Malcolm X

Malcolm Little was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents were active in Marcus Garvey’s movement — his father led a chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association — and his father’s activism drew threats from a white supremacist group, the Black Legion. In 1929 the family’s home in Lansing, Michigan, was burned, and two years later his father’s body was found on the town’s trolley tracks; police called both accidents, but the family believed the Black Legion responsible. “Some kind of psychological deterioration hit our family circle,” Malcolm recalled. His mother was later committed to a mental institution, and the children were split among foster homes and reform schools.

As a young man in Boston, Malcolm was arrested for burglary in 1946 and sentenced to ten years in prison. There he educated himself, and through his brother Reginald learned the teachings of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, which held that white society worked to keep Black people from power. Paroled in 1952 after seven years, he took the name “X” in place of “Little,” which he considered a slave name.

Brilliant and charismatic, Malcolm X became a minister and national spokesman of the Nation of Islam, founding mosques in cities such as Detroit and Harlem and using newspaper columns, radio, and television to spread its message. The organization’s membership grew from about 500 in 1952 to some 30,000 by 1963, largely credited to him. A 1959 television documentary, The Hate That Hate Produced, made him famous — so famous that his celebrity began to eclipse that of Elijah Muhammad. He married Betty Shabazz in 1958; they had four daughters.

In 1963 he learned that Elijah Muhammad had secretly fathered children with several women in the Nation, and his faith in his mentor collapsed. After he said that President Kennedy “never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon,” Muhammad silenced him for ninety days, and in March 1964 Malcolm left the Nation. That year his pilgrimage to Mecca transformed him: sharing his beliefs with people of many cultures, he came home saying he had met blond, blue-eyed men he could call his brothers. He founded Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of African American Unity, reached out to activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and in early 1965 visited Selma, telling Coretta Scott King that he hoped to make her husband’s work easier: “If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”

In his Nation of Islam years Malcolm X preached Black pride, self-reliance, racial separation, and self-defense: “I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defense,” he said, “I call it intelligence.” He mocked a revolution built on loving one’s enemy — “That’s no revolution.” After Mecca he returned with a new outlook on integration and a message for all races, while still insisting that Black Americans must fight for their freedom rather than wait for it: “We want freedom now, but we’re not going to get it saying ‘We Shall Overcome.’ We’ve got to fight to overcome.”

Malcolm X’s attacks on King and on integration, and his advocacy of separatism, made him one of the most polarizing figures of the era; King called his speeches a “great disservice” and rejected his overtures, and the two men met only once, briefly, in a Capitol hallway in March 1964. His remark about Kennedy’s death drew sharp criticism. The FBI infiltrated the Nation of Islam and watched him closely, and after his break with Elijah Muhammad informants warned that he had been marked for death.

On February 14, 1965, his family’s home in East Elmhurst, New York, was firebombed. A week later, on February 21, three gunmen shot him at a speaking engagement at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom; he was thirty-nine. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted, but in 2021 the Manhattan district attorney moved to vacate the convictions of two of them, finding that prosecutors, the FBI, and the police had withheld key evidence. King called the murder a “great tragedy” and wrote that Malcolm had “the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.” Many activists later embraced his message as the Black Power movement grew.