Malcolm X Is Assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom
On February 21, 1965, the civil rights leader Malcolm X was gunned down in New York's Audubon Ballroom as he prepared to address his new movement.
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 21, 1965, some 400 people filled the Audubon Ballroom in New York's Washington Heights to hear Malcolm X speak. A little after 3 p.m., as the 39-year-old civil rights leader stepped toward the microphone to address his Organization of Afro-American Unity, three gunmen opened fire. Malcolm X was shot multiple times and died that afternoon at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. His pregnant wife, Betty Shabazz, and their daughters were in the front row.
Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, he had risen from a youth marked by poverty and prison to become the most electrifying orator of the Nation of Islam, the religious movement led by Elijah Muhammad. His father died when he was very young, his mother was institutionalized, and the children were scattered among foster homes. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade and was imprisoned in 1946 for burglary; behind bars he discovered the Nation of Islam, was released in 1952, and quickly rose to minister of its Harlem temple. For a decade he preached a message of Black pride and self-reliance that electrified audiences across America — and alarmed the establishment. But in 1963 he fell out with Muhammad, and in March 1964 he broke away to found Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a secular movement focused on human rights and international coalition-building.
The split was bitter. Malcolm X had been receiving death threats for months; just days before his death he told an interviewer that the Nation of Islam was trying to kill him. Three members of the Nation were convicted of the murder — Muhammad Abdul Aziz, Khalil Islam, and Thomas Hagan. Hagan confessed; Aziz and Islam maintained their innocence for decades, and in November 2021 both were exonerated after investigators uncovered evidence withheld at their trial.
The killing was one of the four great assassinations that scarred 1960s America, following John F. Kennedy and preceding Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The novelist James Baldwin, hearing the news in London, put the loss into words that are still quoted: "Whatever hand pulled the trigger did not buy the bullet."
Malcolm X's ideas outlived him. The concepts of race pride and self-determination he championed became cornerstones of the Black Power movement, and his posthumously published autobiography — dictated to writer Alex Haley — introduced millions of readers to his journey and his thought. Today the Audubon Ballroom building is a memorial and educational center in his name, and his grave in Westchester County draws visitors from around the world.
Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
