The People with the Worst Backgrounds Build the Best Futures: What Malcolm X Taught Me About Redemption, Resilience, and Revolution

By Ivan Kilgore

When Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz said, “The people with the worst backgrounds build the best futures,” I felt those words in my bones. Not as a poetic statement, but as a truth lived and proven by men like her father—Malcolm X—and by men like me. We come from fractured beginnings, institutional abandonment, and choices we regret. But even from that rubble, something beautiful can be built. Something transformative.

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, lived a life that mirrored my own in uncanny ways. His life was shaped by a brutal legacy of systemic racism, a broken home, and poor choices that led to incarceration. Yet it was in prison where he experienced his most profound transformation. Today, I write this not only as a fellow Black man and former street hustler, but as the incarcerated founder of the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation (UBFSF), a nonprofit designed to disrupt the very systems that once shaped my descent. My journey, like Malcolm’s, is proof that redemption is not only possible—it is powerful.

A Legacy of Violence and Dispossession

Malcolm’s story begins with tragedy. His father, Earl Little, was a preacher and a follower of Marcus Garvey, a man who dared to speak of Black pride and independence in a time when such ideas were dangerous. For this, he was targeted. The Ku Klux Klan torched their home and eventually murdered him. Malcolm was only six.

I, too, lost my father at a young age. He was taken from me not by the Klan, but by the kind of street violence that festers in communities neglected by society. His death carved a hole in me, a hunger for security, for male guidance, for meaning. Instead, I found the streets.

What I’ve come to understand is that trauma creates patterns. It was not just the individual loss of a father, but the systematic stripping away of Black fatherhood, of protection, of hope. Like Malcolm, I inherited trauma that did not begin with me, but that I still had to answer for.

The Madness of Our Mothers

Malcolm’s mother, Louise Little, was biracial and suffered from schizophrenia. After her husband’s murder, she spiraled into mental illness and was institutionalized. The state split her children apart, Malcolm included. He never fully healed from that.

My own mother, also biracial, suffered from schizophrenia. As a child, I didn’t understand her condition. All I saw was the confusion, the episodes, the unpredictable behavior. I felt ashamed of her, powerless to help her, and eventually emotionally detached. That shame lodged deep inside me and began shaping how I saw myself: broken, unworthy, unlovable.

Mental illness, especially in Black families, is so often misunderstood or ignored. We don’t talk about it. We hide it. And children, like Malcolm and I, end up lost in the chaos. We learn to survive, but not to thrive.

From Poverty to Delinquency

It’s no surprise that Malcolm became “Detroit Red”—a hustler, a drug dealer, a man immersed in vice. He was reacting to the poverty and instability he knew too well. So was I. The instability of my home, the shame, the hunger, the loneliness; it all pushed me toward the streets. Crime was never the goal. It was a survival strategy.

Like Malcolm, I didn’t wake up one day and say, “I want to be a criminal.” Life cornered me into making bad choices. Choices that led to prison. But I never forgot how it started. And I never stopped believing that my story wasn’t over.

Rejection Breeds Rebellion

One of the most heartbreaking details in Malcolm’s story is when a white teacher told him he could never be a lawyer because he was Black. That he should be a carpenter instead, something more “realistic.” That moment pierced his spirit. It taught him that no matter how smart he was, white society had already decided his worth.

I experienced that same venom. I was told by white teachers that I wouldn’t amount to anything. I was criminalized in classrooms before I even touched the streets. The system didn’t see promise in me. It saw a problem.

So I rebelled. I rejected school. I internalized their hate and turned it inward. I failed my classes; not because I wasn’t smart, but because I believed them when they told me I was nothing.

From Vice to Vision

Malcolm’s life of crime was not the end. It was the beginning of something greater. In prison, he found the Nation of Islam. He found discipline, identity, and purpose. He studied relentlessly. He learned about himself, his history, and his people. When he walked out of prison, he walked out as a revolutionary.

My awakening came in much the same way. Behind these walls, I began to ask questions: Why did I end up here? What systems funneled me into this path? What if I could change those systems? That’s how UBFSF was born—not from a boardroom or a think tank, but from a cell. From lived experience.

Malcolm understood vice because he lived it. He understood addiction, not from a textbook, but from hustling to feed it. And because he knew that world, he could reach people no preacher or politician could. I strive to do the same. Our remorse becomes fuel. Our pain becomes purpose.

Building the Future We Were Denied

The people with the worst backgrounds really do build the best futures, because we’ve seen the worst. We’ve been abandoned, criminalized, written off. And yet, we survive. We learn. We evolve.

Malcolm didn’t just become a leader—he became a mirror. He reflected back to America the consequences of its racism, its hypocrisy, its cruelty. And he demanded change. Not politely, but powerfully.

I see my mission in a similar light. Through UBFSF, I mentor incarcerated youth. I work to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. I create curriculum rooted in cultural identity, history, and economic empowerment. I write books, I teach, I speak. Not because I’m perfect—but because I’m proof. Proof that redemption is real. Proof that no background is too dark to birth a brilliant future.

Final Reflections

Malcolm X once said, “Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because they don’t do what you do or think as you think… There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.” That quote lives with me.

So many of us were never taught how to love ourselves. We were never shown how to build, only how to survive. But like Malcolm, I’ve learned that our past doesn’t have to define us—it can refine us. In the eyes of society, I am still a criminal, a convicted murderer. But in the eyes of truth, I am a builder, a healer, a revolutionary in the making. Like Malcolm, I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. And I choose to build.

Because I believe, like Malcolm taught us, that even from the ashes, we can rise.