Malcolm X and African Nationalism in Harlem

Malcolm took over Harlem's 116th Street mosque in 1954 and he came into his own at that exact moment. Post-colonial Africa was giving rise to newly independent states and leaders from whom black elites in Harlem drew a lot of inspiration. Malcolm, Robert F. Williams and the Cuban revolution by the late 1950s had helped create a new generation of black nationalists who studied local organizing,. The politics of armed self-defense and global upheavals with equal fervor. But it was the 1961 assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lamumba by a Belgian firing squad that really radicalized them. In February 1961, outraged black nationalists protested for days at the United Nations in New York once they even