Minister of the Nation of Islam and then a movement of his own, assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in 1965. James Baldwin knew him, debated him publicly, wrote his life as a screenplay in One Day When I Was Lost, and counted his murder among the three that shape No Name in the Street.
Malcolm X was an American minister, organizer and writer who transformed himself repeatedly: from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red, from a prison convert to the Nation of Islam's most formidable public voice, and finally to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, an independent Muslim leader trying to internationalize the Black freedom struggle.
His last year carried him through Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In Paris he addressed a packed meeting at the Maison de la Mutualité in November 1964; less than three months later, French officials stopped him at Orly and refused him entry. Twelve days after that refusal, he was assassinated in New York at thirty-nine.
Malcolm X was the Nation of Islam's most visible minister, and in the last year of his life the leader of a movement of his own. He was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on 21 February 1965, at thirty-nine. James Baldwin knew him, debated him publicly, and kept writing about him after his death — most directly in One Day When I Was Lost, the screenplay Columbia Pictures hired Baldwin to draw from The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
He carried four names in sequence, and each marks a stage of the life:
Malcolm Little was born on 19 May 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, a son of Earl and Louise Little.[1] Earl Little was a Baptist lay preacher and an organizer for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the family moved repeatedly under threat — Malcolm's earliest memory, as the Autobiography tells it, was of the family house in Lansing, Michigan burning. Earl Little died under a streetcar in 1931. The death was ruled an accident; Louise Little believed he had been killed by the Black Legion, a white terrorist group active in Michigan, and the question was never settled.
The family did not survive the loss. Louise Little was committed to the Kalamazoo State Hospital in 1938 and her children were separated into foster homes.[1] Malcolm left Michigan for Boston at fifteen to live with his half-sister Ella, moved on to Harlem in 1943, and spent the war years hustling — numbers running, burglary, the work he later itemized in the Autobiography with a bookkeeper's exactness. In 1946, at twenty, he was arrested in Boston after leaving a stolen watch for repair, and sentenced to eight to ten years for larceny and breaking and entering.
Prison made the second life. His siblings had joined a small movement called the Nation of Islam, and from 1948 Malcolm corresponded with its leader, Elijah Muhammad, converted, and began the self-education in the prison library that the Autobiography describes — copying out a dictionary page by page.[1] In 1950 he began signing himself Malcolm X. Paroled in 1952, he rose fast: by May 1954 he was minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem, the Nation's most important post outside Chicago.
Over the next decade he built the Nation from a few thousand members into a national movement, founded its newspaper Muhammad Speaks[1], and became its public face — a debater of unusual speed and discipline who took on journalists, academics, and civil rights leaders on their own terms. A 1959 television documentary, The Hate That Hate Produced, made him famous outside the movement. In January 1958 he married Betty Sanders, later Betty Shabazz; they had six daughters.
The rupture with Elijah Muhammad came in stages. In December 1963, after Malcolm described President Kennedy's assassination as "chickens coming home to roost," Muhammad silenced him for ninety days.[1] Behind the discipline lay deeper trouble: Malcolm had learned that Muhammad had fathered children with several of his young secretaries, the kind of violation the Nation's own moral code made unforgivable. On 8 March 1964 he announced his departure and founded Muslim Mosque, Inc., followed by the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity.
In April 1964 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, converted to Sunni Islam, and took the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.[1] The hajj — praying alongside Muslims of every color — moderated the strict separatism he had preached for the Nation, and he spent much of his final year traveling in Africa and Europe. The Nation treated him as a traitor. His house in East Elmhurst, Queens was firebombed on 14 February 1965, a week before he was killed.
Malcolm X was barred from entering France on 9 February 1965, when French border police turned him away at Orly airport as he arrived to give a lecture on Black emancipation.
On 23 November 1964, returning from months of travel in Africa and the Middle East, Malcolm X stopped in Paris and spoke at the Maison de la Mutualité. Le Monde's report describes an audience of francophone Black students pressing him on Africa, interracial marriage and the politics of his former movement. His central argument was that the American racial crisis had to be treated as an international human-rights question, not contained as a domestic civil-rights dispute.
He tried to return on 9 February 1965 for another Afro-American meeting. French security officials met his flight at Orly, declared his presence undesirable and sent him back to London without allowing him to contact the American embassy. The New York Public Library's Malcolm X papers preserve correspondence about the cancelled Paris meeting; the FBI file preserves contemporary clippings and official reporting on the refusal. Malcolm was killed twelve days later, which left the reason for France's decision unresolved and made the Orly episode one of the final public events of his life.
On 21 February 1965, as he began a speech to his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, three men shot him — a shotgun blast to the chest first, then pistol fire. He was pronounced dead that afternoon at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, across the street. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted in 1966. Two of them, Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam, were exonerated in 2021, after a review found that the FBI and the New York police had withheld evidence pointing away from them;[3] only Talmadge Hayer, who confessed at trial, is still held to have fired.
At the funeral the actor Ossie Davis delivered the eulogy that named him "our own black shining prince." He is buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, under the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. The Autobiography, told to Alex Haley across the last two years of his life, appeared that October — Doubleday dropped it after the murder, and Grove Press published it.
Baldwin and Malcolm X met on the air — they debated on television and radio in the early 1960s, and it was a joint appearance with Malcolm that earned Baldwin his dinner invitation to Elijah Muhammad's Chicago mansion, the evening at the center of The Fire Next Time. Baldwin was in London when he learned of the assassination, and reporters recorded his fury.
The deaths of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr. became the frame of Baldwin's late nonfiction. No Name in the Street is built around the three murders; the unfinished manuscript about the three men, Remember This House, became the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro. And in 1968 Columbia Pictures hired Baldwin to write the Malcolm X film — the commission he abandoned and published in 1972 as One Day When I Was Lost.
Weeks after leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He travelled as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and what he saw there changed the part of his position that had been most quoted against him.
In a letter written during the pilgrimage and copied to friends and the press, he described tens of thousands of pilgrims of every colour, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans, all performing the same ritual together. It showed him a unity his American experience had led him to believe impossible. He knew how it would read. Readers might be shocked by the words coming from him, he wrote, but what he had seen had forced him to rearrange much of what he had thought and to throw some of his conclusions away.
He did not become a gradualist. What changed was the account of race: he stopped describing white people as inherently the enemy and started describing American racism as a system. At the Ford Auditorium in Detroit the following February he put it flatly, saying he was not a racist in any form, did not believe in any form of racism, discrimination or segregation, and believed in Islam.
Leaving the Nation of Islam left him without an organisation, and in 1964 he built two. Muslim Mosque, Inc. was the religious body. The Organization of Afro-American Unity, founded at a rally at the Audubon Ballroom on 28 June 1964, was the political one, modelled on the Organization of African Unity.
Its charter, read aloud at that rally, put education first: a means to help their children and their people rediscover their identity and so increase their self-respect. The line about tomorrow belonging to those who prepare for it today comes from that document.
The rally is also where the most quoted sentence of his life was said, and it is routinely quoted with its object removed. What he actually said was that they wanted freedom by any means necessary, justice by any means necessary, and equality by any means necessary.
Through 1964 Malcolm X travelled in Africa and the Middle East and was received as a head of state might have been. He had private audiences with Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and met Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Sékou Touré of Guinea, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Milton Obote of Uganda.
The purpose was not ceremonial. He was trying to persuade African governments to bring the treatment of Black Americans before the United Nations as a human-rights question. That is the strategy behind the distinction he drew all that year between civil rights and human rights: a civil-rights struggle is a domestic matter, and no country outside the United States can speak on it. Raise it to human rights, he argued, and the rest of the world acquires standing to intervene.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X was built from interviews with Alex Haley conducted over roughly two years from 1963. Two written agreements governed the work. The book was published in 1965, after the assassination, and has never been out of print.
The collaboration is not straightforward and the page should not pretend otherwise. Haley wrote the epilogue himself, and it carries his account of a man whose views were still moving. Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam midway through the process, which meant that chapters written in praise of Elijah Muhammad no longer reflected what he thought by the time the book was finished. What was cut, and how much shaping Haley did, has been argued over ever since.
On 14 February 1965 the house in East Elmhurst, Queens, where Malcolm X lived with Betty Shabazz and their daughters was firebombed in the night. The family got out. He spoke at the Ford Auditorium in Detroit later the same day in the clothes he had grabbed on the way out, which smelled of smoke. He was shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom seven days later, on 21 February 1965.
Three men were convicted of the murder. Two of them, Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam, always maintained they had not been there. On 18 November 2021, after a review by the Manhattan District Attorney's office under Cyrus Vance Jr. found that evidence had been withheld from the defence, both convictions were vacated.[3] Khalil Islam had died in 2009. On 30 October 2022 New York agreed to pay $36 million to settle their claims, $26 million from the city and $10 million from the state.[4]
Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on 19 May.
His father Earl Little dies under a streetcar in Lansing, Michigan. The death is ruled an accident; his mother believes he was killed by the Black Legion.
Sentenced in Boston to eight to ten years for larceny and breaking and entering. In prison he converts to the Nation of Islam.
Begins signing his name Malcolm X.
Appointed minister of the Nation of Islam's Temple No. 7 in Harlem.
Marries Betty Sanders, later Betty Shabazz. They have six daughters.
Leaves the Nation of Islam in March, makes the pilgrimage to Mecca in April, and takes the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.
Addresses an audience at Paris's Maison de la Mutualité after months of travel in Africa and the Middle East.
French authorities refuse him entry at Orly Airport when he arrives to address an Afro-American meeting in Paris.
Assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on 21 February. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, told to Alex Haley, is published that October.
James Baldwin publishes One Day When I Was Lost, the screenplay Columbia Pictures commissioned from the Autobiography in 1968.
Two of the three men convicted of the assassination are exonerated after a review finds the FBI and the New York police withheld evidence.
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
It's got to be the ballot or the bullet.
Collaborated with · 1963–1965
More than fifty interviews across two years produced The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published nine months after the assassination. Haley's epilogue records the collaboration itself — the guarded early sessions, the chapters corrected in Malcolm X's hand, and the February 1965 phone calls that were their last.
Met
James Baldwin knew Malcolm X and debated him publicly in the early 1960s, wrote his life as the screenplay One Day When I Was Lost, and counted his murder among the three deaths that shape No Name in the Street.
Malcolm X told his life to Alex Haley across two years of interviews and was murdered before the book appeared. It is the source James Baldwin was hired to turn into a film.
The speeches of Malcolm X's last year, gathered by George Breitman and published within months of the assassination. "The Ballot or the Bullet" is here, and so is his answer to a question in Paris.
George Breitman's second Malcolm X collection, named after the motto he announced in Harlem in June 1964. The book prints his meeting in Paris that November and his statement on being barred from France.
Four speeches from Malcolm X's years as a minister of the Nation of Islam, edited by the man who introduced him at the Audubon Ballroom on the day he was killed.
Six speeches and interviews, first printed in 1989, ending with the talk Malcolm X gave in Rochester five days before he was killed. He opened it with the week France turned him away.
Depicted in · Book
One of the three murdered men the memoir is built around — Baldwin knew all three.
— James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972)
Depicted in · Book
The scenario follows Malcolm X from a Lansing childhood through Harlem, prison, the Nation of Islam, Mecca, and the assassination at the Audubon Ballroom.
— James Baldwin, One Day When I Was Lost (1972)
Depicted in · Book
His own life, told to Alex Haley across more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965: Malcolm Little of Omaha and Lansing, Detroit Red of Harlem, the prison conversion, the ministry, the break with the Nation of Islam, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. He read and corrected chapters as they were drafted but did not live to see the book published.
— Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
Depicted in · Book
"Down at the Cross" engages Malcolm X directly: Baldwin weighs his argument that white America respects only violence, finds he cannot call it untrue, and refuses where it leads. It was a television appearance alongside Malcolm X that brought Baldwin the dinner invitation from Elijah Muhammad at the essay's center.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963), Down at the Cross
He was assassinated on 21 February 1965, shot as he began a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem — a shotgun blast to the chest followed by pistol fire. He was thirty-nine. Three Nation of Islam members were convicted in 1966; two of them were exonerated in 2021.
He was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925. He replaced Little with X in 1950, the X standing for the African family name erased by slavery, and after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 he took the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, which is on his grave.
He announced his departure on 8 March 1964. The public occasion was his ninety-day silencing over remarks on President Kennedy's assassination, but he had also learned that Elijah Muhammad had fathered children with several of his secretaries, and after the pilgrimage to Mecca he rejected the Nation's separatist theology for Sunni Islam.
Yes. James Baldwin, the novelist and essayist, debated him on television and radio in the early 1960s and wrote about him for the rest of his own life — in No Name in the Street, in the screenplay One Day When I Was Lost, and in the unfinished Remember This House that became the documentary I Am Not Your Negro.
Malcolm X told his life to the journalist Alex Haley in more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965; the title page credits the book to Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. It was published nine months after his death, with Haley's epilogue describing the collaboration and the assassination.
Collaborated with · 1963–1965
More than fifty interviews across two years produced The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published nine months after the assassination. Haley's epilogue records the collaboration itself — the guarded early sessions, the chapters corrected in Malcolm X's hand, and the February 1965 phone calls that were their last.
Depicted in
One of the three murdered men the memoir is built around — Baldwin knew all three.
Depicted in
The scenario follows Malcolm X from a Lansing childhood through Harlem, prison, the Nation of Islam, Mecca, and the assassination at the Audubon Ballroom.
Depicted in
His own life, told to Alex Haley across more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965: Malcolm Little of Omaha and Lansing, Detroit Red of Harlem, the prison conversion, the ministry, the break with the Nation of Islam, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. He read and corrected chapters as they were drafted but did not live to see the book published.
Depicted in
"Down at the Cross" engages Malcolm X directly: Baldwin weighs his argument that white America respects only violence, finds he cannot call it untrue, and refuses where it leads. It was a television appearance alongside Malcolm X that brought Baldwin the dinner invitation from Elijah Muhammad at the essay's center.
Met
James Baldwin knew Malcolm X and debated him publicly in the early 1960s, wrote his life as the screenplay One Day When I Was Lost, and counted his murder among the three deaths that shape No Name in the Street.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Malcolm X and their work.
Transcript of “Message to the Grass Roots”, Detroit, 10 November 1963.
Report of the $36 million settlement of 30 October 2022 with Muhammad Abdul Aziz and the estate of Khalil Islam.
Transcript of “The Ballot or the Bullet”, Cleveland, 3 April 1964.
Transcript of the founding rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, 28 June 1964, including the charter's education clause.
Primary published collection used to verify Malcolm X's brief quotations.
Speech collection carrying the OAAU founding rally address, used to verify the education line's printed wording.
Contemporary report of Malcolm X's November 1964 speech at the Maison de la Mutualité in Paris.
Archival description of the Malcolm X papers, including the France file and cancelled February 1965 meeting.
Scholarly account of Malcolm X's 1964–1965 France connection: the Présence Africaine circle, the Orly exclusion, and the later debate over French motives.
Contemporary clippings and memoranda recording the French refusal of entry at Orly on 9 February 1965.
Published analysis and historical context used in preparing the Malcolm X page.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Malcolm X. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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