From LitHub.
| Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City. On Sunday, February 21, 1965, a little after 3pm, as he was preparing to address his Organization of Afro-American Unity in New York’s Audubon Ballroom, the controversial civil rights leader and revolutionary Malcolm X was shot dead by members of the Nation of Islam, the religious group X had broken from the year before. He was 39. “In the aftermath, rivers of ink spilled across New York City’s many newspapers,” wrote Ted Hamm. The legendary journalist Jimmy Breslin was callous and dismissive; Langston Hughes “somewhat cryptic.” James Baldwin, who was in London at the time, famously shouted at the reporters who found him after X’s death: “You did it! It is because of you—the men that created this white supremacy—that this man is dead. You are not guilty, but you did it. … Your mills, your cities, your rape of a continent started all this.” |
| Later, Baldwin told the story this way: “There we were, at the table, all dressed up, and we’d ordered everything, and we were having a very nice time with each other. The headwaiter came, and said there was a phone call for me, and Gloria rose to take it. She was very strange when she came back—she didn’t say anything, and I began to be afraid to ask her anything. Then, nibbling at something she obviously wasn’t tasting, she said, ‘Well, I’ve got to tell you because the press is on its way over here. They’ve just killed Malcolm X.’ The British press said that I accused innocent people of this murder. What I tried to say then, and will try to repeat now, is that whatever hand pulled the trigger did not buy the bullet. That bullet was forged in the crucible of the West, that death was dictated by the most successful conspiracy in the history of the world, and its name is white supremacy.” “I was certainly saddened by the shocking and tragic assassination of your husband,” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote to Betty Shabazz, X’s wife, after the murder. “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem. He was an eloquent spokesman for his point of view and no one can honestly doubt that Malcolm had a great concern for the problems that we face as a race.” More than sixty years later, some details about the assassination remain unclear. But Malcolm X has endured as a cultural icon, death being, in the end, not quite enough to silence him. |
| EVERGREEN QUOTE:“You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it or who says it.”–Malcolm X |
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