Malcolm X

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on the nineteenth of May 1925, the seventh child of Earl Little — a Baptist minister and Garveyite organizer — and Louise Little. His father was murdered by white supremacists in 1931; his mother was institutionalized in 1939 after years of fighting to keep her children together. He spent the rest of his youth in foster homes and detention.

He converted to the Nation of Islam in 1949 while serving a prison sentence in Massachusetts for burglary. On his release in 1952 he took the surname X — replacing the slave name Little — and rose within the next decade to become the Nation's most consequential minister. He built Mosque Number Seven in Harlem; he was Elijah Muhammad's principal spokesman; he conducted the most-aired television interviews of any Black political figure of the era.

He broke with the Nation of Islam in March 1964 after Elijah Muhammad's affairs with secretaries became impossible to overlook. He performed the hajj to Mecca in April; the experience — praying alongside Muslims of every race — substantially modified his views on race. He returned to found the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and to articulate, for the first time, an explicitly internationalist Black politics — one in which the African American struggle was a piece of the global anti-colonial struggle.

He was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on the twenty-first of February 1965 by three members of the Nation of Islam who, in the final reckoning of the case in November 2021, were partially exonerated as the FBI and the NYPD were shown to have withheld exculpatory evidence for fifty-six years. He was thirty-nine.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, dictated to Alex Haley in the last two years of his life and published nine months after his death, is the second-best-selling memoir in twentieth-century American letters after The Diary of Anne Frank.

He is honored here as the minister whose voice anchored Black internationalism.