolm turned to "peddling reefers." Some merchant seamen he knew supplied him with "gunja and kisca smuggled in from Africa and Persia," and "musicians, among whom I had so many good contacts, were the heaviest consistent market for reefers." On his first night, he was able to pay back the friend who had staked his business.
"In every band, at least half of the musicians smoked reefers," he wrote. "I'm not going to list names; I'd have to include some of those most prominent then in popular music, even a number of them around today. In one case, every man in one of the bands which is still famous was on marijuana. Or again, any number of musicians could tell you who I mean when I say that one of the most famous singers smoked his reefers through a chicken thighbone. He had smoked so many though the bone that he could just light a match before the empty bone, draw the heat through, and get what he called a 'contact' high."
Malcolm was soon making $50-$60 a day. "And I didn't sell and run, because my customers were my friends. Often I'd smoke along with them. None of them stayed any more high than I did." Soon, however, he attracted the attention of police, and after trying to peddle his wares in poorer neighborhoods, he jumped back on the railroad, selling pot in small towns where he would find the Black neighborhoods by looking for a Lincoln High School.
Back in New York, he turned to armed robbery, using cocaine to hype him up for his jobs. He smoked opium to come down and was smoking reefer "by the ounce." In 1946 he was convicted of burglary and sentenced to 10 years (he served 7). In prison he spent much of his time high on nutmeg or reefer until his family got him placed in an experimental prison where he read up on history and was introduced to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. After his parole in 1952, he became one of the Nation's leaders and chief spokesmen as Malcolm X. For nearly a dozen years, he was the public face of the Nation of Islam, but ultimately broke with Muhammad. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 by three members of the NOI.
"When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom," Malcolm X said. "Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire . . . or preserve his freedom."