It was a turbulent time in the fiery Negro leader’s life. Throughout the early 1960s, Malcolm had emerged as a singular force in the budding black liberation movement, which ran alongside and sometimes served as a counterpoint to the more mainstream civil rights movement. Malcolm X presented himself as a militant alternative to the nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Malcolm ridiculed nonviolence as a tactic, saying, “It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks…. It doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defense. I call it intelligence.” More recently, Malcolm had become caught up in a nasty public feud with his former mentor in the Nation of Islam, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The previous year, Malcolm X learned that Elijah Muhammad had fathered numerous children out of wedlock with young female secretaries in the Nation of Islam.
