As always, Malcolm prepped for the opposition. As soon as nonfiction books on black topics were released, he would hit Michaux’s National Memorial Bookstore on 125th Street in Harlem. In addition to treatises on Africa, on Asia, and on religions, he read the works of such writers as James Baldwin, Lerone Bennett, Frantz Fanon, and Kenneth Clark; the historians E. Franklin Frazier and John Hope Franklin; and the autodidactic John Henrik Clarke, his Harlem friend, among others. Malcolm also studied the liberal white social critics who wrote with a practiced disinterestedness, and from a great
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