By Sonsyrea Tate. Since the 1930s, the Nation of Islam has been one of the foremost all-black organizations in the United States. Yet for most people outside the movement, it has been known only through media portrayals of the controversial leaders such as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan. As a young girl, Sonsyrea Tate was one of tens of thousands of "Little X's," the children raised within the Nation of Islam as future foot soldiers of black unity. In Little X, Tate, an award winning journalist, shows us the Nation of Islam from the inside: Little X is the compelling account of one woman's cultural identiy, family unity and spiritual fulfillment in predominantly white and Christian America. Her grandparents joined the Nation of Islam in 1952, which makes Sonsyrea Tate a third-generation member of the Nation. In this fascinating glimpse at life behind the scenes in an NOI family, Tate tells of going to a Muslim school, of the changes in the Nation after the death of its leader, Elijah Muhammad, and of the tensions within her family after her mother converted to Orthodox Islam. For all that it is a profoundly interesting account of growing up in a different culture, in the end Tate's is a quintessentially American story of a child coming of age and finding her own path. University Tennessee Press (2005), English, Paperback: 256 pages.