Malcolm X

Malcolm X was an African American Muslim minister and activist who, as the most prominent spokesman of the Nation of Islam in the 1950s and early 1960s, became the leading voice of Black nationalism in the United States. Sharply critical of white America and of the non-violent civil rights movement, he broke with the Nation in 1964, embraced Sunni Islam and a broader, internationalist politics, and was assassinated in New York in February 1965.

He was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on 19 May 1925, one of the children of Earl Little, a Baptist preacher, and Louise Little, who was born in Grenada; both were followers of the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey. Threats from white supremacists drove the family to Lansing, Michigan, where their house burned in 1929. Earl died under a streetcar in 1931, officially ruled an accident, though his widow believed he had been murdered. In 1938 Louise was committed to a psychiatric hospital and the children were split up among foster homes. Malcolm left school in 1941.

Living in Boston and then Harlem, he worked odd jobs and drifted into drug dealing, gambling and robbery. In 1946 he was jailed for burglary and larceny. In prison he read widely and, after his siblings wrote to him about it, joined the Nation of Islam, a religious movement led by Elijah Muhammad that preached Black self-reliance and taught that white people were devils. From around 1950 he signed himself Malcolm X, the X standing for an African family name he could never know.

Paroled in 1952, he rose rapidly, leading Temple Number 7 in Harlem from 1954 and founding temples across the country. Membership grew from about 1,200 to somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 by the early 1960s, much of it credited to him. He called for the separation of Black and white Americans, defended self-defence "by any means necessary", and mocked Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington. A 1959 television documentary made him nationally known, and in 1960 he met Fidel Castro in Harlem. He also recruited the boxer Muhammad Ali.

Tensions with Elijah Muhammad grew after Muhammad refused to let him retaliate for a 1962 police shooting of Muslims in Los Angeles, and after Malcolm learned of Muhammad's relationships with young secretaries. When he described President Kennedy's assassination as "chickens coming home to roost", the Nation silenced him for 90 days. On 8 March 1964 he announced his departure and founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity.

In April 1964 he made the Hajj to Mecca. Seeing pilgrims of every colour worshipping as equals, he said, changed his view of race, and he adopted the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. On long journeys through Africa that year he met leaders including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah, and attended a summit of the Organisation of African Unity in Cairo. He also spoke at the Oxford Union in December 1964 and, in speeches such as "The Ballot or the Bullet", urged Black Americans to use their votes.

The Nation's leaders denounced him in increasingly violent terms, and in February 1965 his home was destroyed by fire. On 21 February 1965, as he began a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, gunmen shot him dead. Three Nation members were convicted in 1966; one confessed, but two always maintained their innocence and were exonerated in 2021 after a review found that the FBI and New York police had withheld evidence. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley, appeared later in 1965, and his ideas strongly shaped the Black Power movement.

Our 1945 and 1960 maps show the United States in the decades of his life; his travels of 1964 crossed the newly independent states of Africa on our 1960 map.