The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  The Pakistan Hurriyet of Karachi said: “A great Negro leader”; the Pakistan Times said, “His death is a definite setback to the Negro movement for emancipation.” The Peking, China People’s Daily said the killing happened “because Malcolm X…fought for the emancipation of the 23,000,000 American Negroes.” According to correspondents’ reports, the first Algerian headline said “the Ku Klux Klan” assassinated Malcolm X; the pro-Communist Alger Republican’s editorial on the slaying accused “American Fascism,” and the Times’ Algerian correspondent said Algerians showed “signs” of raising Malcolm X to martyrdom. The U.S. Consulate in Georgetown, British Guiana, was marched on by pickets accusing “American imperialists.” Another Peking, China paper, Jenmin Jihpao, said that the death showed that “in dealing with imperialist oppressors, violence must be met with violence.” Pravda in Moscow carried only brief stories and no editorial comment, the New York Times Moscow correspondent said, and another in Poland said there was no noticeable reaction of any kind, and that “few Poles had heard of Malcolm or were interested in the racial issue.” Reportedly, the murder was only routinely reported with little special interest by the press in Cairo, Beirut, New Delhi, and Saigon. In Paris and Western Europe, the story was “essentially a one-day sensation,” with the West German press handling it “as if it were in the Chicago gangster tradition.” The New York Times said: “The London newspapers have probably played the story harder and longer than most, giving continuing emphasis to the police work on the murder. The London Times and the London Daily Telegraph both carried editorial comments, but neither treated Malcolm X as a major figure.” Also reported by the New York Times London correspondent was that “a London group calling itself the Council of African Organizations had violently attacked the United States over the murder. This group is made up of students and other unofficial African representatives here. A press release described Malcolm as a ‘leader in the struggle against American imperialism, oppression and racialism.’ It said, ‘the butchers of Patrice Lumumba are the very same monsters who have murdered Malcolm X in cold blood.’ ”

  Friday morning New York City press headlines concerning Malcolm X’s slaying were devoted to the police department’s apprehension of a second slaying suspect. He was a stocky, round-faced, twenty-six-year-old karate expert named Norman 3X Butler, allegedly a Black Muslim, and a week later, this was followed by the arrest of Thomas 15X Johnson, also allegedly a Black Muslim. Both men had been earlier indicted in the January, 1965, shooting of Benjamin Brown, a New York City Correction Officer and a Black Muslim defector. Both men were indicted, along with Hayer, for the murder of Malcolm X on March 10.

  With the news announcement of Butler’s arrest, and his at least tentative identification as a member of Elijah Muhammad’s organization, tension reached a new high among all who had any role in the feud. The Black Muslim National Convention was scheduled to begin that Friday in Chicago, to last for three days. Early Friday morning in New York at the Kennedy Airport dozens of policemen spent forty minutes searching a plane belonging to Capital Airlines, which back in December 1964 had accepted a Mosque Number 7 charter flight to Chicago and return, at a fee of $5,175.54 which the mosque had subsequently paid in increments.

  Altogether, about three thousand Black Muslims from their mosques in most sizable cities were in Chicago for their annual “Saviour’s Day” convention, regarded by them as similar to the holiday of Christmas. In the order of arrival, each group from the different mosques and cities assembled outside the big sports coliseum south of Chicago’s business district, the brothers of all ages dressed in neat, dark suits and white shirts and the sisters garbed in flowing silk gowns and headdresses—and every individual was filtered through an intense security check that Chicago police sources said was unprecedented in Chicago except for a visiting President.

  Searched even more closely were the relatively few non-Muslim Negroes who came to be spectators, and the press representatives both white and black. “Take off your hat, show some respect!” snapped a Black Muslim guard at a white reporter. As each person was “cleared” a Fruit of Islam man ushered him or her to a specific seat in the drafty interior of the 7500-seat coliseum. (Later, Muslim sources would blame the half-full house upon “the white man’s dividing of Negroes,” but observers who recalled the packed coliseum in 1964 said that bombing fears kept away many non-Muslim Negroes.) The audience sat lightly murmuring under the two huge hanging banners proclaiming “Welcome Elijah Muhammad—We Are Glad To Have You With Us” and “We Must Have Some Of This Land” (referring to Elijah Muhammad’s demand that “one or more states” be turned over to the “23 million so-called Negroes” in America as partial reparation for “over a century of our free blood and sweat as slaves which helped to develop this wealthy nation where still today you show us you do not wish or intend to accept us as equals”). In front of the wide, raised speaker’s platform were two nearly life-sized photographic blowups of Elijah Muhammad. Standing between the stage and the audience were Fruit of Islam guards. Others were prowling the aisles, scanning rows of faces, with intermittent peremptory demands for identification, “What mosque, brother?” Still more Fruit of Islam men were inspecting the coliseum’s vacant balcony, backstage, downstairs, and rafters and roof.

  The ghost of Malcolm X was in the coliseum. First, in a high drama for the Muslims, Elijah Muhammad’s son, Wallace Delaney Muhammad, who once had sided with Malcolm X, faced the audience and begged forgiveness for his defection. Next, two brothers of Malcolm X, Wilfred and Philbert, both of them Black Muslim ministers, urged unity with Elijah Muhammad. Said Minister Wilfred X of the Detroit mosque, “We would be ignorant to get confused and go to arguing and fighting among ourselves and forget who the real enemy is.” Said Minister Philbert X, of the Lansing mosque, “Malcolm was my own blood brother, next to me…I was shocked. No man wants to see his own brother destroyed. But I knew that he was traveling on a very reckless and dangerous road. I made attempts to change his course. When he was living, I tried to keep him living; now that he is dead, there is nothing I can do.” Indicating the seated Elijah Muhammad, Minister Philbert X declared, “Where he leads me, I will follow”—and then he introduced the Black Muslim leader to make his address.

  Only the head of Elijah Muhammad was visible above the grim-faced Fruit of Islam men in a living wall, Cassius Clay among them. Crescents, stars, moons and suns were in goldthread embroidery on the small fez that Elijah Muhammad wore. He said in his speech: “For a long time, Malcolm stood here where I stand. In those days, Malcolm was safe, Malcolm was loved. God, Himself, protected Malcolm….For more than a year, Malcolm was given his freedom. He went everywhere—Asia, Europe, Africa, even to Mecca, trying to make enemies for me. He came back preaching that we should not hate the enemy….He came here a few weeks ago to blast away his hate and mud-slinging; everything he could think of to disgrace me….We didn’t want to kill Malcolm and didn’t try to kill him. They know I didn’t harm Malcolm. They know I loved him. His foolish teaching brought him to his own end….”

  Both physically and emotionally worked up, often Elijah Muhammad would begin coughing. “Take it easy! Take your time!” his audience pleaded with him. “He had no right to reject me!” Elijah Muhammad declared. “He was a star, who went astray!…They knew I didn’t harm Malcolm, but he tried to make war against me.” He said that Malcolm X would have been given “the most glorious of burials” if he had stayed with the Black Muslims and had died a natural death; “instead, we stand beside the grave of a hypocrite!…Malcolm! Who was he leading? Who was he teaching? He has no truth! We didn’t want to kill Malcolm! His foolish teaching would bring him to his own end! I am not going to let the crackpots destroy the good things Allah sent to you and me!”

  Elijah Muhammad drove his frail energy to speak for about an hour and a half. He challenged any would-be assassins: “If you seek to snuff out the life of Elijah Muhammad, you are inviting your own doom! The Holy Quran tells us not to pick
a fight but to defend ourselves. We will fight!” It was mid-afternoon when Elijah Muhammad turned back to his seat with some three thousand Black Muslim men, women, and children shouting “Yes, sir!…So sweet!…All praise to Muhammad!”

  In the Unity Funeral Home in the Harlem community of New York City in the mid-afternoon, the public’s viewing of the body of Malcolm X was interrupted by the arrival of a party of about a dozen people whose central figure was a white-turbaned, dark-robed elderly man whose white beard fell to his chest and who carried a forked stick. When reporters rushed to attempt interviews, another man in the party waved them away, saying, “A silent tongue does not betray its owner.” The man was Sheik Ahmed Hassoun, a Sudanese, a member of the Sunni Moslems, who had taught in Mecca for 35 years when he had met Malcolm X there, and then had soon come to the United States to serve as Malcolm X’s spiritual advisor and to teach at the Muslim Mosque, Inc.

  Sheik Hassoun prepared the body for burial in accordance with Moslem ritual. Removing the Western clothing in which the body had been on display, Sheik Hassoun washed the body with special holy oil. Then he draped the body in the traditional seven white linen shrouds, called the kafan. Only the face with its reddish moustache and goatee was left exposed. The mourners who had come with Sheik Hassoun filed to the bier and he read passages from the Koran. Then he turned to a funeral home representative: “Now the body is ready for burial.” Soon, the sheik and his retinue left, and the viewing by the public resumed. When the word spread, numbers of persons who had come before returned for another wait in the long, slowly moving line, wanting to see the Moslem burial dress.

  It was late during this Friday afternoon that I got into the quietly moving line, thinking about the Malcolm X with whom I had worked closely for about two years. Blue-uniformed policemen stood at intervals watching us shuffle along within the wooden gray-painted police barricades. Just across the street several men were looking at the line from behind a large side window of the “Lone Star Barber Shop, Eddie Johns, Prop., William Ashe, Mgr.” Among the policemen were a few press representatives talking to each other to pass the time. Then we were inside the softly lit, hushed, cool, large chapel. Standing at either end of the long, handsome bronze coffin were two big, dark policemen, mostly looking straight ahead, but moving their lips when some viewer tarried. Within minutes I had reached the coffin. Under the glass lid, I glimpsed the delicate white shrouding over the chest and up like a hood about the face on which I tried to concentrate for as long as I could. All I could think was that it was he, all right—Malcolm X. “Move on”—the policeman’s voice was soft. Malcolm looked to me—just waxy and dead. The policeman’s hand was gesturing at his waist level. I thought, “Well—good-bye.” I moved on.

  Twenty-two thousand people had viewed the body when the line was stopped that night for good, at eleven P.M. Quietly, between midnight and dawn, a dozen police cars flanked a hearse that went the twenty-odd blocks farther uptown to the Faith Temple. The bronze coffin was wheeled inside and placed upon a platform draped in thick dark red velvet, in front of the altar, and the coffin’s lid was reopened. As the hearse pulled away, policemen stood at posts of vigil both inside and outside Faith Temple. It was crispy cold outside.

  About six A.M., people began forming a line on the east side of Amsterdam Avenue. By nine A.M., an estimated six thousand persons thronged the nearby blocks, behind police barriers, and faces were in every window of the apartment buildings across the street; some stood shivering on fire escapes. From 145th Street to 149th Street, policemen had blocked off all automobile traffic except for their own cars, the newspapers’ cars, and the equipment trucks for radio and television on-the-spot coverage. There were hundreds of policemen, some on the rooftops in the immediate area. Combing the crowd’s edges were reporters with microphones and notebooks. “He was fascinating, a remarkably fascinating man, that’s why I’m here,” a white girl in her mid-twenties told a New York Times man; and a Negro woman, “I’m paying my respects to the greatest black man in this century. He’s a black man. Don’t say colored.” Another woman, noticing steel helmets inside a television network car, laughed to the driver, “You getting ready for next summer?”

  When the Faith Temple doors were opened at 9:20, a corps of OAAU members entered. Within the next quarter-hour, twenty of the men had ushered in six hundred seat-holders. Fifty press reporters, photographers and television cameramen clustered beneath religious murals to the rear of the altar, and some stood on chairs to see better. A Negro engineer monitored recording equipment between the altar and the coffin which was guarded by eight uniformed Negro policemen and two uniformed Negro policewomen. One Negro plainclothes policeman sat on either side of heavily veiled Sister Betty in the second row. The raised lid of the coffin hid the Faith Temple’s brass tithe box and candelabra; the head of the Islamic Mission of America, in Brooklyn, Sheik Al-Haj Daoud Ahmed Faisal, had counseled that any hint of Christianity in the services would make the deceased a kafir, an unbeliever. (The sheik had also dissented with the days of public exhibition of the body: “Death is a private matter between Allah and the deceased.”)

  Before the services began, OAAU ushers brought in one floral wreath—a two-by-five arrangement of the Islamic Star and Crescent in white carnations against a background of red carnations.

  First, the actor Ossie Davis and his wife, actress Ruby Dee, read the notes, telegrams and cables of condolence. They came from every major civil-rights organization; from individual figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King; from organizations and governments abroad, such as The Africa-Pakistan-West-Indian Society of the London School of Economics, the Pan-African Congress of Southern Africa, the Nigerian Ambassador from Lagos, the President of the Republic of Ghana, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah: “The death of Malcolm X shall not have been in vain.”

  Next, Omar Osman stood, a representative of the Islam Center of Switzerland and the United States: “We knew Brother Malcolm as a blood brother, particularly after his pilgrimage to Mecca last year. The highest thing that a Moslem can aspire to is to die on the battlefield and not die at his bedside—” He paused briefly to wait out the applause from among the mourners. “Those who die on the battlefield are not dead, but are alive!” The applause was louder, and cries rose, “Right! Right!” Omar Osman then critically commented upon the remarks which USIA Director Carl Rowan had made in Washington, D.C., about the foreign press reaction to the death of the deceased. From the audience then hisses rose.

  Again, the actor Ossie Davis stood. His deep voice delivered the eulogy to Malcolm X which was going to cause Davis subsequently to be hailed more than ever among Negroes in Harlem:

  “Here—at this final hour, in this quiet place, Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes—extinguished now, and gone from us forever….

  “Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain—and we will smile….They will say that he is of hate—a fanatic, a racist—who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle!

  “And we will answer and say unto them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves….And we will know him then for what he was and is—a Prince—our own black shining Prince!—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”

  Brief speeches were made by others. Then, the family, the OAAU members and other Muslims present stood and filed by the coffin to view the body for the last time. Finally, the two plainclothes policemen ushered Sister Betty to have her last sight of her husband. She leaned over, kissing the glass over him; she broke into tears. Until then almost no crying had been heard in the services,
but now Sister Betty’s sobs were taken up by other women.

  The services had lasted a little over an hour when the three minutes of prayers said for every Muslim who is dead were recited by Alhajj Heshaam Jaaber, of Elizabeth, New Jersey. At the phrase “Allahu Akbar”—“God is most great”—all Muslims in the audience placed their opened hands at the sides of their faces.

  An official cortege, with the hearse, of three family cars, eighteen mourners’ cars, twelve police cars and six press cars—followed by about fifty other cars—briskly drove the eighteen miles out of Manhattan and along the New York Thruway, then off its Exit 7 to reach the Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, N.Y. All along the route, Negroes placed their hats or hands over their hearts, paying their final respects. At each bridge crossing to Manhattan, police cars stood watch; the Westchester County police had stationed individual patrolmen at intervals en route to the cemetery.

  Over the coffin, final Moslem prayers were said by Sheik Alhajj Heshaam Jaaber. The coffin was lowered into the grave, the head facing the east, in keeping with Islamic tradition. Among the mourners, the Moslems knelt beside the grave to pray with their foreheads pressed to the earth, in the Eastern manner. When the family left the gravesite, followers of Malcolm X would not let the coffin be covered by the white grave-diggers who had stood a little distance away, waiting. Instead, seven OAAU men began dropping bare handfuls of earth down on the coffin; then they were given shovels and they carried dirt to fill the grave, and then mound it.

  The night fell over the earthly remains of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, who had been called Malcolm X; who had been called Malcolm Little; who had been called “Big Red” and “Satan” and “Homeboy” and other names—who had been buried as a Moslem. “According to the Koran,” the New York Times reported, “the bodies of the dead remain in their graves until the Last Day, the Day of Judgment. On this day of cataclysm the heavens are rent and the mountains ground to dust, the graves open and men are called to account by Allah.