Malcolm X Trivia
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47 free Malcolm X trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Malcolm X trivia quiz follows Malcolm Little from Omaha and Lansing through foster homes, Harlem hustling as 'Detroit Red', and a burglary sentence in Massachusetts, to the letters from prison that led him to the Nation of Islam, twelve years as its most electrifying minister, the break with Elijah Muhammad, the pilgrimage to Mecca that changed his view of race, and the shotgun blast at the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965. The easy questions are ones most people know: what the X stood for, who he worked with, how he died. The medium ones ask about his family, his prison reading, the temples he built, his meeting with Castro, the Hinton Johnson incident and the Hajj. The hard ones dig into Redd Foxx, the FBI file, the Oxford Union debate, Smethwick, the 2021 exonerations and the Marvel villain he inspired. It suits a Black History Month unit, a civil rights class or anyone who has read the Autobiography and wants to see how much stuck. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Malcolm X's birth surname?
Little
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.
Q 02What did the 'X' in Malcolm X stand for?
The African family name he could never know
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.
Q 03In which city was Malcolm X born in 1925?
Omaha, Nebraska
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.
Q 04Malcolm's parents were admirers and local organisers for which Pan-African leader?
Marcus Garvey
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.
Q 05Police ruled the 1931 death of Malcolm's father an accident involving which vehicle?
A streetcar
A streetcar. Earl was found on the tracks, but his mother believed that white supremacists who had threatened him had murdered him.
Q 06What career ambition did a white teacher tell the young Malcolm was 'no realistic goal' for him?
Practising law
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.
Q 07Which street nickname did the red-haired Malcolm go by as a young hustler in Harlem?
Detroit Red
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.
Q 08Which future comedian washed dishes at Jimmy's Chicken Shack in Harlem while Malcolm worked there?
Redd Foxx
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.
Q 09How did Malcolm avoid being drafted for World War II in 1943?
He feigned mental disturbance
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.
Q 10Police arrested Malcolm in Boston in 1946 when he went back to a shop to collect which stolen item?
A watch
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.
Q 11What nickname did Malcolm's hostility to Christianity earn him in prison?
Satan
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.
Q 12What two things did his brother Reginald tell Malcolm to give up in 1948 to 'get out of prison'?
Pork and cigarettes
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.
Q 13A 1950 prison letter put Malcolm on the FBI's radar because in it he claimed to have always been what?
A communist
Q 21What did Malcolm X call the August 1963 civil rights march at the Lincoln Memorial?
'The farce on Washington'
'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'.
Q 22What did Muhammad Ali do when Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam?
Ended their friendship
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.
Q 23Which protégé of Malcolm X wrote in December 1964 that such a man was 'worthy of death'?
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.
Q 14Who was the leader of the Nation of Islam whom Malcolm X served as spokesman from 1952 to 1964?
Elijah Muhammad
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.
Q 15In February 1965 Malcolm X spoke in which Alabama city, telling Coretta Scott King he had come to help her jailed husband?
Selma
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.
Q 16Which book did Malcolm copy out by hand, page by page, to educate himself in prison?
A dictionary
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.
Q 17How did Malcolm X propose to Betty Sanders in January 1958?
During a telephone call from Detroit
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.
Q 18Betty Sanders was training for which profession in New York when she met Malcolm X?
Nursing
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.
Q 19What was the 1959 New York TV broadcast about the Nation of Islam featuring Malcolm X titled?
The Hate That Hate Produced
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.
Q 20Which foreign leader, who moved his UN delegation into Harlem's Hotel Theresa in 1960, met Malcolm X there?
Fidel Castro
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.
Louis Farrakhan
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.
Q 24The Nation of Islam silenced Malcolm X for 90 days after his remark about which event?
The assassination of John F. Kennedy
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.
Q 25After leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm X embraced which branch of the faith?
Sunni Islam
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.
Q 26Which speech did Malcolm X give in April 1964, weeks after leaving the Nation of Islam?
'The Ballot or the Bullet'
'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.
Q 27Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. met only once, by chance, inside which building?
The U.S. Capitol
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.
Q 28Which magazine surprised Malcolm X by printing his interview answers word for word, as it had promised?
Playboy
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.
Q 29What did his 1964 Hajj lead Malcolm X to conclude?
Islam could overcome racial problems
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.
Q 30Students in which African country named Malcolm X 'Omowale', meaning 'the son who has come home'?
Nigeria
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.