Malcolm X

Malcolm X transformed himself into a self-taught intellectual who spurned his past as a white-hating separatist and Nation of Islam spokesman to become an orthodox Muslim and an international figure.

In 1964, Malcolm X left his high-ranking post at the Nation of Islam, after discovering that the founder of the organization, Elijah Muhammad, had fathered children out of wedlock. He was assassinated in 1965 at the age of 39 by men associated with the group.

He was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Neb., to a West Indian mother and an American father, who was a Baptist minister deeply influenced by Marcus Aurelius Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey exhorted African-Americans to return to Africa because the United States would continue to deny them basic rights.

He later married Betty Sanders, a nurse and fellow member of the Nation of Islam, in 1958. They had six children. Betty Shabazz died in 1997 after one of her grandchildren set fire to her apartment.

During the ‘60s, Malcolm X disdained the leaders of the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, calling him an “Uncle Tom.” But after his conversion to orthodox Islam, changing his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz in Mecca, he revised his vision of the movement and its leaders.

Toward the end of his “Autobiography” (written by Alex Haley), Malcolm X wrote: “The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities — he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites. But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth — the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.”