MALCOLM X (aka el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, 19 May 1925–21 February 1965), African American Muslim minister and civil-rights activist whose biting critique of US race relations shadowed the Civil Rights movement and paved the way for the more radical Black Power movement. He is widely considered one of the most gifted orators and most influential African Americans in US history.
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of Earl and Louise Little’s seven childen. His parents were avid supporters of the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey; Earl served as Omaha chapter president of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Louise as division secretary. Their activism prompted death threats from the White-supremacist Black Legion, forcing the family to relocate twice before Malcolm’s fourth birthday, and in 1929 their Lansing, Michigan, home was burned to the ground. Two years later Earl’s body was found lying across the town’s trolley tracks. Though police ruled his death accidental—the family’s life-insurance company claimed it was suicide—Louise was certain the Black Legion was responsible. She suffered an emotional breakdown not long thereafter and was committed to a mental institution; the children were split up and sent to various foster homes and orphanages.
Malcolm ended up in a home for juveniles and, though an academically gifted student, dropped out of high school after a teacher discouraged his aspirations to become a lawyer. He moved first to Boston and then to Harlem, New York, drifting into a life of drug dealing, gambling, and petty crime. Eventually Malcolm and his longtime friend Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis moved back to Boston, only to be arrested and convicted there on burglary charges in 1946. Malcolm was sentenced to ten years in prison but was granted parole after seven years. During his incarceration Malcolm’s brother Reginald introduced him to the Nation of Islam (NOI), a Black Nationalist inflection of Islam that emphasized the evilness of Whites and advocated Black self-reliance. Intrigued, Malcolm began to study the teachings of NOI leader Elijah Muhammad.
Muhammad taught that the White race was a bastardized offshoot of the original Black race and that Whites were “devils” who had cheated Blacks out of their natural patrimony. Given Whites’ intrinsic evil, Blacks would eventually have to carve out a separate state, whether in North America or Africa, to achieve true freedom and independence. In the meantime they had only themselves to rely on. The NOI was thus hostile to the idea of Black political participation, seeing it as pointless, and instead preached a doctrine of Black economic self-empowerment as a prelude for racial separation. By the time he was paroled in 1952 Malcolm had become a member of the NOI, having corresponded with Muhammad from prison, and had replaced his surname “Little”—which “the white slavemaster . . . had imposed upon my paternal forebears”—with “X,” meant to signify his lost tribal name. He rose rapidly within the organization as he helped Muhammad establish new mosques in Detroit and Harlem, adroitly utilizing the mass media to spread the NOI’s message across the country. His charismatic, blistering oratory attracted record numbers of new members; he was largely credited with having increased membership from five hundred in 1952 to thirty thousand in 1963.
The crowds and controversy surrounding Malcolm soon made him a media magnet. He was featured in a television special with Mike Wallace in 1959 called The Hate That Hate Produced. The program explored the fundamentals of the NOI and tracked Malcolm’s emergence as one of its most important leaders. After the special aired, Malcolm was faced with the uncomfortable reality that his fame had eclipsed that of Muhammad, his mentor. Malcolm’s vivid personality had also attracted the government’s attention; as membership in the NOI continued to grow, FBI agents infiltrated the organization (one even acted as Malcolm’s bodyguard) and began a campaign of surveillance to monitor the group’s activities.
Malcolm was critical of the Civil Rights movement and the premise of nonviolent resistance on which it was based, arguing instead for the need for Black self-defense: “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts a hand on you, send him to the cemetery,” he said. “That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s the old-time religion. Preserve your life, it’s the best thing you’ve got. And if you’ve got to give it up, let it be even-steven.” Malcolm’s militancy was a powerful lure for more revolutionary elements to join the NOI. In response to the charge that the NOI was racist he said simply, “If we react to White racism with a violent reaction, to me that’s not Black racism. If you come to put a rope around my neck and I hang you for it, to me that’s not racism. Yours is racism, but my reaction has nothing to do with racism.”
Tensions between Malcolm and Muhammad were inflamed in April 1962 after an altercation with between NOI members and police officers at the Los Angeles mosque left its secretary, Ronald Stokes, dead and several members seriously wounded. Malcolm immediately flew out to LA to direct the organization’s response and sought Muhammad’s permission to authorize violent retaliation if necessary. Though the NOI preached the gospel of self-defense, Muhammad denied Malcolm’s request, to the latter’s bewilderment and frustration. Though at this time he would still preface his speeches with the phrase “Elijah Muhammad teaches ,” Malcolm was adapting Muhammad’s ideas into a political critique of the system, gradually breaking out of the rejectionist straitjacket of the NOI by seeking to establish coalitions with other Black-advocacy movements and organizations. As one NOI minister complained, “It was Malcolm who injected the political concept of ‘Black nationalism’ into the Black Muslim movement, which was essentially religious in nature.”
Malcolm’s faith in the NOI and his personal relationship with Muhammad were further compromised in 1963 when he learned that Muhammad had secretly been having relations with as many as six women in the organization and had fathered children with some of them.
All of this came to a head in December 1963 in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When asked to comment on the event, Malcolm infamously opined that it was a case of “chickens coming home to roost.” Although the statement was consistent with the hostility the NOI had expressed toward the US administration in the past, Muhammad nevertheless informed Malcolm that he would be suspended for ninety days so that “Muslims everywhere can be disassociated from the blunder.” It soon became clear that the suspension was in fact an expulsion. In March 1964 Malcolm formally announced his break with the NOI. The movement, he said, “had gone as far as it can because it was too sectarian and too inhibited.” He advocated greater engagement with the Civil Rights movement, warning that the NOI would find itself “one day suddenly separated from the Negroes’ frontline struggle.” Around this time he also embraced Sunni Islam after making a pilgrimage to Mecca and began to separate politics and religion, declaring, “We don’t mix our religion with our politics and our economics and our social and civil activities—not anymore. We become involved with anybody, anywhere, anytime and in any manner that’s designed to eliminate the evils, the political, economic and social evils that are afflicting the people in our community.” Such public disagreements with the NOI did not go over well with many of the faithful and made Malcolm a target.
Malcolm X was assassinated on February 19, 1965, while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Three NOI members were convicted of the murder, two of whom were exonerated in 2021. Speculation that the NOI was more deeply involved in the murder continues to this day. He was gunned down just as he was beginning to “think for himself,” as he put it, and to flesh out a radical program for Black liberation. In one of his last speeches, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” he summarized his credo: “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the twenty-two million Black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the twenty-two million Black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”