Sukarno, Indonesia's first president, and Malcolm X shared the platform at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1956, introduced there by mutual friend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. The relationship launched there endured until Malcolm X’s untimely death in 1965, two weeks before he was slated to speak at the Asian-African Islamic Conference in Jakarta.
He had also planned to attend the tenth anniversary celebration of the 1955 Bandung Conference, the first large-scale Asian-African conference. Iandola explores this little-known relationship to illuminate their ideological affinities as well as the Cold War politics of the Third World.
