The facts of the killing
Malcolm X was shot and killed on 21 February 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights area of upper Manhattan, just north of Harlem proper. He was about to address a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a group he had founded the previous year, when a disturbance broke out in the audience and several men fired at him. He was 39. His wife, Betty Shabazz, and their children were in the hall. The killing occurred in 1965, two years before the year this site covers, but its effects were strongly felt in the politics of 1967.
Life and break with the Nation of Islam
Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, he spent part of his youth in Michigan and later in Boston and New York. While in prison in the late 1940s he encountered the Nation of Islam, a religious and political movement led by Elijah Muhammad, and after his release in the early 1950s he became its most prominent spokesman. He took the name Malcolm X, rejecting what he saw as a surname inherited from slavery. A gifted speaker, he criticised racism and the pace of the civil rights movement, argued for Black self-defence and pride, and drew attention far beyond the organisation.
By the early 1960s tensions within the Nation had grown. Malcolm was suspended in December 1963 after a remark about the assassination of President Kennedy, in which he said it was a case of “chickens coming home to roost”. In March 1964 he announced that he was leaving the group. A pilgrimage to Mecca that spring led him to adopt the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and to speak of a broader view of racial cooperation, though he continued to argue that racism had to be confronted directly. He then founded Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which sought to link Black struggles in the United States with the anticolonial movements in Africa and elsewhere.
He faced threats in this period, and his home was firebombed a week before his death. Relations with the Nation of Islam were openly hostile.
The investigation and trial
Three men were arrested and convicted of murder in March 1966: Talmadge Hayer (later known as Mujahid Halim), Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, the latter two members of the Nation of Islam. Hayer, who had been shot and caught at the scene, admitted taking part, but said that Butler and Johnson had not been involved. Those two maintained their innocence for decades.
Questions about the case persisted. Historians, journalists and relatives of Malcolm X raised concerns about the quality of the evidence and about the possible role of police and federal surveillance. In November 2021, after a review by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, a judge vacated the convictions of Butler and Johnson (by then known as Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam). The review concluded that prosecutors and investigators had withheld evidence. Questions about who ordered and planned the killing have not been fully resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
The Autobiography
In November 1965, nine months after his death, the book The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published. It was written with the journalist Alex Haley, based on interviews conducted over the preceding two years. The book covers his childhood, years of crime and imprisonment, his time in the Nation of Islam and his later change of views. It has remained in print and sold widely, and is often named among the most influential nonfiction books of the century.
Its importance lay in giving readers a first-person account of the experience of racism in the United States, and of personal transformation. It helped introduce him to younger readers, including many who had never heard him speak.
Influence on 1967
Malcolm X’s ideas strongly influenced the Black freedom movement as it changed in the mid-1960s. After the Harlem riot of 1964 and the passage of civil rights laws, many activists felt that legal victories had not altered daily conditions in northern cities. His emphasis on self-determination, community control, self-defence and pride found a ready audience. Young SNCC organisers, who had grown impatient with the older strategy of the civil rights movement, turned to his speeches.
In June 1966 Stokely Carmichael popularised the slogan “Black Power” on a march in Mississippi, and in 1967 the book Black Power, co-written with Charles Hamilton, set out an argument for political and economic independence. Malcolm X was an acknowledged influence on this thinking. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in October 1966, also drew on his call for self-defence and community organisation. Muhammad Ali, who had been close to Malcolm before they fell out over the Nation of Islam, was in 1967 a central figure in a related argument over the war; the Ali draft refusal in April was widely read in the context of Black identity.
It is easy to oversimplify. Malcolm X did not leave a finished programme, and he changed his views in the final year of his life. People across the political spectrum, from the militant to the moderate, have claimed him. What can be said with confidence is that his death did not end his influence, and 1967 was a year when that influence was visible in the language and demands of a new generation. The summer’s unrest, including the Newark riot, took place in an atmosphere shaped in part by the argument he had made about patience, power and dignity.
Memory
The Audubon Ballroom was largely demolished in later years, though part of the building was preserved and now houses a memorial and educational centre named for Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz. His grave is in Hartsdale, New York. Writers, musicians and filmmakers have continued to draw on his life, and he remains a major figure in debates about race, religion and American politics.