Ashley V. Britton May 4, 2001
             Separated by centuries, and driven by entirely different circumstances Malcolm X (Little) and Samuel Adams were two men who made overwhelming changes in, not only their communities, but all over the world. Although X and Adams made exceptionally different contributions to society, and lived in two time periods that were unbelievably different, their characteristics of leadership, determination and strength make them quite similar.
             On the nineteenth day of May in 1925, Malcolm Little was born to parents Earl and Louise Little, in Omaha, Nebraska. He was the second youngest, of five children, and his father was a Baptist preacher from Georgia. By the time Malcolm was six years old, his family had moved from Nebraska to Wisconsin, to Lansing, Michigan. On September 28, 1931 Earl Little (Malcolm's father) was run over and killed by a streetcar, believed to have been driven by a member of a white supremacist group. In 1939 Louise Little, Malcolm's mother, was declared mentally insane and committed to a mental hospital where she remained for twenty-six years. In 1940 Malcolm was placed into various foster homes, until 1941 when he moved to Boston to live with his paternal half-sister for a year.
             After living with his sister for a year, Malcolm went off on his own working wherever he could find job openings, from ballrooms to restaurants. In 1943 Malcolm registered for the U.S. Army, but they found him mentally unfit for military service, because of psychopathic personality inadequacies, sexual perversion, psychiatric rejection. He would quit and walk off of most of the jobs that he got after working for only about a month, and moved back and forth between New York, Michigan, and Boston. On the streets of Detroit, Michigan he was known as Big Red, and he pushed dope, played the numbers, peddled bootleg whiskey, and hustled. In 1946 Malcolm was indicted in Boston for carrying...