Malcolm X in the context of "Drug rehabilitation"

The Black power movement or Black liberation movement emerged in the mid-1960s from the mainstream civil rights movement in the United States, reacting against its moderate and incremental tendencies and representing the demand for more immediate action to counter White supremacy. Many of its ideas were influenced by Malcolm X's criticism of Martin Luther King Jr.'s peaceful protest methods. The 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, coupled with the urban riots of 1964 and 1965, ignited the movement. While thinkers such as Malcolm X influenced the early movement, the views of the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, are widely seen as the cornerstone. Black power was influenced by philosophies such as pan-Africanism, Black nationalism, and socialism, as well as contemporary events such as the Cuban Revolution and the decolonization of Africa.

During the peak of the Black power movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many African Americans adopted "Afro" hairstyles, African clothes, or African names (such as Stokely Carmichael, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who popularized the phrase "Black power" and later changed his name to Kwame Ture) to emphasize their identity. Others founded Black-owned stores, food cooperatives, bookstores, publishers, media, clinics, schools, and other organizations oriented to their communities. American universities began to offer courses in Black studies, and the word Black replaced negro as the preferred usage in the country. Other leaders of the movement included Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the Black Panther Party.

COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political parties and organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive.

Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party), Student organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers, and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups, such as the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party). Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left, they also targeted white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party.

Malcolm X, a Muslim African American minister and human rights activist who was a popular figure during the civil rights movement, was shot multiple times and died from his wounds in Manhattan, New York City, on February 21, 1965, at the age of 39 while preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in the neighborhood of Washington Heights. Three members of the Nation of Islam—Muhammad Abdul Aziz, Khalil Islam, and Thomas Hagan—were charged, tried, and convicted of the murder and given indeterminate life sentences, but in November 2021, Aziz and Islam were exonerated.

Speculation about the assassination and whether it was conceived or aided by leading or additional members of the Nation of Islam, or by law enforcement agencies, particularly the FBI and CIA, has persisted for decades after the shooting. The assassination was one of four major assassinations of the 1960s in the United States, coming less than two years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and three years before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

Kwame Ture (/ˈkwɑːmeɪ ˈtʊəreɪ/ KWAH-may TOOR-ay; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a Trinidadian-American activist who played a major role in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, he grew up in the United States from age 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. Ture was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party and as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

Carmichael was one of the original SNCC Freedom Riders of 1961 under Diane Nash's leadership. He became a major voting rights activist in Mississippi and Alabama after being mentored by Ella Baker and Bob Moses. Like most young people in the SNCC, he became disillusioned with the two-party system after the 1964 Democratic National Convention failed to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as official delegates from the state. Carmichael eventually decided to develop independent all-black political organizations, such as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and, for a time, the national Black Panther Party. Inspired by Malcolm X's example, he articulated a philosophy of black power, and popularized it both by provocative speeches and more sober writings. The author Richard Wright is credited with coining the phrase in his 1954 book Black Power.

Malcolm X College is a public municipal community college in the Near West Side community area in the west side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is part of the City Colleges of Chicago system.

The college was founded as Crane Junior College in 1911 and was the first of the City Colleges. Crane ceased operation during the Depression; their newspaper, the Crane College Javelin, was still being printed in May of 1932. It was reopened in 1934 as Theodor Herzl Junior College, located in the North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's West Side in. Needing a new campus in the late 1960s, Herzl's building was changed into an elementary school. In 1969, the school was named in honor of civil rights advocate and orator Malcolm X on its move to a new campus in the Near West Side.