Part III: Kenyatta of Harlem Podcast By  cover art

Part III: Kenyatta of Harlem

Part III: Kenyatta of Harlem

Listen for free

View show details

About this listen

In the third episode, Lou talks about becoming closer to Kenyatta, who begins to share his story, beginning with a childhood traumatized by racism and violence in the South, and its ramifications in later life.   Lou also discusses Kenyatta's first independent efforts as a stepladder speaker in Harlem--an "inflammatory" career that brought him into center focus of the New York Office of the FBI, and Director J. Edgar Hoover.

In "The Curious & Embattled Life of Charles Kenyatta," historian and biographer, Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., narrates the story of his association and friendship with Charles (37X) Kenyatta, a follower of Malcolm X and prominent personality in Harlem from the 1960s until his death in 2005.   Reminiscing about his decade-long association with this controversial Harlem personality, Lou weaves Kenyatta's own story into the narrative, revealing the life and struggles of an unlikely Harlem leader, a man whose passion for the poor and the disenfranchised was matched by his own quest for leadership and notoriety--a quest filled with twists, turns, and backflips.  Based upon extensive interviews with Kenyatta, the story is juxtaposed against Kenyatta's FBI files and other research.

Louis DeCaro Jr. is a biographer of abolitionist John Brown, but entered his life of scholarship in the late 1980s and early '90s as a student of Malcolm X, and ultimately produced a doctoral dissertation and two books on the Muslim activist, On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (1995) and Malcolm and the Cross: Christianity, the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X (1997).

Support the show
No reviews yet