Fatal shots silenced fierce voice of black segregation

As shots rang out across an upper Manhattan theatre 50 years ago today, Betty Shabazz “pushed my children under the seat and protected them with my body”.

FILE - FEBRUARY 17, 2015: February 21st sees the anniversary of 50 Years Since The Assassination Of Malcolm X circa 1962: American political activist and radical civil rights leader, Malcolm X (1925 - 1965) standing at a podium during a rally of African-American Muslims held in a Washington, DC arena. He is wearing a formal jacket and a white bow-tie. (Photo by Richard Saunders/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

As shots rang out across an upper Manhattan theatre, Betty Shabazz “pushed my children under the seat and protected them with my body”. While Betty shielded her four children, their father Malcolm X was hit by seven bullets.

The black rights activist who offended whites by advocating a segregated black state, alienated Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad by revealing his infidelities, and horrified everyone with the comment that President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was “chickens coming home to roost”, died on February 21, 1965, aged 39.

Born Malcolm Little in Nebraska in 1925, he was one of seven children to Baptist minister Earl and his second wife Louise, avid followers of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. A Ku Klux Klan attack on their home early in 1925 moved the family to Milwaukee, then East Lansing, Michigan.

Their home in Lansing, outside a designated black area, was burned to the ground in 1929, likely by white supremacist Black Legionnaires. Father Earl, a harsh disciplinarian prone to violence, was killed in 1931, his beaten body found across trolley tracks.

With his mother committed to a mental hospital when he was 13, Malcolm and his siblings were placed in foster care. After topping his junior high school class, a favourite teacher’s dismissal of ambitions to study law as “no realistic goal” for a black student became a turning point in his attitudes.

In 1940 Malcolm’s half-sister Ella, a teacher and businesswoman, took him to live in Boston where she found him work in a parking lot. Shining shoes at Roseland State Ballroom introduced him to jazz and Duke Ellington; he quit because, “I couldn’t find time to dance and shine shoes, too.”

After a brief move to Harlem, he was arrested in 1944 in Boston for stealing an aunt’s fur coat. On a suspended sentence, he became a railroad porter while peddling cocaine and gambling in poker games. With a friend and their white girlfriends, he began housebreaking and was arrested again in January 1946. Pleading guilty to seven counts, he was sentenced to six years hard labour. He suspected the long sentence was because he consorted with a white woman.

At Charlestown Prison, inmates nicknamed him “Satan” for his foul mouth and bad temper. Malcolm was studying English and Latin by correspondence when his siblings urged him to join Nation of Islam, founded in Detroit in 1930 by mysterious silk salesman Wallace D. Fard (W. Fard Muhammad), who disappeared in 1934. Fard’s successor Elijah Muhammad preached black pride and against cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and eating pork.

Moved to progressive Norfolk prison, Malcolm read widely, copied an entire dictionary and joined the debating team. Paroled in 1952, he worked as a furniture salesman and adopted NOI’s X, replacing the name bestowed by “blue-eyed devil” slave-owners. His brother Philbert said: “X meant you no longer was a drinker, a smoker, you no longer practised adultery and fornication — so you were ex all those things that were negative.”

In June 1954 Malcolm was minister of NOI New York Temple No. 7 in Harlem, where his message stressed black nationalism and dismissed integration as a hoax. He also founded NOI newspaper Muhammad Speaks and in 1958 married nurse Betty Sanders. They had four daughters, with twin daughters born after Malcolm’s death.

As Elijah’s ambassador, Malcolm travelled to the Middle East in 1959, meeting Egyptian president Nassar. A TV report, The Hate That Hate Produced, in mid-1959 drew national attention to NOI and dramatically boosted membership.

But confronting rumours of Elijah’s affairs and six illegitimate children early in 1963, followed by a lecture arguing for black nationalism, dented Malcolm’s standing with NOI. His Kennedy comment days later had him banned from public speaking for 90 days. When petitions to Elijah for reinstatement failed, Malcolm quit NOI to establish Muslim Mosque Inc, moderating his views to better work with Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign.

On a pilgrimage to Mecca in April 1964 he visited nine Middle Eastern countries and sent a letter, signed as El-Hajj Malik EI-Shabazz, outlining a humanistic vision. Back home he founded the Organisation of Afro-American Unity, hoping to link black freedom struggles in Africa with those in the US.

His home in East Elmhurst was firebombed on February 14, 1965. At 3.10pm a week later, Malcolm greeted 400 followers at the Audubon Ballroom when a scuffle broke out. Shots fired from three guns killed Malcolm. Talmadge Hayer (Thomas Hagan), Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson were convicted of murder in 1966.

Originally published as Fatal shots silenced fierce voice of black segregation