Malcolm X ( /ˈmælkəm ˈɛks/; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Arabic: الحاجّ مالك الشباز‎), was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. Detractors accused him of preaching racism, black supremacy, antisemitism, and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.

Malcolm X's father died—killed by white supremacists, it was rumored—when he was young, and at least one of his uncles was lynched. When he was thirteen, his mother was placed in a mental hospital, and he was placed in a series of foster homes. In 1946, at age 20, he went to prison for breaking and entering.

In prison, Malcolm X became a member of the Nation of Islam and after his parole in 1952 he quickly rose to become one of its leaders. For a dozen years Malcolm X was the public face of the controversial group, but disillusionment with Nation of Islam head Elijah Muhammad led him to leave the Nation in March 1964. After a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, he returned to the United States, where he founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. In February 1965, less than a year after leaving the Nation of Islam, he was assassinated by three members of the group.

Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole; October 7, 1897 – February 25, 1975) was an African American religious leader, and led the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death in 1975. Muhammad was a mentor to Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad Ali; and his son Warith Deen Mohammed.

Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Robert Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, the sixth of thirteen children to William Poole, Sr. (1868–1942), a Baptist lay preacher and sharecropper, and Mariah Hall (1873–1958), a homemaker and sharecropper.

Poole's education ended at the fourth grade. To support the family, he worked with his parents as a sharecropper. When he was sixteen years old, he left home and began working in factories and at other businesses.

Poole married Clara Evans (1899–1972) on March 7, 1917. In 1923, the Pooles, like hundreds of thousands of other African Americans in those years, migrated from the Jim Crow South to the northern states for safety and employment opportunities in the industrial cities. Poole later recounted that before the age of 20, he had witnessed the lynchings of three black men by white people. He said, "I seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years".

Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The phrase "Uncle Tom" has also become an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be a participant in the oppression of their own group.

At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851 Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for White audiences by portraying Tom as a Christlike figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because Tom refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who escape from slavery. Stowe reversed the gender conventions of slave narratives by juxtaposing Uncle Tom's passivity against the daring of three African American women who escape from slavery.

The novel was both influential and commercially successful, published as a serial from 1851-1852 and as a book from 1852 onward. An estimated 500,000 copies had sold worldwide by 1853, including unauthorized reprints. Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln himself reportedly quipped that Stowe had triggered the American Civil War.Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery". Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication The Liberator suspected a racial double standard in the idealization of Uncle Tom:

Jeffrey Robinson (born 1945) is an American author of 25 books. He has been labeled by the British Bankers' Association "the world's leading financial crime author".

Born in Long Beach, New York, Robinson is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia (1967). While still at school, he wrote for television and radio, including a popular weekly children's show and was on the writing staff of The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally televised daily talk show. He continued working in the media during his four year stint as an officer in the United States Air Force. Charged with running a press and public relations office for five generals at the height of the Vietnam War, he hosted a weekly talk show, scripted and directed several film projects, wrote short stories for national magazines and moonlighted as a disc jockey on local radio.

When his military obligation was completed at the end of 1970, he took up residence in a small village in the south of France. Using that as his base, he vagabonded around the world, writing articles and short stories for leading North American and British periodicals. His magazine credits include Playboy, McCalls, Barron's, Gourmet, True, Ambassador magazine, Mademoiselle, Reader's Digest and TV Guide; his newspaper credits include The Washington Post, The San Francisco Examiner, The Christian Science Monitor and International Herald Tribune (for which he was a major contributor of features during the 1970s). In Britain his feature journalism has appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Independent and The Mail on Sunday, among others.

Malcolm Lateef Shabazz (born 1984 in Paris) is the son of Qubilah Shabazz, the second daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz. His father is an Algerian Muslim whom Qubilah Shabazz met in Paris. He is the first male descendant of Malcolm X. In 1997, when he was 12 years old, Shabazz set a fire that caused the death of his grandmother, Betty Shabazz.

According to Shabazz, he has never met his father. Other sources say Shabazz knew his father, but they had little contact with one another.

When Shabazz was a few months old, he and his mother moved to Los Angeles. A little while later, they went to New York City and then Philadelphia. One landlord there remembered frequently having to let young Shabazz into the apartment because his mother was not at home. Shabazz showed some evidence of disturbance as a child. As a three-year-old, he reportedly set fire to his shoes. He brought a knife to school in the third grade. About the same time, he suffered from delusions and was hospitalized for a short time.