The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  Then—it seemed to me such an odd, abrupt change of subject: “You know, I’m glad I’ve been the first to establish official ties between Afro-Americans and our blood brothers in Africa.” And saying good-bye, he hung up.

  After that telephone call, Malcolm X drove on into Manhattan and to the New York Hilton Hotel between 53rd and 54th Streets at Rockefeller Center. He checked the blue Oldsmobile into the hotel garage and then, in the lobby, he checked himself in and was assigned a twelfth-floor room, to which a bellman accompanied him.

  Soon some Negro men entered the giant hotel’s busy lobby. They began asking various bellmen what room Malcolm X was in. The bellmen, of course, never would answer that question concerning any guest—and considering that it was Malcolm X whom practically everyone who read New York City newspapers knew was receiving constant death threats, the bellmen quickly notified the hotel’s security chief. From then until Malcolm X checked out the next day, extra security vigilance was continuously maintained on the twelfth floor. During that time, Malcolm X left the room only once, to have dinner in the hotel’s lobby-level, dimly lit Bourbon Room.

  Sunday morning at nine o’clock, Sister Betty in Long Island was surprised when her husband telephoned her and asked if she felt it would be too much trouble for her to get all of the four children dressed and bring them to the two o’clock meeting that afternoon at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. She said, “Of course it won’t!” On Saturday he had told her that she couldn’t come to the meeting. He said to her, “You know what happened an hour ago? Exactly at eight o’clock, the phone woke me up. Some man said, ‘Wake up, brother’ and hung up.” Malcolm X said good-bye to Sister Betty.

  And four hours later, Malcolm X left his room and took an elevator down to the lobby, where he checked out. He got his car and in the clear, warm midday of Sunday, February 21, he drove uptown to the Audubon Ballroom.

  —

  The Audubon Ballroom, between Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue, on the south side of West 166th Street, is a two-story building frequently rented for dances, organization functions, and other affairs. A dark, slender, pretty young lady, occupationally a receptionist and avocationally a hardworking OAAU assistant to Malcolm X, has since told me that she arrived early, about 1:30 P.M., having some preliminary work to do. Entering, she saw that the usual 400 wooden chairs had been set up, with aisles on either side, but no center aisle; the young lady (she wishes to be nameless) noticed that several people were already seated in the front rows, but she gave it no thought since some always came early, liking to get seats up close to the stage, to savor to the fullest the dramatic orator Malcolm X. On the stage, behind the speaker’s stand were eight straight brown chairs arranged in a row and behind it was the stage’s painted backdrop, a mural of a restful country scene. The young lady’s responsibilities for this day had included making arrangements and subsequent confirmations with the scheduled co-speaker, the Reverend Milton Galamison, the militant Brooklyn Presbyterian who in 1964 had led the two one-day Negro boycotts in New York City public schools, protesting “racial imbalance.” She had similarly made arrangements with some other prominent Negroes who were due to appeal to the audience for their maximum possible contributions to aid the work of Malcolm X and his organization.

  The people who entered the ballroom were not searched at the door. In recent weeks, Malcolm X had become irritable about this, saying “It makes people uncomfortable” and that it reminded him of Elijah Muhammad. “If I can’t be safe among my own kind, where can I be?” he had once said testily. For this day, also, he had ordered the press—as such—barred, white or black. He was angry at what he interpreted as “slanted” press treatment recently; he felt especially that the newspapers had not taken seriously his statements of the personal danger he was in. United Press International reporter Stanley Scott, a Negro, had been admitted, he later said, when a Malcolm lieutenant decided, “As a Negro, you will be allowed to enter as a citizen if you like, but you must remove your press badge.” The same criterion had applied to WMCA newsman Hugh Simpson. Both he and Scott came early enough so that they obtained seats up near the stage.

  Malcolm X entered the ballroom at shortly before two o’clock, trudging heavily instead of with his usual lithe strides, his young lady assistant has told me. By this time several other of his assistants were filtering in and out of the small anteroom alongside the stage. He sat down sideways on a chair, his long legs folded around its bottom, and he leaned one elbow on a kind of counter before a rather rickety make-up mirror that entertainers used when dances were held in the ballroom. He wore a dark suit, white shirt and narrow dark tie. He said to a little group of his assistants that he wasn’t going to talk about his personal troubles, “I don’t want that to be the reason for anyone to come to hear me.” He stood up and paced about the little room. He said he was going to state that he had been hasty to accuse the Black Muslims of bombing his home. “Things have happened since that are bigger than what they can do. I know what they can do. Things have gone beyond that.”

  Those in the anteroom could hear the sounds of the enlarging audience outside taking seats. “The way I feel, I ought not to go out there at all today,” Malcolm X said. “In fact, I’m going to ease some of this tension by telling the black man not to fight himself—that’s all a part of the white man’s big maneuver, to keep us fighting among ourselves, against each other. I’m not fighting anyone, that’s not what we’re here for.” He kept glancing at his wrist watch, anticipating the arrival of Reverend Galamison. “Whenever you make any appointment with a minister,” he said to his young lady assistant, “you have to call them two or three hours before time, because they will change their mind. This is typical of ministers.”

  “I felt bad, I felt that it was my fault,” the young lady told me. “It was time for the meeting to start, too.” She turned to Malcolm X’s stalwart assistant Benjamin X, known as a highly able speaker himself. “Brother, will you speak?” she asked—then, turning to Malcolm X, “Is it all right if he speaks? And maybe he could introduce you.” Malcolm X abruptly whirled on her, and barked, “You know you shouldn’t ask me right in front of him!” Then, collecting himself quickly, he said “Okay.” Brother Benjamin X asked how long he should speak. Malcolm X said, glancing again at his wrist watch, “Make it half an hour.” And Brother Benjamin X went through the door leading onto the stage. They heard him expertly exhorting the audience about what is needed today by “the black man here in these United States.”

  The Reverend Galamison and other notables due hadn’t arrived by three o’clock. “Brother Malcolm looked so disappointed,” the young lady says. “He said to me ‘I don’t think any of them are coming, either.’ I felt so terrible for him. It did seem as if no one cared. I told him ‘Oh, don’t worry, they’re just late, they’ll be here.’ ” (It was also reported by another source that Galamison, unable to come to the meeting, did telephone earlier, and that Malcolm X was told of this before he went out to speak.)

  Then Brother Benjamin X’s half-hour was up, and the young lady and Malcolm X, alone back there in the anteroom could hear him entering the introduction: “And now, without further remarks, I present to you one who is willing to put himself on the line for you, a man who would give his life for you—I want you to hear, listen, to understand—one who is a trojan for the black man!”

  Applause rose from the audience; at the anteroom door, Malcolm X turned and looked back at his young lady assistant. “You’ll have to forgive me for raising my voice to you—I’m just about at my wit’s end.”

  “Oh, don’t mention it!” she said quickly, “I understand.”

  His voice sounded far away, “I wonder if anybody really understands—” And he walked out onto the stage, into the applause, smiling and nodding at Brother Benjamin X who passed him en route to the anteroom.

  The young lady had picked up some paperwork she had to do when Benjamin X came in, perspiring. She patted his hand, saying, “That was good!”
Through the anteroom door, just ajar, she and Benjamin X heard the applause diminishing, then the familiar ringing greeting, “Asalaikum, brothers and sisters!”

  “Asalaikum salaam!” some in the audience responded.

  About eight rows of seats from the front, then, a disturbance occurred. In a sudden scuffling, a man’s voice was raised angrily, “Take your hand out of my pocket!” The entire audience was swiveling to look. “Hold it! Hold it! Don’t get excited,” Malcolm X said crisply, “Let’s cool it, brothers—”

  With his own attention distracted, it is possible that he never saw the gunmen. One woman who was seated near the front says, “The commotion back there diverted me just for an instant, then I turned back to look at Malcolm X just in time to see at least three men in the front row stand and take aim and start firing simultaneously. It looked like a firing squad.” Numerous persons later said they saw two men rushing toward the stage, one with a shotgun, the other with two revolvers. Said U.P.I. reporter Stanley Scott: “Shots rang out. Men, women and children ran for cover. They stretched out on the floor and ducked under tables.” Radio Station WMCA reporter Hugh Simpson said, “Then I heard this muffled sound, I saw Malcolm hit with his hands still raised, then he fell back over the chairs behind him. Everybody was shouting. I saw one man firing a gun from under his coat behind me as I hit it [the floor], too. He was firing like he was in some Western, running backward toward the door and firing at the same time.”

  The young lady who was in the backstage anteroom told me, “It sounded like an army had taken over. Somehow, I knew. I wouldn’t go and look. I wanted to remember him as he was.”

  Malcolm X’s hand flew to his chest as the first of sixteen shotgun pellets or revolver slugs hit him. Then the other hand flew up. The middle finger of the left hand was bullet-shattered, and blood gushed from his goatee. He clutched his chest. His big body suddenly fell back stiffly, knocking over two chairs; his head struck the stage floor with a thud.

  In the bedlam of shouting, screaming, running people, some ran toward the stage. Among them Sister Betty scrambled up from where she had thrown her body over her children, who were shrieking; she ran crying hysterically, “My husband! They’re killing my husband!” An unidentified photographer snapped shots of Malcolm X supine on the stage floor with people bent over him snatching apart his bloody shirt, loosening his tie, trying to give him mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration, first a woman, then a man. Said the woman, who identified herself only as a registered nurse, “I don’t know how I got up on the stage, but I threw myself down on who I thought was Malcolm—but it wasn’t. I was willing to die for the man, I would have taken the bullets myself; then I saw Malcolm, and the firing had stopped, and I tried to give him artificial respiration.” Then Sister Betty came through the people, herself a nurse, and people recognizing her moved back; she fell on her knees looking down on his bare, bullet-pocked chest, sobbing, “They killed him!”

  Patrolman Thomas Hoy, 22, was stationed outside the Audubon Ballroom entrance. “I heard the shooting and the place exploded.” He rushed inside, he saw Malcolm X lying on the stage, and then some people chasing a man. Patrolman Hoy “grabbed the suspect.”

  Louis Michaux, the owner of the Nationalist Memorial Bookstore at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, said “I was arriving late at the meeting where Malcolm X had invited me, I met a large number of people rushing out.”

  Sergeant Alvin Aronoff and Patrolman Louis Angelos happened to be cruising by in their radio car when they heard shots. “When we got there,” said Aronoff, “the crowds were pushing out and screaming ‘Malcolm’s been shot!’ and ‘Get ’im, get ‘im, don’t let him go!’ ” The two policemen grabbed by the arms a Negro who was being kicked as he tried to escape. Firing a warning shot into the air, the policemen pushed the man into their police car, not wanting the angry crowd to close in, and drove him quickly to the police station.

  Someone had run up to the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital’s Vanderbilt Clinic emergency entrance at 167th Street and grabbed a poles-and-canvas stretcher and brought it back to the Audubon Ballroom stage. Malcolm X was put on the stretcher and an unidentified photographer got a macabre picture of him, with his mouth open and his teeth bared, as men rushed him up to the hospital clinic emergency entrance. A hospital spokesman said later that it was about 3:15 P.M. when Malcolm X reached a third-floor operating room. He was “either dead, or in a death-appearing state,” said the spokesman.

  A team of surgeons cut through his chest to attempt to massage the heart. The effort was abandoned at 3:30 P.M.

  Reporters who had descended upon the hospital office fired questions at the spokesman, who kept saying brusquely, “I don’t know.” Then he took the elevator upstairs to the emergency operating room. A small crowd of friends and Sister Betty had also pushed into the hospital office when the hospital spokesman returned. Collecting himself, he made an announcement: “The gentleman you know as Malcolm X is dead. He died from gunshot wounds. He was apparently dead before he got here. He was shot in the chest several times, and once in the cheek.”

  The group filed out of the hospital office. The Negro men were visibly fighting their emotions; one kept smashing his fist into the other cupped palm. Among the women, many were openly crying.

  Moments after the news flashed throughout Harlem (and throughout the entire world), a crowd began to gather outside the Hotel Theresa where Malcolm X’s OAAU had its headquarters. They learned over transistor radios that the man whom the two policemen had taken from the murder scene initially identified himself as Thomas Hagan, 22 (he was later identified as Talmadge Hayer), in whose right trousers pocket the policemen had found a .45 caliber cartridge clip containing four unused cartridges, and then at Jewish Memorial Hospital doctors had reported that Hayer had been shot in the left thigh, his forehead was bruised and his body was beaten. “If we hadn’t gotten him away, they would have kicked him to death,” Sergeant Aronoff had said, and Hayer had been taken to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward.

  By five P.M., the crowd in front of the Theresa Hotel had been quietly, carefully dispersed, and the Black Muslim Mosque Number 7 and its restaurant around the corner, at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, had been ordered closed as a precautionary measure, on the orders of the local 28th Precinct’s Captain Lloyd Sealy, New York City’s first Negro to command a precinct. When reporters telephoned the Black Muslim restaurant, a man’s voice stated, “No one is available to make any statement.” When the OAAU office in the Theresa Hotel was tried, the telephone kept ringing, unanswered. Precinct Captain Sealy soon appeared, walking by himself along 125th Street, swinging his nightstick and conversing with people he met.

  At the 28th Precinct station house on West 123rd Street, the forty policemen who were to have gone off duty at four P.M. had been told they must remain on duty, and two full busloads of the highly trained New York City Police Tactical Patrol Force had arrived at the precinct. Various high police officials made press statements. A Tactical Patrol Force Captain, Harry Kaiser, said no unusual occurrences had been noted, and he anticipated no trouble. Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm said that “hundreds” of extra policemen would be put into the Harlem area, including some members of the Bureau of Special Services. An Assistant Chief Inspector, Harry Taylor, speculated that the assassins had not rushed from the ballroom among the crowd, but had kept running past the stage and escaped on 165th Street. In the early evening, the police department’s Chief of Detectives Philip J. Walsh quit a vacation he was on to join the hunt for the killers, and he said he looked forward to “a long-drawn-out investigation.” Police and reporters at the shooting scene had pictures taken of the stage, with white chalk marks now circling five bullet holes in the speaker’s stand; there were other holes in the stage’s mural backdrop, indicating slugs or shotgun pellets which had either missed Malcolm X or passed through him. Police declined to discuss a rumor sweeping Harlem that they had some motion pictures which had been taken in the Audu
bon Ballroom as the murder took place. Another rumor that gained swift momentum was that when Sister Betty had leaned over her husband’s body, she had removed from his coat pocket a paper on which he had written the names of those he had supposedly learned were assigned to execute him.

  Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm stressed that the department had made efforts to protect Malcolm X. Twenty different times the department had offered protection to Malcolm X or to some of his assistants, and the protection was refused, said Commissioner Arm, and seventeen times uniformed police guards had been offered for the OAAU meetings at the Audubon Ballroom, the most recent time being “last Sunday.” Asked about the pistol permit that Malcolm X had said publicly he planned to request, Commissioner Arm said that as far as he knew, Malcolm X had never actually filed a request.

  A number of questions have been raised. The “suspect” arrested by Patrolman Hoy as he was being chased from the meeting has, at present writing, not been identified publicly. Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm’s statement that Malcolm X refused police protection conflicts directly with the statements of many of his associates that during the week preceding his assassination Malcolm X complained repeatedly that the police would not take his requests for protection seriously. Finally, although police sources said that a special detail of twenty men had been assigned to the meeting and that it had even been attended by agents of the Bureau of Special Services, these men were nowhere in evidence during or after the assassination, and Talmadge Hayer, rescued from the crowd and arrested as a suspect immediately after the assassination, was picked up by two patrolmen in a squad car cruising by.

  On long-distance telephones, reporters reached the Chicago mansion headquarters of Elijah Muhammad. He would not come to the telephone, but a spokesman of his said that Muhammad “has no comment today, but he might have something to say tomorrow.” No statement could be obtained either from Malcolm X’s oldest brother, Wilfred X, the Black Muslim minister of Mosque Number 1 in Detroit. At his home, a woman told reporters that Minister Wilfred X was not there, that he had not gone to New York, and she didn’t believe he had any plans to do so. (Minister Wilfred X, reached later, said that he anticipated attending the Black Muslim convention in Chicago on the following Sunday, and regarding his brother, “My brother is dead and there is nothing we can do to bring him back.”)