THE HOTEL THERESA STORY.
WIKI: "It has a striking white brick facade and was known as the "Waldorf Astoria of Harlem." From the time it opened until 1940, the hotel accepted only white guests plus a few black celebrities. This changed when the hotel passed to new management.
Louis Armstrong, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, Josephine Baker, Dorothy Dandridge, Duke Ellington, Muhammad Ali, Dinah Washington, Ray Charles, Little Richard, and Jimi Hendrix all stayed in the Hotel or lived there for a time, as did Fidel Castro, while in New York for the 1960 opening session of the United Nations, after storming out of the Hotel Shelburne because of that hotel manager's "unacceptable cash" demands.[1] Castro's entourage rented 80 rooms at the Theresa for $800 per day.[2]
The hotel profited from the refusal of prestigious hotels elsewhere in the city to accept black guests. As a result, black businessmen, performers, and athletes were thrown under the same roof.
After leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X maintained his competing Organization of Afro-American Unity at the hotel and hosted meetings there. He met Cassius Clay in the hotel on various occasions.
Bill Clinton's commerce secretary, Ron Brown, grew up in the hotel, where his father worked as manager. U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) once worked there as a desk clerk.
The hotel may have enjoyed its greatest prominence in 1960. Nikita Khruschev visited New York in that year, during the week when Castro was staying in Harlem, and came to meet him in the hotel. Also, in October 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned for the presidency at the hotel, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and other powerful figures in the Democratic Party.
SOMETHING ABOUT MALCOLM X"...Malcolm moved to New York City where, to support himself, he became a numbers runner, a drug dealer, even a pimp. He wore zoot suits and dyed his hair red, which earned him the nickname 'Detroit Red.' He relocated to Boston again where he organized a robbery ring that was uncovered by the police in 1946, and he was sentenced to eight to 10 years in prison.
...Malcolm used the time behind bars to educate himself in the prison library where he learned the fundamentals of grammar and increased his vocabulary. It was here that a few inmates introduced Malcolm to a new religion and movement, The Nation of Islam. Malcolm's younger brother, Reginald, already a member, visited him and told him about Islam and about Allah. Much of what Reginald said confused Malcolm, but two phrase took root in his head, "The white man is the devil" and "The black man is the brainwashed." Malcolm learned that if he wanted to join, he would have to accept its theology and submit completely to its founder and leader, Elijah Muhammad.
Inspired by the new direction his life was taking, Malcolm wrote Elijah Muhammad a heartfelt letter about himself and why he wanted to join. Elijah wrote back welcoming Malcolm to the faith. He instructed Malcolm to drop his last name, which his ancestors inherited from a slave owner and replace it with the letter X which symbolized that his true African name had been lost. In 1952, Malcolm was finally paroled from prison. Rather than returning to the life of crime, Malcolm committed himself to learning more about his new religion. "...In 1958, Malcolm married Betty Shabazz, a Muslim nurse and together they had four daughters (plus two more born after his death).
