Part VI: Shortcomings and Other Glorious Moments

37: The Curious & Embattled Life of Charles Kenyatta

In the sixth episode we continue to follow young Charles Morris's dreadful experiences in the flourishing racist prison system in North Carolina of the late 1930s. Fast forwarding the story, we see Kenyatta's emerging role as a community reformer in the late 1960s and early '70s, and Lou's reflections on Kenyatta in the 1990s, when his community polemics prove embarrassing and offensive, especially in the wake of the death of Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, who died in 1997 after a tragic house fire. Still, as Lou observes, Kenyatta's offensive behaviors probably reflected past memories of Malcolm's death and, likewise, his own near assassination in 1969, quite likely, by the same movement that had killed his friend.
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.
NOTE TO LISTENERS: ALTHOUGH KENYATTA'S NARRATIVE CONTAINS THE USE OF THE "N-WORD" IN THIS SECTION, IT IS NOT REPRODUCED. INSTEAD, AN APPROPRIATELY OFFENSIVE "BEEP" SOUND SERVES AS THE "N-WORD" MARKER.--LD
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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