• Part IV: The Rabble Rouser Index

  • Apr 23 2021
  • Length: 21 mins
  • Podcast

Part IV: The Rabble Rouser Index

  • Summary

  • In the fourth episode, we learn how Kenyatta had become a major annoyance to the New York Office of the FBI, which saw him as a provocative and disturbing public figure in the later 1960s. With Malcolm gone, Kenyatta turns to supporting Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the Harlem Congressman and Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, who is facing his own struggles in Washington D.C.  As a machete-waving belligerent, Kenyatta is disliked by Martin Luther King Jr. , and with King's assassination, Kenyatta demonstrated his preference for Malcolm over Martin in an unconventional manner. Once again, however, Kenyatta makes yet radical shift -- this time in a most unpredictable direction.

    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).

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