He peddled marijuana, became a cocaine addict and, to satisfy his $20-a-day craving, took to burglary. He thereupon turned himself into a full-time hustler whose specialties were fixing up white men with Negro whores and Negro men with white whores. He was caught pimping on the side and fired. But an honest dollar was not for Malcolm Little. Nicknamed “Big Red,” he was a gangling zoot-suiter who fancied yellow-toed shoes and straightened his hair with lye in a scalp-searing process called “conking.” He worked briefly as a waiter at Small’s Paradise, still one of Harlem’s top nightspots. He quit school after the eighth grade, eventually made his way to New York.
Now I hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me.” Years later he wrote in his autobiography: “I was for years insane enough to feel that it was some kind of status symbol to be light-complexioned. In his youth, Malcolm prided himself on his reddish hair and light skin, an inheritance from his maternal grandfather, a white man. Soon afterward his mother was committed to a mental asylum in Michigan. Police called it an accident, but Malcolm insisted that his father had been bludgeoned by whites and placed across the tracks. Two years later, when Malcolm was six, his father was run over by a streetcar, his body cut almost in half. The family moved to Lansing, Mich., where, Malcolm claimed, white racists set fire to his parents’ home in 1929. His father was a Baptist preacher and an enthusiast for Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement. “That White Rapist.” The man who lived as Malcolm X and died as John Doe was born Malcolm Little, in Omaha on May 19, 1925. Because he had not yet been formally identified, he was at first entered on hospital records as John Doe. A team of doctors laid open his chest, tried to revive him via open-heart massage. Minutes after the shooting, Malcolm’s body was lifted from the stage, placed on a rolling bed that had been wheeled over from the nearby Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and rushed to an emergency operating room. He was Thomas Hagan, alias Talmadge Hayer, a New Jersey thug with a dreary police record. Cops rescued him, took him to a hospital, and charged him with homicide. Crippled, he was caught by Malcolm X’s furious followers, knocked down, kicked and stomped on. The man with the shotgun was hit in the left leg by a bullet from the pistol of a Malcolm X bodyguard. A woman screamed: “Oh, black folks, black folks, why you got to kill each other?” Thirteen shotgun pellets tore into Malcolm’s chest and heart several slugs from. “I looked at Malcolm, and there was blood running out of his goatee.” Men and women threw themselves to the floor as the gunmen squeezed off at least a score of shots. “There was what sounded like an explosion,” said a dazed woman. One Negro with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun blasted Malcolm at point-blank range. ”Īs he spoke, three men rushed down the aisle toward him.
“Now brothers!” he cried, “Be cool, don’t get excited. “Don’t be messing with my pockets!” At the distraction, Malcolm raised his hands. “Get your hand off my pockets!” a man shouted. ” Suddenly a disturbance broke out several rows back. ” The audience replied in unison: “ Wa-alaikum salaam. Characteristically, he had kept his followers waiting for nearly an hour while he lingered over tea and a banana split at a nearby Harlem restaurant.Įntering the auditorium at last, Malcolm cried “ As-salaam alaikum.
Malcolm’s murder, almost certainly at the hands of the Black Muslims from whom he had defected, came on a bright Sunday afternoon in full view of 400 Negroes in the Audubon Ballroom, a seedy two-story building on Manhattan’s upper Broadway. In fact, Malcolm X -in life and in death-was a disaster to the civil rights movement.