Timeline of Malcolum X: Biography
TIMELINE OF MALCOLM X: Biography
CHRONOLOGY-
1923 Earl and Louise Little move with their three small
children to Omaha, Nebraska, 3448 Pinkney Street.
1924 The Ku Klux Klansmen warned Louise, then pregnant with
Malcolm, to get her family out of town, because her
husband was stirring up trouble in the black community
with UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) back
to Africa preaching. They were activist supporters of
Marcus Garvey black-nationalist organization the
Universal Negro Improvement Association. Reverend Little
helped organize the UNIA.
1925 Malcolm Little is born at University Hospital in Omaha,
Nebraska.
1926 The Little family moves to Milwaukee, Wisconsin after
threats by night riders.
1928 The Little family purchased a home in Lansing, Michigan,
and less than two years later the house was destroyed by
fire.
1931 Earl Little was found dead in 1931, most likely the victim
of racist violence. Malcolm was sent to Boston, then to
New York City, where he committed burglary. While serving
a six and one-half year prison sentence, he became
self-educated and converted to an American sect of Islam.
1939 Malcolm mother struggled to keep the family together, she
was institutionalized in a state mental hospital, where
she would remain for a quarter century.
1941 Malcolms half-sister on his fathers side, Ella Collins,
brought the teenager to her home in Boston, Massachusetts.
1946 Known on the streets as Big Red and Detroit Red he
entered the underground economy of the ghetto, running
numbers and selling liquor and illegal drugs. Malcolm
Little was arrested and charge with grand larceny and
breaking and entering. He was sentenced to prison in
Charlestown, Massachusetts, and would live behind bars
until his release six and a half years later.
1947 – At the Concord Reformatory prison, in Massachusetts, to
which he had been transferred. He was introduced to a
black-nationalist Islamic sect, the Nation of Islam,
during a visit by his younger brother, Reginald. Malcolm
joined the sect and began a frequent correspondence with
its leader, Elijah Muhammad, formerly Robert Poole.
1952 Paroled from prison, he took the surname X, which stood
for the lost true name of his African ancestors.
1953 He lived briefly in the home of Elijah Muhammad, and
quickly rose in the hierarchy of the sect. He was named
minister of the newly established Boston Temple No. 11 in
the fall of that year and became the minister of
New Yorks Temple No. 7 in June 1954. He initiated and
directed the development of new temples in many cities and
established a national newspaper, Muhammad Speaks.
1956 Malcolm X met Betty Sanders, a new convert who had joined
Temple No. 7. Calling her from a gas station telephone in
Detroit in early January 1958, his proposal of marriage to
her. Two days later the two were married by a white
Justice of the Peace in Lansing, Michigan. The newlyweds
moved into a small two-family flat in the borough of
Queens, New York and over the next seven years they had
six daughters, Attalah, Qubilah, Ilyasah, Gamilah, Malaak
and Malikah.
1958 Malcolm took the name Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-
Shabazz), studied under Elijah Muhammad, and became
outspoken about mistreatment of blacks in the United
States.
1959 He began reaching out to mainstream civil rights leaders
and black elected officials, such as the Harlem
congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., in an effort to
build a national black united front. A television
documentary on the Nation of Islam, with the provocative
title The Hate That Hate Produced brought the sect into
national prominence. That same year Malcolm X visited
Egypt, Iran, Syria, Ghana, Nigeria and Sudan. The early
1960s he was actively involved in protesting police
brutality against Black Muslim, the name the media gave
members of the Nation.
1960 He met with Fidel Castro during the Cubans visit to the
United Nations. He also led a demonstration at the United
Nations to denounce the killing of the prime minister of
the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.
1961-1963 – He became a sought-after campus speaker, lecturing at
Harvard Law School in March and many other institutions.
His high profile brought him under intense surveillance by
Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement
agencies and fed hostility and resentment among Nation of
Islam leaders close to Elijah Muhammad, who feared that
Malcolm X had grown too powerful to control.
1963 When President John F. Kennedys was assassinated in
November, Malcolm X remarked to the media that the Chief
Executives murder was a case of the chickens coming home
to roost, symbolizing white Americas tendency to
violence and hatred. Elijah Muhammad use the public
controversy as an excuse for expelling his powerful
prot©g© from the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X was first
ordered to submit to a 90-day period of silence. That
same month, he called a press conference and resigned from
the sect.
1964 His Autobiography of Malcolm X was published in 1964.
Leaving the United States during a pilgrimage to Mecca in
April 13, he converted to Orthodox Islam. He abandoned
concepts of racial antagonism and counseled the need for
human brotherhood and international cooperation. Malcolm
X formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964
and became renowned as an articulate spokesperson for
human rights. Like Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X was
known as one of the most outstanding orators of his day.
1965 In early February the former black separatist traveled to
Alabama to address and encourage young activists involved
in a voting right campaign. He tried to meet with King
during this trip, but the civil rights leader was in
jail; instead Malcolm met with Coretta Scott King, telling
her that he did not intend to make life more difficult
for her husband. If white people realize what the
alternative is, perhaps they will willing to hear
Dr. King. Malcolm X was assassinated February 21, 1965,
in New York City at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan at
the age of 39, he had been a prominent public figure for
less than a decade.
1970 Dr. Betty Shabazz commented about her husbands journey to
Mecca, and his return to the Unites States a little over a
month later as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz:
When [Malcolm] returned he has a new perspective. Part
of it, I think, was the human experience of seeing people
from different countries functioning together because of a
common philosophy . . . . Malcolms basic goal or
objective never changed: He was totally committed to
freedom for oppressed people . . . Malcolms [new]
feeling was that if a group has an answer to the problems
of black people, than they should help solve the problems
without having all black people join that group. In this
sense his scope had been broadened.
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MALCOLM X’s LIFE AFTER DEATH
BY: DR. MANNING MARABLE, AMERICAN LEGACY, 2002
EDITED BY: LAWRENCE E. WALKER, 2005
Only days after the assassination, Bayard Rustin, the architect of the 1963 March on Washington, wrote: Now that he is dead, we must resist the temptation to idealize Malcolm X, to elevate charisma to greatness. Malcolm X is not a hero of the movement, he is a tragic victim of the ghetto. . . White America, not the Negro people, will determine Malcolms role in history.
Only days following Malcolm Xs assassination, Elijah Muhammad denounced his former prot©g© as a hypocrite whose foolish teaching brought him to his own end.
He sharply criticized Martin Luther Kings philosophy of nonviolence, and ridiculed the 1963 March on Washington as nothing but a picnic, a circus.
If capitalistic Kennedy and communistic Khruchchev can find something in common on which to form a United front despite their tremendous ideological differences, he wrote in a 1963 letter to Dr. King, inviting him to a rally in Harlem, it is a disgrace for Negro leaders not to be able to submerge our minor differences in order to seek a common solution to a common problem posed by a Common Enemy.
Soon after his departure from the Nation of Islam, he created tow new organization: Muslim Mosque, Inc., a spiritual refuge for former Nation of Islam members and others, to reach out to the orthodox Islamic community; and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a black-nationalist group that sought to overcome the ideological and political divisions within black America.
The first phase of the remaking of Malcolm X occurred in late 1965 with the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X written with the assistance of the journalist Alex Haley. He wrote: The American black man should be focusing his every effort toward building his own businesses, and decent homes for himself. As other ethnic groups have done, let the black people, wherever possible, however possible, patronize their own kind, hire their own kind, and start in those ways to build up the black races ability to do for itself. Thats the only way the American black man is every going to get respect. The Autobiography of Malcolm X sold nearly three million copies over the next 35 years. In 1999 Time magazine named it one of the ten most influential works of nonfiction of the century.
On January 20, 1999, when the stamp bearing Malcolm X’s image was unveiled in front of a jubilant audience of fifteen hundred people at Harlems historic Apollo Theater. Malcolm X, after all, had been illegally wiretapped, his private conversations recorded, his mail opened, and his organizations disrupted by a U.S. government that critics felt Malcolm X would have disapproved of even today.
As the white attorney William Kuntsler observed in 1994: I like Malcolm would be a fire-eater, burning with hatred, with no sense of humor. He was actually quite the opposite, a warm, responsive human being, not at all as he was depicted by the media . . . He spent most of his public life trying to convince his black audiences that they had to resist the white avalanche by any means necessary. A failure to resist, he often said, was part of a residual slave mentality. I completely agreed with him.
