47 Fun Facts About Malcolm X

What was Malcolm X's birth surname?

Little. When his parents bought a house in a white part of Lansing, the Littles were sued for eviction under a deed clause that barred its sale to non-white buyers.

What did the 'X' in Malcolm X stand for?

The African family name he could never know. Nation of Islam members dropped the surnames that slaveholders had given their families, and kept the X until a true name was revealed to them.

In which city was Malcolm X born in 1925?

Omaha, Nebraska. He was still a baby when Klan threats over his father's organising drove the family out, first to Milwaukee and then to Lansing, Michigan.

Malcolm's parents were admirers and local organisers for which Pan-African leader?

Marcus Garvey. His father Earl led the local chapter of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association with his mother Louise as its secretary, and that work drew the threats that kept the family moving.

Police ruled the 1931 death of Malcolm's father an accident involving which vehicle?

A streetcar. Earl was found on the tracks, but his mother believed that white supremacists who had threatened him had murdered him.

What career ambition did a white teacher tell the young Malcolm was 'no realistic goal' for him?

Practising law. The teacher suggested carpentry instead, although Malcolm had some of the best grades in his class, and he lost interest in school soon afterwards.

Which street nickname did the red-haired Malcolm go by as a young hustler in Harlem?

Detroit Red. The red was the tinge of his hair, but the Detroit was borrowed: he had grown up in and around Lansing, Michigan's much smaller state capital.

Which future comedian washed dishes at Jimmy's Chicken Shack in Harlem while Malcolm worked there?

Redd Foxx. Malcolm remembered him keeping the kitchen crew in stitches; born John Sanford, he later played TV's Fred Sanford, a name he took from his own brother.

How did Malcolm avoid being drafted for World War II in 1943?

He feigned mental disturbance. Malcolm told the army psychiatrist he was eager to organise Black soldiers and steal guns, and was classified 4-F, unfit to serve.

Police arrested Malcolm in Boston in 1946 when he went back to a shop to collect which stolen item?

A watch. It came from a string of burglaries of wealthy Boston homes; he was sentenced to eight to ten years and was not paroled until 1952.

What nickname did Malcolm's hostility to Christianity earn him in prison?

Satan. In his first prison he would pace his cell for hours cursing God and the Bible aloud, and the other inmates on the block gave him the name.

What two things did his brother Reginald tell Malcolm to give up in 1948 to 'get out of prison'?

Pork and cigarettes. Malcolm gave up both almost at once, before he knew why: they were rules of the Nation of Islam, which several of his brothers and sisters had already joined.

A 1950 prison letter put Malcolm on the FBI's radar because in it he claimed to have always been what?

A communist. The FBI began watching him in 1953 on that suspicion, but its reports soon turned from his politics to his rapid rise in the Nation of Islam.

Who was the leader of the Nation of Islam whom Malcolm X served as spokesman from 1952 to 1964?

Elijah Muhammad. The two began writing to each other while Malcolm was still in prison; years later Malcolm was shaken to learn of the leader's affairs with his young secretaries.

In February 1965 Malcolm X spoke in which Alabama city, telling Coretta Scott King he had come to help her jailed husband?

Selma. He told her he had not come to make Dr. King's job harder: if white people saw the alternative, they might be readier to listen to him. Malcolm was killed less than three weeks later.

Which book did Malcolm copy out by hand, page by page, to educate himself in prison?

A dictionary. He copied it page by page, reading each one back aloud, then joined the prison's debating classes to try his new words on an audience.

How did Malcolm X propose to Betty Sanders in January 1958?

During a telephone call from Detroit. He rang her from a pay phone at a gas station, on a drive to see his brother, and they were married two days later.

Betty Sanders was training for which profession in New York when she met Malcolm X?

Nursing. She had left the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she first met open racism, for New York, and met Malcolm at a Nation of Islam lecture in Harlem.

What was the 1959 New York TV broadcast about the Nation of Islam featuring Malcolm X titled?

The Hate That Hate Produced. Mike Wallace's five-part series took a hostile line on the Nation, yet in the weeks after it aired, attendance at its meetings and its membership both jumped.

Which foreign leader, who moved his UN delegation into Harlem's Hotel Theresa in 1960, met Malcolm X there?

Fidel Castro. After a row with his midtown hotel, the Cuban leader took his delegation uptown, and Malcolm was among the Harlem figures who arranged the stay and welcomed him.

What did Malcolm X call the August 1963 civil rights march at the Lincoln Memorial?

'The farce on Washington'. He mocked it as a demonstration 'run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn't like us when he was alive'.

What did Muhammad Ali do when Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam?

Ended their friendship. Ali stayed loyal to the Nation and turned his back on Malcolm; long afterwards he called it one of the mistakes he regretted most in his life.

Which protégé of Malcolm X wrote in December 1964 that such a man was 'worthy of death'?

Louis Farrakhan. Malcolm had mentored him as a young minister; in 2000 Farrakhan said on 60 Minutes that his rhetoric may have helped bring about the killing, while denying he ordered it.

The Nation of Islam silenced Malcolm X for 90 days after his remark about which event?

The assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nine days after it, he called the killing a case of 'chickens coming home to roost', defying the Nation's order that its ministers say nothing.

After leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm X embraced which branch of the faith?

Sunni Islam. He announced the break in March 1964; Sunni Muslims in New York urged him to study their faith, and within weeks he was on the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Which speech did Malcolm X give in April 1964, weeks after leaving the Nation of Islam?

'The Ballot or the Bullet'. The Nation of Islam had kept its members out of politics; weeks after leaving it, he was urging Black Americans to register and vote shrewdly, and to be ready to fight if that failed.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. met only once, by chance, inside which building?

The U.S. Capitol. Both had come to see the Senate debate the civil rights bill in March 1964; they shook hands in a hallway, long enough for photographers, and never met again.

Which magazine surprised Malcolm X by printing his interview answers word for word, as it had promised?

Playboy. Malcolm kept telling the interviewer the magazine would never print what he said; it did, and the piece gave a publisher the idea for a book of his life story.

What did his 1964 Hajj lead Malcolm X to conclude?

Islam could overcome racial problems. In a letter from Mecca he described praying and eating beside pilgrims of all colours, some with blue eyes and blond hair, and said he would have to rearrange much of his thinking.

Students in which African country named Malcolm X 'Omowale', meaning 'the son who has come home'?

Nigeria. Muslim students at the University of Ibadan gave him the Yoruba name in 1964, after a speech urging Africa's new nations to take Black Americans' case to the United Nations.

Which American writer, then living in Ghana, helped plan Malcolm X's 1964 visit to Accra?

Maya Angelou. She was one of the Black American expatriates who filled his days in Ghana, and she came home to work for his new organisation shortly before he was killed.

Malcolm X's December 1964 debate on 'extremism in the defense of liberty' was held at which institution?

The Oxford Union. The motion was Barry Goldwater's own line on extremism; Malcolm spoke in its favour, quoting Patrick Henry and Hamlet, and left to a long ovation.

Nine days before his death, Malcolm X visited Smethwick, a town notorious for a racist election slogan, in which country?

England. He walked Marshall Street, where the council had agreed to buy up houses to keep them for white families, and said he had heard the town's minorities were being treated as Jews were under Hitler.

Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965 while preparing to speak at which Manhattan venue?

The Audubon Ballroom. Columbia University began tearing it down in 1992 for a research centre; after protests part of it was saved, and in 2005 it opened as a memorial centre to Malcolm and Betty Shabazz.

Which weapon did the first of Malcolm X's assassins fire?

A sawed-off shotgun. A man in the audience had just jumped up shouting about a hand in his pocket; as the bodyguards turned to the row, the gunman rushed the stage, and two more followed with handguns.

What happened in 2021 to two of the three men imprisoned for murdering Malcolm X?

Their convictions were vacated. A review found the FBI and New York police had withheld evidence; Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam had each spent about 20 years in prison, and Islam had died in 2009.

Which actor and activist delivered the eulogy calling Malcolm X 'our shining black prince'?

Ossie Davis. Twenty-seven years later he read the same eulogy again, as the voice over the closing scenes of Spike Lee's film about Malcolm.

Which writer collaborated with Malcolm X on his autobiography, published months after his death?

Alex Haley. Their late-night sessions in his Greenwich Village studio got off, he wrote, 'to a very poor start': Malcolm arrived wary of him, and only slowly began to talk about his own life.

Fans often read which X-Men character as a stand-in for Malcolm X, a comparison writer Chris Claremont has called 'totally valid'?

Magneto. Claremont said his own model was Israel's Menachem Begin, who went from wanted militant to Nobel Peace Prize winner; the Malcolm X and Martin Luther King echoes came later and, he said, 'just fit'.

Who played Malcolm X in Spike Lee's 1992 film?

Denzel Washington. He had played Malcolm on stage a decade earlier. When the film's money ran out in editing, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and Prince were among the donors who let Spike Lee finish it.

Which California city made Malcolm X's birthday a citywide holiday in 1979?

Berkeley. Its schools, libraries and city offices have closed for Malcolm X Day ever since; the first known celebration of the day, eight years earlier in Washington, D.C., was not a public holiday.

Which Harlem thoroughfare did Mayor Ed Koch rename Malcolm X Boulevard in 1987?

Lenox Avenue. The Harlem temple he led for a decade stood at its corner with 116th Street; the 1987 proclamation added his name beside the old one rather than replacing it.

Anthony Davis's 'X', a 1986 work about Malcolm X revived in New York in 2023, is what kind of work?

An opera. X opened at New York City Opera in 1986 and waited 37 years to reach the Metropolitan Opera, by which time Davis had won a Pulitzer Prize for another opera, The Central Park Five.

Which 2020 film imagines Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown talking in a motel room after a title fight?

One Night in Miami. Regina King's film is built on a real evening in February 1964, after Ali, then Cassius Clay, took the heavyweight title; within a year both Cooke and Malcolm had been shot dead.

Which secular Pan-African group did Malcolm X found after leaving the Nation of Islam?

The Organization of Afro-American Unity. He modelled it, name and all, on the Organization of African Unity, then went to that body's 1964 summit in Cairo to ask Africa's leaders to back Black Americans.

The prisoner Malcolm called 'Bimbi' was, he wrote, the first man he saw command total respect with what?

His words. John Bembry, a self-taught old burglar and the prison library's best customer, told Malcolm he had brains if he would use them, and pushed him toward the library and correspondence courses.

At his nearly all-white Michigan school, classmates elected Malcolm to which post?

Class president. He had some of the best marks in the school and said the vote surprised him more than anyone; within two years he had given up on school and left for Boston.