Malcolm X

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, the name he was born with in Omaha in 1925
• Detroit Red, the street name of the Harlem hustling years
• Malcolm X, taken in 1950 — the X standing for the African family name slavery erased
• el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, the name he took after the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964

Early life

Malcolm Little was born on 19 May 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, a son of Earl and Louise Little. 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. 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 and the Nation of Islam

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. 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, 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 break

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. 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. 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.

The assassination

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; 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.

Malcolm X and James Baldwin

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.