This detailed and highly emotional recollection appeared to ground Malcolm’s political beliefs; in his public speeches,
Malcolm referred back to episodes of racial conflict and harassment.
In 1917, African American basketball legend Bill Russell’s grandfather stood up to the Ku Klux Klan. Russell heard the
story of this momentous episode from his father:
The way my father told it, come the end of the crop season a white farmer refused to pay Grandpa his fair share of crop
sales. . .When Grandpa gave him an earful, the farmer threatened to beat him for his insolence. . .That night, the dog
started barking when a group of Klansmen called Night Raiders drove up in trucks. One of them yelled, ‘‘Come on out here,
old man, and take your whipping, so you can learn how to treat a white man!’’ Grandpa yelled back, ‘‘Sir, you’ll have to
come on in this house and get me!’’ When someone fired a stray shot at the house, Grandpa unloaded his shotgun. . .the
Night Raiders vanished in a hurry; they hadn’t bargained for that’’.
[Russell & Steinberg, 2009, p. 5]