They are such icons and heroes that, like members of our family, we are comfortable calling them only by their first names. On this day in 1925, Malcolm Little, later to be called Malcolm X, was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Five years later, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois. In their own unique ways they were pivotal to the explosive push for civil rights in the tumultuous years spanning the early 1950s, right up to their deaths a little more than a month apart in 1965.