The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  As dark fell, many Negro men and women assembled before Louis Michaux’s bookstore, where most of Harlem’s Black Nationalist public activity centered. A small group of OAAU members opened their Hotel Theresa headquarters and sat in the room and would not make any statements to reporters.

  The New York Daily News came onto the newsstands with its cover page devoted to “Malcolm X Murdered” over the photograph of him being borne away on the stretcher, and a sub-caption, “Gunned Down at Rally.” In Long Island, where she had been taken just after her father’s murder, six-year-old Attallah carefully wrote a letter to him, “Dear Daddy, I love you so O dear, O dear, I wish you wasn’t dead.”

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  The body—still listed as “John Doe” because it had not yet been formally identified—had been moved late Sunday to the New York City Medical Examiner’s office at 520 First Avenue. The autopsy confirmed that shotgun pellet wounds in the heart had killed Malcolm X. Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Milton Helpern said that death followed the first sawed-off shotgun blast which caused thirteen wounds in the heart and chest, and he said that .38 and .45 caliber bullet wounds in the thighs and legs evidenced that Malcolm X had been shot at after he had fallen.

  Monday morning the official identification was made at the Medical Examiner’s office by Sister Betty, who was accompanied by Percy Sutton, Malcolm X’s Boston half-sister Mrs. Ella Collins, and Joseph E. Hall, General Manager of the large Unity Funeral Home in Harlem. Leaving the Medical Examiner’s office at about noon to go and complete funeral arrangements, Sister Betty told reporters, “No one believed what he said. They never took him seriously, even after the bombing of our home they said he did it himself!”

  At the Unity Funeral Home on the east side of Eighth Avenue between 126th and 127th streets, Sister Betty chose a six-foot-nine-inch bronze casket lined with egg-shell velvet. At her request, the funeral would be delayed until the following Saturday, five days away. The funeral home’s manager Hall announced to the press that the body would be dressed in a business suit, and it would be put on view under a glass shield from Tuesday through Friday, then the Saturday services would be at a Harlem church.

  Soon posted on the funeral home’s directory was “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.” In Brooklyn, orthodox Moslem Sheik Al-Hajh Daoud Ahmed Faisal of the Islamic Mission of America said that the delayed funeral services violated a Moslem practice that the sun should not set twice on a believer’s body, that the Koran prescribed burial inside twenty-four hours if possible, and Moslems believed that when a body grows cold the soul leaves it and when the body is put into the earth it comes alive again.

  In Chicago, where policemen were watching all bus depots, railways, terminals, O’Hare Airport and highway entrances, Elijah Muhammad, under heavy guard in his three-story mansion, said, “Malcolm died according to his preaching. He seems to have taken weapons as his god. Therefore, we couldn’t tolerate a man like that. He preached war. We preach peace. We are permitted to fight if we are attacked—that’s the Scripture, the Koran, and the Bible, too. But we will never be the aggressor. I don’t have the right to be frightened, because I was chosen by Allah. If Allah gives me up to the hands of the wicked, I am satisfied. My life is in the hands of Allah.” The grounds outside the mansion were patrolled by both Chicago police and Fruit of Islam bodyguards. More of both patrolled before the University of Islam high school, and the offices of the newspaper Muhammad Speaks.

  Malcolm X’s lawyer, Assemblyman Percy Sutton, said that the police now had the names of those whom Malcolm X had said planned to kill him. All over Harlem, reporters were interviewing people, and microphones were being put before the mouths of the man-in-the-street. At police precinct station houses, people being questioned were leaving by side entrances. Said Assistant Chief Inspector Joseph Coyle, in charge of Manhattan North detectives, “….a well-planned conspiracy. We’re doing a screening process of the four hundred people who were in the hall at the time.” Fifty detectives were on the case, he said, and he had been in touch with police in other cities.

  Harlem was mostly asleep when around the Black Muslim Mosque Number 7, on the top floor of a four-story building at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, an explosive sound at 2:15 A.M. ripped the night. Firemen were instantly summoned by the four policemen who had been guarding the sidewalk entrance to the mosque. Within a few minutes flames burst through the building’s roof and leaped thirty feet into the air. For the next seven hours firemen would pour water into the building. On an adjacent roof they found an empty five-gallon gasoline can, a brown, gasoline-stained shopping bag, and oily rags. Southbound IRT subway service was re-routed for a while, also three bus lines. At the spectacular five-alarm fire’s height, a wall of the building collapsed; it smashed two fire engines at the curb and injured five firemen, one seriously, and also a pedestrian who had been across the street buying a newspaper. By daybreak, when the fire was declared “under control,” the Black Muslim mosque and the Gethsemane Church of God in Christ on the floor beneath it were gutted, and seven street-level stores, including the Black Muslim restaurant, were “total losses.” Fire Department sources said that replacing the ruined equipment would cost “around $50,000.” Joseph X of the Black Muslims, who once had been the immediate assistant of Malcolm X, said that Elijah Muhammad’s followers had two alternative mosques to meet in, one in Brooklyn and the other in Queens, Long Island. Both these mosques were under continuous police guard.

  Across the nation in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon two policemen discovered a fire beginning in the San Francisco Black Muslim Mosque, and quickly extinguished it. Kerosene had been splashed on the sidewalk and door and set afire.

  The body of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz originally had been scheduled to go on public view at 2:30 P.M. Tuesday. Crowds stood in line behind police barricades waiting to be admitted and the policemen wherever one looked included numerous patrol cars and even sharpshooters on the roofs around the Unity Funeral Home. But the telephoned bomb-threats which had begun shortly after noon made necessary two evacuations of the funeral home for bomb-squad searches, which proved futile. A search was conducted even in the 43rd Street offices of the New York Times after a man telephoned complaining of an editorial about Malcolm X and said, “Your plant will be destroyed at four o’clock.”

  At the funeral home in Harlem, policemen inspected all packages and floral pieces being delivered, as well as the large handbags of women mourners. It was 6:15 P.M. when a cordon of policemen arrived flanking Sister Betty and four close relatives and friends who entered the funeral home in a glare of flashbulbs. “She’s a black Jacqueline Kennedy,” observed a white reporter. “She has class, she knows what to do and when, she handles herself beautifully.”

  It was 7:10 P.M. when the family party emerged and left. After ten minutes, the first of the waiting public was admitted. Between then and an hour before midnight, two thousand people, including scores of whites, had filed past the open coffin in which the body lay dressed in a dark business suit, a white shirt and dark tie, with a small, oblong brass plate above it inscribed, “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—May 19, 1925—Feb. 21, 1965.”

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  Malcolm X followers had been canvassing with growing anxiety for a Harlem church that would accept the Saturday funeral. Officials of several churches had refused, including a spokesman for the community’s largest church, Abyssinian Baptist, of which Congressman-Reverend Adam Clayton Powell is the pastor; others which turned down requests, according to the Amsterdam News, included the Williams C.M.E. Church and The Refuge Temple of The Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the funeral was accepted by Bishop Alvin A. Childs for the Faith Temple, Church of God in Christ located at 147th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The Faith Temple, a former movie theater which had been converted fifteen years previously, could seat a thousand in its auditorium and another seven hundred in its basement. Bishop Childs, who in 1964 had been elected as Harlem’s “locality mayor,” told the press that it was “as a humanitaria
n gesture” that he made his church available, and of Malcolm X, he said, “…a militant and vocal person. I did not agree with all of his philosophy, but this did not affect our friendship.” Shortly after the news became known, Bishop Childs and his wife began to receive the first of a succession of bomb threats telephoned both to the church and to their home.

  Prominent Negro figures were being quoted by the various press media. The famed psychologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark told Jet magazine, “I had a deep respect for this man. I believe that he was sincerely groping to find a place in the fight for Civil Rights, on a level where he would be respected and understood fully. I looked forward to his growth along those lines. It doesn’t matter so much about his past. It is tragic that he was cut down at the point when he seemed on the verge of achieving the position of respectability he sought.” A New York Times correspondent in a London press conference quoted the author and dramatist James Baldwin, who thought the death of Malcolm X was “a major setback for the Negro movement.” Pointing at white reporters, Baldwin accused, “You did it…whoever did it was formed in the crucible of the Western world, of the American Republic!” European “rape” of Africa began racial problems and was therefore the beginning of the end for Malcolm X, Baldwin said.

  The bookstore owner in Harlem, Louis Michaux, a major voice in the community, told the Amsterdam News, “It’s things like the murder of Malcolm X that drive the masses closer together. He died in the same manner that Patrice Lumumba met his death in the Congo….We must unite, not fight.”

  “Malcolm X caused many young Negroes to take a new vision of themselves,” said Bayard Rustin, a main figure in organizing the March on Washington in 1963. A “third party” was suspected of killing Malcolm X by CORE’S National Director James Farmer, who said, “Malcolm’s murder was calculated to produce more violence and murder and vengeance killings.” A few days later, asked for his opinion of a rumor circulating about that a “Red Chinese” plot brought about the murder, Farmer said, “I would not say it is impossible.”

  “For the Negroes in America, the death of Malcolm X is the most portentous event since the deportation of Marcus Garvey in the 1920’s,” said Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, author of The Black Muslims in America, who talked to the press at Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he was a visiting professor and research fellow. “I doubt there are ‘international implications’ in the slaying. The answer is closer to home. The answer is in the local struggle among contending rivals for leadership of the black masses, which are potentially the most volatile sub-group in America.” Said Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “Master spellbinder that he was, Malcolm X in death cast a spell more far-flung and more disturbing than any he cast in life.”

  The New York City police investigators who were pursuing the case were unhappy that Malcolm’s followers had “not come forward” to aid the investigation. At police request, the press printed a telephone number, SW 5-8117, for “strictly confidential” information that anyone might offer concerning the slaying. The police had picked up and were holding Reuben Francis, described as a Malcolm X “bodyguard,” who was believed to be the person who had shot the suspected assassin Talmadge Hayer during the melee the previous Sunday at the Audubon Ballroom. Hayer remained in the Bellevue Prison Ward, awaiting surgery.

  As thousands continued viewing the body of the slain Malcolm X amid intermittent new bomb threats telephoned to the funeral home, and to the Faith Temple where his funeral was scheduled for Saturday, a new organization, the Federation of Independent Political Action, threatened to picket all Harlem business establishments which would not close from Thursday afternoon until Monday morning “in tribute to Malcolm X.” The FIPA’s spokesman was Jesse Gray, the well-known rent-strike leader; Harlem pedestrians began to be handed printed sheets reading, in part, “If the stores refuse to close, they identify with our enemy—therefore we must close them—pass them by. Those that shop along 125th Street during the hours that the stores are to be closed identify with the murderous stooge that allowed the power structure to use his hands to kill Brother Malcolm.” At a late evening FIPA rally before Louis Michaux’s bookstore, Jesse Gray declared that in 1965 a Negro should run for Mayor of New York “in the name of Malcolm,” and speculated that such a candidate should receive 100,000 votes. Shortly after the FIPA rally, merchants and other members of the Uptown Chamber of Commerce met and swiftly passed a resolution urging all Harlem stores to remain open and “continue to serve their customers,” and recommendation was made that full pay be given to any store employees who might wish to attend Malcolm X’s funeral on Saturday morning. Then one after another, Harlem leaders sharply criticized the FIPA proposal as “irresponsible.” Finally, nearly all of the Harlem stores kept their doors open for business. The FIPA got together about twenty pickets who patrolled for a while before Harlem’s largest store, Blumstein’s; leading the pickets were two white men carrying signs reading “All Stores Should Close. Honor Malcolm X.”

  The weather had turned very cold. Icicles hung from the collapsed roof of the fire-ruined building that had housed Black Muslim Mosque Number 7. The Amsterdam News, its offices barely a block down Eighth Avenue from the funeral home where Malcolm X’s body lay, editorialized, “Steady, Eddie!” saying that orderly tributes to Malcolm X would “confound his critics, who would like nothing better than to see black people rioting over his remains.”

  The fear of serious mass rioting set off by some unpredictable spark hung steadily in the air. An increasing number of Harlem leaders declared that the principal reason for this was the downtown white press media, sensationalizing what was going on in a calm, dignified community. Finally the Harlem Ministers’ Interfaith Association would issue a formal accusation: “The screaming headlines of many of our newspapers make it seem as if all of Harlem was an armed camp, ready to explode at any moment. The vast majority of the citizens of the Harlem community is not involved in the unfortunate acts of violence that have been grossly overplayed by the press. Many times the slanting of the news is able to bring about an atmosphere through which a few depraved and reckless individuals can take advantage.”

  “Malcolm X Died Broke”—that headline in Harlem’s Amsterdam News came as a shock to many in the community. Few had reflected that Malcolm X, upon becoming a Black Muslim minister, had signed an oath of poverty, so that for twelve years he never acquired anything in his own name. (Somewhere I have read that Malcolm X in his Black Muslim days received about $175 weekly to cover his living and other expenses exclusive of travel.) “He left his four daughters and pregnant wife with no insurance of any kind, no savings, and no income,” the Amsterdam News story said (and it might have added that he never drew up a will; he had made a February 26th appointment with his lawyer—five days after his death). Within the week, two groups had organized and were asking Harlemites for contributions to help Sister Betty raise and educate the children (since organized as the Malcolm X Daughters’ Fund at Harlem’s Freedom National Bank, 275 West 125th Street).

  In Boston, Malcolm X’s half-sister, Mrs. Ella Mae Collins, told a news conference that she would choose the leaders of the OAAU to succeed Malcolm X. Mrs. Collins operated the Sarah A. Little School of Preparatory Arts where, she said, children were taught Arabic, Swahili, French, and Spanish. In 1959, she, too, had broken away from Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslims, to which she had originally been converted by Malcolm X.

  Far from Harlem, in lands where Malcolm X had traveled, the press had given the murder a coverage that had highly irritated the Director of the United States Information Agency, Carl T. Rowan, himself a Negro. In Washington, addressing the American Foreign Service Association, Rowan said that when he first heard of the murder, he knew it would be grossly misconstrued in some countries where people were unaware what Malcolm X represented, and he said the USIA had worked hard to inform the African press of the facts about Malcolm X and his preachments, but still there
had been “a host of African reaction based on misinformation and misrepresentation.”

  Said USIA Director Rowan, “Mind you, here was a Negro who preached segregation and race hatred, killed by another Negro, presumably from another organization that preaches segregation and race hatred, and neither of them representative of more than a tiny minority of the Negro population of America—” Rowan held up some foreign newspapers. “All this about an ex-convict, ex-dope peddler who became a racial fanatic,” continued Rowan. “I can only conclude that we Americans know less about what goes on in the minds of other peoples than we thought, or the need to inform is even greater than we in USIA thought it to be.”

  The Daily Times of Lagos, in Nigeria, had said: “Like all mortals, Malcolm X was not without his faults…but that he was a dedicated and consistent disciple of the movement for the emancipation of his brethren, no one can doubt…Malcolm X has fought and died for what he believed to be right. He will have a place in the palace of martyrs.” The Ghanaian Times, Accra, called Malcolm X “the militant and most popular of Afro-American anti-segregationist leaders” and it added his name to “a host of Africans and Americans” ranging from John Brown to Patrice Lumumba “who were martyred in freedom’s cause.” Also in Accra, the Daily Graphic: “The assassination of Malcolm X will go down in history as the greatest blow the American integrationist movement has suffered since the shocking assassinations of Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy.”