the jazz of malcolm x

Asalam Alaikum.
From adolescence until today I have been deeply influenced by El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, the iconic freedom fighter, apostle of Pan-Africanism and international spokesperson for all people of goodwill and human rights in the mid-twentieth century.
Since his assassination in February 1965, a mythology has grown around his legacy.
Malcolm was the quintessential archetypal contradiction found in American life. He was raised on the Great Plains and in the Midwest by parents who were followers of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican Black nationalist who had emigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century, rooting Malcolm in world views of other Black internationalists such as Martin Delaney, America's first Black nationalist who led a back-to-Africa movement in 1878 out of Charleston.
Malcolm joined family in the Northeast as a teenager and proceeded to a lifestyle of street hustling and crime. While in prison in Massachusetts, he converted to the Nation of Islam, a Black separatist religious sect for whom he became in later years the chief minister and fiery spokesperson.
The pre-NOI, secular time in his life had him mingling with jazz musicians. He hung out in clubs and dancehalls all up and down the Northeastern corridor. As it turns out, these musicians' craft taught him the showmanship and the affect that became an integral part of his style.
He was a sharp dresser. He was largely self taught. He was articulate. The cadence of his very eloquent speechmaking was that of bop.
As told in Manning Marable's new blockbuster biography, "Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention," he had a kind of cultural symbiotic relationship with jazz players to the extent that many came under the influence of his teachings and rhetoric, such as John Coltrane, with some converting to Islam and/or taking Muslim names - Aminata Moseka (Abbey Lincoln), Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Liaquat Ali Salaam (Kenny Clarke), Emmanuel Abdul Rahim (Juan Amalbert), Abdullah Ibn Buhaina (Art Blakey), Yusef Lateef (William Evans), Aliyah Rabia Dawud (Dakota Staton), Jamil Bashir (Jaki Byard) and many others.
For me, what Malcolm and how he lived his life had most in common with jazz and its creators is an ongoing pursuit of excellence, open minded progress, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a seeking of spiritual enlightenment and fulfillment.
Alaikam as Salaam.