“We never can win freedom and justice and equality until we are doing something for ourselves!”

Malcolm X learned from his father that black people should demand equality by taking their lives and futures into their own hands. Malcolm believed in this idea. It was one he lived by.

Though Malcolm faced hard times growing up and even went to jail, he turned his life around. He read books and combined lessons he’d learned from his father and from the religious leader Elijah Muhammad. Soon Malcolm would become a powerful leader in the struggle for blacks to achieve equality.

Malcolm died tragically when he was only thirty-nine, but his beliefs live on today. Walter Dean Myers’s evenhanded narrative and Leonard Jenkins’s striking paintings celebrate the man and the fiery message he brought to all people of color.