Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection

On Feb. 21, 1965, the former Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X was shot and killed by assassins identified as Black Muslims as he was about to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. He was 39.

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in 1925, was the son of a preacher rumored to have been killed by white supremacists when Malcolm was young. When he was 13, his mother was placed in a mental hospital, and he lived in a series of foster homes. A focused student, he finished junior high at the top of his class. But he left school after a favorite teacher told Malcolm that his dream of becoming a lawyer was “no realistic goal” for a black student (the teacher, however, used an ethnic slur while making the comment). Malcolm then moved to Boston to live with his half-sister. In 1946, he went to prison for breaking and entering. He joined the Nation of Islam while in prison and adopted his new name upon his release in 1952.

Malcolm X rose quickly in the organization and traveled the country preaching the message of the Black Muslims, including the belief that blacks were superior to whites, that blacks and whites should be segregated and that blacks must protect themselves “by any means necessary.” A charismatic speaker, he won thousands of converts.



However, his inflammatory oratory put him in opposition to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the mainstream civil rights movement, which sought integration with white America through nonviolent means. Malcolm X often belittled Dr. King, calling him an “Uncle Tom” who was supported by whites and argued that Dr. King’s Christian faith was a religion for whites.

In the 1960s, Malcolm X clashed with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, over the direction of the organization among other issues. In 1963, Muhammad suspended Malcolm X from the organization as punishment for his comment that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was an example of “the chickens coming home to roost.” In 1964, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam and converted to traditional Islam. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he began to question his beliefs after seeing Muslims of all races coming together in peace. He changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and upon his return to the United States began espousing less confrontational and separatist views on race relations.

Malcolm X received many death threats from Nation of Islam members. His home in New York, in Queens, was set on fire on Feb. 14, 1965, a week before his death. The Feb. 22 New York Times presented quotations from an interview he gave on Feb. 18: “I’m a marked man. It doesn’t frighten me for myself as long as I felt they would not hurt my family. … No one can get out with out trouble, and this thing with me will be resolved by death and violence.”

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Though during his time in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X took a militant stance toward civil rights and used violent, uncompromising rhetoric, he had reformed his beliefs by the time of his death.

In a New York Times review of Manning Marable’s 2011 biography “Malcolm X: Life of Reinvention,” Michiko Kautani wrote that he had an “embrace of a kind of internationalist humanism, separating himself not just from Nation of Islam’s leadership but from its angry, separatist theology too. After Mecca, Malcolm began reaching out to the civil rights establishment and came to recognize, in Mr. Marable’s words, that ‘blacks indeed could achieve representation and even power under America’s constitutional system.’”

For many, Malcolm X is a cultural hero and a symbol of black pride and social protest. What does his legacy mean to you? In your opinion, should this complex, self-made civil rights and spiritual leader be remembered for the messages he advocated for a majority of his public life or for the reformed beliefs of his later life?

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