In the fifth episode, Kenyatta shifts from being a "bombastic, machete-waving extremist to a streetwise community leader" with connections to people in high places. Allied with Barry Gotteherer, "the mayor's man" among other people, Kenyatta continues to be a controversial figure in Harlem, but now because he is distrusted by many community activists. Meanwhile, Kenyatta becomes aware of the suffering of the Biafran people, whose independence movement has led to blockades and starvation, and he travels to Africa to intercede.  Reflecting on Kenyatta's concern for the poorest in the community, the story then flashes back to the Harlem street days of a zoot-suit wearing Charles Morris, playing the "up north success" and then returning South where his life descends into criminality and imprisonment.

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).