Malcolm X and the Black Muslims, 1952-65
From Malcolm Little to Malcolm X
Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925. His father Earl, a Baptist minister and follower of the Black-nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, was killed in 1931 in what the white-owned local press recorded as a streetcar accident and what the family always believed was a murder by white supremacists. His mother was committed to a mental hospital. Malcolm grew up in foster care, drifted into petty crime in Boston and Harlem, and in 1946, aged 20, was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison for burglary.
In prison he encountered the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim religious movement led by Elijah Muhammad. The Nation taught that white people were the ‘blue-eyed devils’ created by an evil scientist 6,000 years ago, that Black people were the original humans, and that integration was a trap. The doctrine made sense of everything that had happened to Malcolm’s family. He converted, took the surname ‘X’ to mark the lost African name slavery had stolen, and on his release in 1952 became a Nation minister. By the late 1950s he was the Nation’s national spokesman and Elijah Muhammad’s designated successor.
Malcolm Little adopted the name Malcolm X in prison after converting to the Nation of Islam in the late 1940s. The ‘X’ marked the African family name lost under slavery. By 1959 he was the Nation’s national spokesman and the public face of Black Muslim teaching in the United States.
Beliefs and Methods, 1952-63
Malcolm X’s public message in his Nation years rejected almost every assumption of King and the SCLC. Where King wanted integration, the Nation taught racial separatism and the eventual return of Black Americans to a state of their own. Where King preached nonviolent direct action, Malcolm called for self-defence ‘by any means necessary’: ‘If someone puts a hand on you, send him to the cemetery.’ Where King appealed to the conscience of white America, Malcolm dismissed that conscience as a fiction and refused to be addressed as ‘Negro’. He attacked the 1963 March on Washington as ‘the Farce on Washington’, a movement coopted by white liberal money and presidential approval.
For young Black Northerners outside the SCLC’s Southern church base — in Harlem, in Chicago, in Detroit — Malcolm articulated an anger at white America that nonviolent direct action could not contain. The Nation also offered a programme: drug rehabilitation, family discipline, Black-owned businesses, mosques, schools and newspapers funded entirely from Black donations. By 1959 the Nation had grown from around 400 members in 1952 to perhaps 50,000.
A common shorthand sets Malcolm and King up as opposites — nonviolence vs violence, integration vs separatism — and ends the story there. The reality is messier. King’s public position on self-defence inside the home was less absolute than his public sermons (he kept armed guards at his Montgomery house in 1956 and applied for a concealed-carry permit; it was refused). Malcolm’s position changed dramatically after 1964. The two men met in person only once, briefly, at the Capitol on 26 March 1964 over the Civil Rights Bill; King later wrote that Malcolm ‘had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem’. Top-band interpretation answers can use the convergence after the Hajj to challenge a static-opposites reading.
The Break with the Nation of Islam, 1963-64
The split had two layers. In December 1963, after President Kennedy’s assassination, Malcolm called the killing ‘chickens coming home to roost’ — that is, the violence the United States visited on others, returning to it. Elijah Muhammad suspended him for ninety days. Below the surface, Malcolm had also discovered that Elijah Muhammad — who taught strict sexual discipline — had fathered children with several Nation secretaries. By March 1964 Malcolm had left the Nation entirely.
In April 1964 he flew to Saudi Arabia to perform the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Sunni Islam, with believers of every colour praying side by side, contradicted the Nation’s race theology. He wrote home from Mecca that he had seen ‘the brotherhood practiced by people of all colors’ and that he was now obliged to drop ‘sweeping indictments of one race’. He returned with the new name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and a public position that white people could be allies, although racism in the United States remained the system that had to be dismantled.
The Final Year and the Assassination
In June 1964 Malcolm founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Modelled on the Organization of African Unity formed by newly independent African states, the OAAU aimed to take Black American grievances to the United Nations as a human rights issue. Malcolm travelled in Africa for much of 1964, met heads of state, addressed the Cairo Conference of the OAU, and began building international links unimaginable in his Nation period. SNCC organisers including Fannie Lou Hamer met him in Harlem; he travelled to Selma in February 1965 in support of the SCLC’s voting rights campaign.
The Nation, which now treated him as a heretic, had been issuing thinly veiled death threats since the spring of 1964. Malcolm’s home was firebombed on 14 February 1965; he, his wife Betty Shabazz and their four daughters escaped. Seven days later, on 21 February 1965, Malcolm took the stage at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem to address the OAAU. As he greeted the audience, three Nation of Islam members rushed the stage and shot him at close range. He was 39.
At his death, Malcolm was widely treated by the white press as a defeated demagogue. His Autobiography, published a few months later in collaboration with Alex Haley, became one of the most-read books in twentieth-century America and shaped the politics of a younger generation of activists. By 1966 SNCC had moved away from nonviolence under Stokely Carmichael, who acknowledged Malcolm as the founding voice of Black Power. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in October 1966 explicitly in his memory, picking up his demand for armed Black self-defence. Malcolm’s Nation period and his Sunni-Muslim, internationalist OAAU period had to be told together to make any sense of the late-1960s movement.
Between December 1963 and February 1965 Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam, performed the Hajj as a Sunni Muslim, took the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and shifted from racial separatism to a position that white allies were possible — though American racism remained the system to be dismantled. He was assassinated by Nation members on 21 February 1965.