Alex Haley's Queen

His original message, that the “white man” was (quite literally) the devil incarnate, had become transformed into a religiously inspired quest for racial equality. The quest was tempered by a conviction that black America had to look within, and not to white America, for the means to freedom and progress. The evolution of Malcolm X was cut short on February 21, 1965, when he was gunned down by three Black Muslims during a speech at Harlem’s Audubon Auditorium. His Autobiography (dictated to Alex Haley, who would later gain fame as the author of Roots, a sweeping novel of black history), published just after his assassination, became an extraor-dinarily influential document in expanding and redefining the civil rights movement. The journey of black America, like the life of Malcolm X, remained incomplete during the 1960s and remains incomplete to this day. The fact is that African-Americans generally live less affluently, amid more crime, and with less opportunity than white Americans. Yet the range of black leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, from Rosa Parks, to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X, brought hope and social visibility to black America ...»