Sanderson holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. In this essay, she examines how Malcolm X, despite the fiery rhetoric, fulfills the image of the classic American success story.

The general reaction among the white community in the United States to Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam in the 1950s and 1960s was one of alarm. He and the Nation were painted as fomenting violent revolution just as many whites and some more conservative blacks believed that life was beginning to get better for African Americans.

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the Muslim leader remembers the heated response to a documentary made in 1959 about the Nation of Islam: "The public reaction was like what happened back in the 1930s when Orson Welles frightened America with a radio program describing, as though it were actually happening, an invasion...