Malcolm X

Recently had the chance to read the second half of the Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley). Started with his release from prison and subsequent joining of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam. I had never actually studied his life, which to call remarkable would be an understatement. Most impressive is the way he followed his conscience into a very public break with the NOI after discovering that its "dear leader" was a serial adulterer who fathered children with several teenage "personal secretaries". After this discovery, he went on pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey during which his views on race evolved--from buying into Elijah Muhammad's strange theories about the origin of the white race in an ancient genetic experiment to recognizing, through Islam, that racism is a sickness peculiar to western civilization. Who knows, had he lived longer, if he would eventually have seen through the charade of the Abrahamic religions as a whole and the way that they have functioned through the ages, like racism, to keep humanity ignorant and divided. As it was, his unrelenting pursuit of truth and justice, even with the full knowledge of his imminent and inevitable assassination, sets him head and shoulders above the vast majority of history's so-called heroes, martyrs, and saints in my book.