In the third episode, Lou talks about becoming closer to Kenyatta, who begins to share his story, beginning with a childhood traumatized by racism and violence in the South, and its ramifications in later life. Lou also discusses Kenyatta's first independent efforts as a stepladder speaker in Harlem--an "inflammatory" career that brought him into center focus of the New York Office of the FBI, and Director J. Edgar Hoover.
In "The Curious & Embattled Life of Charles Kenyatta," historian and biographer, Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., narrates the story of his association and friendship with Charles (37X) Kenyatta, a follower of Malcolm X and prominent personality in Harlem from the 1960s until his death in 2005. Reminiscing about his decade-long association with this controversial Harlem personality, Lou weaves Kenyatta's own story into the narrative, revealing the life and struggles of an unlikely Harlem leader, a man whose passion for the poor and the disenfranchised was matched by his own quest for leadership and notoriety--a quest filled with twists, turns, and backflips. Based upon extensive interviews with Kenyatta, the story is juxtaposed against Kenyatta's FBI files and other research.
Louis DeCaro Jr. is a biographer of abolitionist John Brown, but entered his life of scholarship in the late 1980s and early '90s as a student of Malcolm X, and ultimately produced a doctoral dissertation and two books on the Muslim activist, On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (1995) and Malcolm and the Cross: Christianity, the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X (1997).