Betty Shabazz and Malcolm X
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Betty Shabazz (born Betty Dean Sanders;[2] May 28, 1934/1936[a] – June 23, 1997), also known as Betty X, was an American educator and civil rights advocate. She was married to Malcolm X.
Shabazz grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where her foster parents largely sheltered her from racism. She attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she had her first encounters with racism. Unhappy with the situation in Alabama, she moved to New York City, where she became a nurse. It was there that she met Malcolm X and, in 1956, joined the Nation of Islam. The couple married in 1958.
Along with her husband, Shabazz left the Nation of Islam in 1964. She witnessed his assassination the following year. Left with the responsibility of raising six daughters as a widow, Shabazz pursued higher education, and went to work at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York.
Following the 1995 arrest of her daughter, Qubilah, for allegedly conspiring to murder Louis Farrakhan, Shabazz took in her ten-year-old grandson Malcolm. In 1997, he set fire to her apartment. Shabazz suffered severe burns and died three weeks later as a result of her injuries.
Betty Dean Sanders was born on May 28, 1934 or 1936,[a] to Ollie Mae Sanders and Shelman Sandlin. Sandlin was 21 years old and Ollie Mae Sanders was a teenager; the couple were unmarried. Throughout her life, Betty Sanders maintained that she had been born in Detroit but early records — such as her high-school and college transcripts — show Pinehurst, Georgia, as her place of birth. Authorities in Georgia and Michigan have been unable to locate her birth certificate.[3]
By most accounts, Ollie Mae Sanders abused her daughter, whom she was raising in Detroit. When Betty was about 11 years old, she was taken in by Lorenzo and Helen Malloy, a prominent businessman and his wife. Helen Malloy was a founding member of the Housewives League of Detroit, a group of African-American women who organized campaigns to support black-owned businesses and boycott stores that refused to hire black employees. She was also a member of the National Council of Negro Women and the NAACP. The Malloys were both active members of their local Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.[4]
Despite their lessons on black self-reliance, the Malloys never spoke with Sanders about racism.[5] Looking back in 1995, Shabazz wrote: "Race relations were not discussed and it was hoped that by denying the existence of race problems, the problems would go away. Anyone who openly discussed race relations was quickly viewed as a 'troublemaker.'"[6] Still, two race riots during her childhood—in 1942 when the Sojourner Truth housing project was desegregated, and one the following year on Belle Isle—made up what Shabazz later called the "psychological background for my formative years".[7][8]
After she graduated from high school, Sanders left her foster parents' home in Detroit to study at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), a historically black college in Alabama that was Lorenzo Malloy's alma mater. She intended to earn a degree in education and become a teacher.[9] When she left Detroit to go to Alabama, her foster mother stood at the train station crying. Shabazz later recalled that Malloy was trying to mumble something, but the words would not come out. By the time she arrived in Alabama, she felt she knew what her foster mother was saying. "The minute I got off that train, I knew what she was trying to say. She was trying to tell me in ten words or less about racism."[10]
Nothing had prepared Sanders for Southern racism. So long as she stayed on campus, she could avoid interacting with white people, but weekend trips into Montgomery, the nearest city, would try her patience. Black students had to wait until every white person in a store had been helped before the staff would serve them — if they received any service at all. When she complained to the Malloys, they refused to discuss the issue; in a 1989 interview, Shabazz summarized their attitude as "if you're just quiet it will go away."[11]
Sanders' studies suffered as a result of her growing frustration. She decided to change her field of study from education to nursing. The dean of nursing, Lillian Holland Harvey, encouraged Sanders to consider studying in a Tuskegee-affiliated program at the Brooklyn State College School of Nursing in New York City. Against her foster parents' wishes, Sanders left Alabama for New York in 1953.[12]
In New York, Sanders encountered a different form of racism. At Montefiore Hospital, where she performed her clinical training, black nurses were given worse assignments than white nurses. White patients sometimes were abusive toward black nurses. While the racial climate in New York was better than the situation in Alabama, Sanders frequently wondered whether she had merely exchanged Jim Crow racism for a more genteel prejudice.[13]
During her second year of nursing school, Sanders was invited by an older nurse's aide to a Friday night dinner party at the Nation of Islam temple in Harlem. "The food was delicious", Shabazz recalled in 1992, "I'd never tasted food like that."[14] After dinner, the woman asked Sanders to come to the Muslims' lecture. Sanders agreed. After the speech, the nurse's aide invited Sanders to join the Nation of Islam; Sanders politely declined.[14] When the woman asked her why she chose not to join the Nation of Islam after visiting, Sanders replied that she did not know she had been brought there to join. "Besides, my mother would kill me, and additionally I don't even understand the philosophy."[10] The Malloys were Methodists, and when she was 13, Sanders had decided she would remain a Methodist for the rest of her life.[10]
The nurse's aide told Sanders about her minister, who was not at the temple that night: "Just wait until you hear my minister talk. He's very disciplined, he's good looking, and all the sisters want him."[14] Sanders enjoyed the food so much, she agreed to come back and meet the woman's minister. At the second dinner, the nurse's aide told her the minister was present and Sanders thought to herself, "Big deal."[15]
In 1992, she recalled how her demeanor changed when she caught a glimpse of Malcolm X:
Then, I looked over and saw this man on the extreme right aisle sort of galloping to the podium. He was tall, he was thin, and the way he was galloping it looked as though he was going someplace much more important than the podium. ... He got to the podium—and I sat up straight. I was impressed with him.[16]
Sanders met Malcolm X again at a dinner party. The two had a long conversation about Sanders's life: her childhood in Detroit, the racial hostility she had encountered in Alabama, and her studies in New York. He spoke to her about the condition of African Americans and the causes of racism. Sanders began to see things from a different perspective.[17] "I really had a lot of pent-up anxiety about my experience in the South," Shabazz recalled in a 1990 interview, "and Malcolm reassured me that it was understandable how I felt."[18]
Soon Sanders was attending all of Malcolm X's lectures at Temple Number Seven in Harlem. He always sought her out afterwards, and he would ask her a lot of questions.[19] Sanders was impressed with Malcolm X's leadership and work ethic. She felt he was selfless when it came to helping others, but he had no one to lean on when he needed help. She thought maybe she could be that person.[10] He also began to pressure her to join the Nation of Islam. In mid-1956, Sanders converted. Like many members of the Nation of Islam, she changed her surname to "X", which represented the family name of her African ancestors whom she could never have known.[19]
Betty X and Malcolm X did not have a conventional courtship. One-on-one dates were contrary to the teachings of the Nation of Islam. Instead, the couple shared their "dates" with dozens of other members. Malcolm X frequently took groups to visit New York's museums and libraries, and he always invited Betty X.[16]
Although they had never discussed the subject, Betty X suspected that Malcolm X was interested in marriage. One day he called and asked her to marry him, and they were married on January 14, 1958, in Lansing, Michigan.[20][21] By coincidence, Betty X became a licensed practical nurse (LPN) on the same day.[22]
At first, their relationship followed the Nation of Islam's strictures concerning marriage; Malcolm X set the rules and Betty X obediently followed them.[23] In 1969, Shabazz wrote that "his indoctrination was so thorough, even to me, that it has become a pattern for our [family's] lives."[24] Over time, the family dynamic changed, as Malcolm X made small concessions to Betty X's demands for more independence.[25] In 1969, Shabazz recalled:
We would have little family talks. They began at first with Malcolm telling me what he expected of a wife. But the first time I told him what I expected of him as a husband it came as a shock. After dinner one night he said, "Boy, Betty, something you said hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I've been going along having our little workshops with me doing all the talking and you doing all the listening." He concluded our marriage should be a mutual exchange.[26]
The couple had six daughters. Their names were Attallah, born in 1958 and named after Attila the Hun;[b] Qubilah, born in 1960 and named after Kublai Khan; Ilyasah, born in 1962 and named after Elijah Muhammad; Gamilah Lumumba, born in 1964 and named after Patrice Lumumba; and twins, Malikah and Malaak, born in 1965 after their father's assassination and named for him.[30]
On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam.[31] He and Betty X, now known as Betty Shabazz, became Sunni Muslims.[32][33]
On February 21, 1965, in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X began to speak to a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity when a disturbance broke out in the crowd of 400.[34] As Malcolm X and his bodyguards moved to quiet the disturbance, a man rushed forward and shot Malcolm in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun.[35] Two other men charged the stage and fired handguns, hitting Malcolm X 16 times.[36]
Shabazz was in the audience near the stage with her daughters. When she heard the gunfire, she grabbed the children and pushed them to the floor beneath the bench, where she shielded them with her body. When the shooting stopped, Shabazz ran toward her husband and tried to perform CPR. Police officers and Malcolm X's associates used a stretcher to carry him up the block to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.[37]
Angry onlookers caught and beat one of the assassins, who was arrested on the scene.[38][39] Eyewitnesses identified two more suspects. All three men, who were members of the Nation of Islam, were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.[40]
Shabazz had difficulty sleeping for weeks after Malcolm X's assassination. She suffered from nightmares in which she relived the death of her husband. She also worried about how she would support herself and her family. The publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X helped, because Shabazz received half of the royalties.[41] (Alex Haley, who assisted Malcolm X in writing the book, got the other half. After the publication of his best-seller Roots, Haley signed over his portion of the royalties to Shabazz.[42][43])
Actor and activist Ruby Dee and Juanita Poitier (married to Sidney Poitier until 1965) established the Committee of Concerned Mothers to raise funds to buy a house and pay educational expenses for the Shabazz family. The Committee held a series of benefit concerts at which they raised $17,000.[44][45] They bought a large two-family home in Mount Vernon, New York, from Congressmember Bella Abzug.[46][47]
Looking back, Shabazz said she initially made an "unrealistic decision" to isolate herself because of the injustice of her husband's assassination. She realized, however, that giving up because of her husband's death would not help the world. "It is impossible to create an environment for children to grow in and develop in isolation. It is imperative that one mix in society on some level and at some time."[10]
In late March 1965, Shabazz made the pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj), as her husband had the year before.[48] Recalling the experience in 1992, Shabazz wrote:
I really don't know where I'd be today if I had not gone to Mecca to make Hajj shortly after Malcolm was assassinated. ... That is what helped put me back on track. ... Going to Mecca, making Hajj, was very good for me because it made me think of all the people in the world who loved me and were for me, who prayed that I would get my life back together. I stopped focusing on the people who were trying to tear me and my family apart.[49]
Shabazz returned from Mecca with a new name that a fellow pilgrim had bestowed upon her, Bahiyah (meaning "beautiful and radiant").[50]
Raising six children by herself exhausted Shabazz. Providing for them was difficult as well. Shabazz's share of the royalties from The Autobiography of Malcolm X was equivalent to an annual salary. In 1966, she sold the movie rights to the Autobiography to film-maker Marvin Worth. She began to authorize the publication of Malcolm X's speeches, which provided another source of income.[51]
When her daughters were enrolled in day care, Shabazz became an active member of the day care center's parents organization, where she became very fond of the organization and where she would later start a campaign to run the organization. In time, she became the parents' representative on the school board. Several years later, she became president of the Westchester Day Care Council.[52]
Shabazz began to accept speaking engagements at colleges and universities. She often spoke about the black nationalist philosophy of Malcolm X, but she also spoke about her role as a wife and mother.[53] Shabazz felt that some of the images of her husband projected by the media were misrepresentations. "They attempted to promote him as a violent person, a hater of whites," she explained. "He was a sensitive man, a very understanding person and yes, he disliked the behavior of some whites ... He had a reality-based agenda."[10]
As her daughters grew older, Shabazz sent them to private schools and summer camps. They joined Jack and Jill, a social club for the children of well-off African Americans.[54]
In late 1969, Shabazz enrolled at Jersey City State College (now New Jersey City University) to complete the degree in education she left behind when she became a nurse. She completed her undergraduate studies in one year, and decided to earn a master's degree in health administration. In 1972, Shabazz enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to pursue an Ed.D. in higher education administration and curriculum development. For the next three years, she drove from Mount Vernon to Amherst, Massachusetts, every Monday morning, and returned home Wednesday night. In July 1975, she defended her dissertation and earned her doctorate.[55]
Shabazz joined the New York Alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta in April 1974.[56]
In January 1976, Shabazz became associate professor of health sciences with a concentration in nursing at New York's Medgar Evers College. The student body at Medgar Evers was 90 percent black and predominantly working-class, with an average age of 26. Black women made up most of the faculty, and 75 percent of the students were female, two-thirds of them mothers. These were all qualities that made Medgar Evers College attractive to Shabazz.[57]
By 1980, Shabazz was overseeing the health sciences department, and the college president decided she could be more effective in a purely administrative position than she was in the classroom. She was promoted to Director of Institutional Advancement. In her new position, she became a booster and fund-raiser for the college. A year later, she was given tenure. In 1984, Shabazz was given a new title, Director of Institutional Advancement and Public Affairs; she held that position at the college until her death.[58]
During the 1970s and 1980s, Shabazz continued her volunteer activities. In 1975, President Ford invited her to serve on the American Revolution Bicentennial Council. Shabazz served on an advisory committee on family planning for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 1984, she hosted the New York convention of the National Council of Negro Women. Shabazz became active in the NAACP and the National Urban League[59] and was a member of The Links.[60]: 102 When Nelson and Winnie Mandela visited Harlem during 1990, Shabazz was asked to introduce Winnie Mandela.[61]
Shabazz befriended Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers, and Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. They had the common experience of losing their activist husbands at a young age and raising their children as single mothers. The press came to refer to the three, who made numerous joint public appearances, as the "Movement widows". Evers-Williams and King were frequent guests at Medgar Evers College, and Shabazz occasionally visited the King Center in Atlanta.[62] Writing about Shabazz, Evers-Williams described her as a "free spirit, in the best sense of the word. When she laughed, she had this beauty; when she smiled, it lit up the whole room."[63]
For many years, Shabazz harbored resentment toward the Nation of Islam—and Louis Farrakhan in particular—for what she felt was their role in the assassination of her husband.[64] Farrakhan seemed to boast of the assassination in a 1993 speech:
Was Malcolm your traitor or ours? And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours? A nation has to be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats.[65][66]
In a 1994 interview, Gabe Pressman asked Shabazz whether Farrakhan "had anything to do" with Malcolm X's death. She replied: "Of course, yes. Nobody kept it a secret. It was a badge of honor. Everybody talked about it, yes."[67] Farrakhan denied the allegations, stating "I never had anything to do with Malcolm's death", although he said he had "created an atmosphere that allowed Malcolm to be assassinated."[67]
In January 1995, Qubilah Shabazz was charged with trying to hire a hit man to kill Farrakhan in retaliation for the murder of her father.[68] Farrakhan surprised the Shabazz family when he defended Qubilah, saying he did not think she was guilty and that he hoped she would not be convicted.[69] That May, Betty Shabazz and Farrakhan shook hands on the stage of the Apollo Theater during a public event intended to raise money for Qubilah's legal defense.[70] Some heralded the evening as a reconciliation between the two, but others thought Shabazz was doing whatever she had to in order to protect her daughter. Regardless, nearly $250,000 was raised that evening. In the aftermath, Shabazz maintained a cool relationship with Farrakhan, although she agreed to speak at his Million Man March that October.[71]
Qubilah accepted a plea agreement with respect to the charges, in which she maintained her innocence but accepted responsibility for her actions.[70] Under the terms of the agreement, she was required to undergo psychological counseling and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse for a two-year period in order to avoid a prison sentence.[72] For the duration of her treatment, Qubilah's ten-year-old son, Malcolm, was sent to live with Shabazz at her apartment in Yonkers, New York.[73]
On June 1, 1997, her 12-year-old grandson Malcolm set a fire in Shabazz's apartment. Shabazz suffered burns over 80 percent of her body, and remained in intensive care for three weeks, at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.[73][74] She underwent five skin-replacement operations as doctors struggled to replace damaged skin and save her life. Shabazz died of her injuries on June 23, 1997.[75] Malcolm Shabazz was sentenced to 18 months in juvenile detention for manslaughter and arson.[76][77]
More than 2,000 mourners attended a memorial service for Shabazz, at New York's Riverside Church. Many prominent leaders were present, including Coretta Scott King and Myrlie Evers-Williams, poet Maya Angelou, actor-activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, New York Governor George Pataki, and four New York City mayors—Abraham Beame, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani. U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman delivered a tribute from President Bill Clinton.[78] In a statement released after Shabazz's death, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said, "She never stopped giving and she never became cynical. She leaves today the legacy of one who epitomized hope and healing."[79]
Shabazz's funeral service was held at the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City. Her public viewing was at the Unity Funeral Home in Harlem, the same place where Malcolm X's viewing had taken place 32 years earlier. Shabazz was buried next to her husband, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.[80]
In late 1997, the Community Healthcare Network renamed one of its Brooklyn, New York, clinics the Dr. Betty Shabazz Health Center, in honor of Shabazz.[81][82][c] The Betty Shabazz International Charter School was founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1998 and named in her honor.[84] In 2005, Columbia University announced the opening of the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. The memorial is located in the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated.[85] In March 2012, New York City co-named Broadway at the corner of West 165th Street, the corner in front of the Audubon Ballroom, Betty Shabazz Way.[86][87]
Shabazz was the subject of the 2013 television movie Betty & Coretta, in which she was played by Mary J. Blige.[88] Angela Bassett portrayed her in the 1992 film Malcolm X[89] and in a less prominent role in the 1995 film Panther.[90] Yolanda King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, played Shabazz in the 1981 television movie Death of a Prophet,[91] and Shabazz was portrayed by Victoria Dillard in the 2001 film Ali.[92] Joaquina Kalukango portrays her in the 2020 film One Night in Miami..., alongside Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X.[93] Shabazz was portrayed by Grace Porter in the second season of the 2019 TV series Godfather of Harlem.[94]
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See the article in its original context from June 24, 1997,
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Betty Shabazz, who saw her husband, Malcolm X, assassinated 32 years ago and sought to preserve his memory and teachings in a life that became a symbol of perseverance to black America, died yesterday at a Bronx hospital, three weeks after suffering extensive burns in a fire apparently set by her troubled 12-year-old grandson. She was 61.
Dr. Shabazz had suffered third-degree burns over 80 percent of her body in the fire at her Yonkers apartment on June 1 and had undergone five operations at Jacobi Medical Center to replace burned tissue. Doctors had said her chances of survival were extremely low.
After weeks of a fight for life that seemed to defy the medical experts and to mirror her own decades of struggle, the death of Dr. Shabazz was met with an outpouring of grief and solemn statements by her family, political and civil rights leaders, colleagues and friends, and hundreds of ordinary people whose lives she had touched. $(Page D20.$)
''Our mother made a transition -- I'd like to think of it as that,'' Attallah Shabazz said at the hospital shortly after the announcement of death at 2:46 P.M. Ms. Shabazz is the eldest of the six daughters Dr. Shabazz raised while earning a doctorate and making a career for herself as a college official and a voice in the civil rights movement.
''Her living life was very strong, and her fight here showed that endurance,'' Ms. Shabazz said, standing with her sisters. ''We are a family of daughters who got to learn a lot more about our mother, as have a lot of people around the globe.''
As many of the dignitaries and friends who had visited the hospital in recent weeks noted yesterday, the death of Dr. Shabazz was the latest tragedy in an extraordinary family that is still coping with a singular historical moment.
On Feb. 21, 1965, Dr. Shabazz, pregnant with twins, sat with her four small daughters in the Audubon Ballroom on 165th Street in Washington Heights as the tall, fiery orator who had been her husband for seven years prepared to address a crowd of 400 people. She was worried.
Malcolm X had undergone a conversion and renounced the black nationalist, virulently anti-white views of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and was espousing moderate themes of black self-determination, even possible coalition with white people. Louis Farrakhan, a rising young star of the Nation of Islam, had vilified Malcolm X as a traitor.
His wife knew that he had many enemies. There had been death threats. A week earlier, the family's house in Elmhurst, Queens, had been firebombed in the night. But Malcolm X seemed undaunted as he stepped behind a flimsy lectern, intoned the Muslim salutation ''Salaam Aleikum,'' and began to speak.
Suddenly, the killers closed in. Gunfire roared, and the terrible images were burned into her memory: Malcolm X's body, raked with bullets, falling at the front, wild confusion, her arms reaching out to cover her children on the floor; her own voice, like a stranger's, shouting: ''They're killing my husband!''
She was only 28, with little money, a big family and half an education. And if she had been a quiet helpmate to the tumultuous Malcolm X, she could hardly have foreseen the hardships of carrying on for one whose complex legacy would be claimed by radicals and conservatives, whose life would be explored in film, opera, books and essays, whose angry words would be celebrated by rap artists, and whose ''X'' would be emblazoned on caps and T-shirts across America.
''I'm private,'' Dr. Shabazz, who never remarried, said after Spike Lee's 1992 film ''Malcolm X'' created a new surge of interest in her husband. ''But there were some public things I had to do, because of his commitment to the cause. I loved him, and he loved the people.''
She survived at first on money from her husband's estate, on royalties from ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X,'' which was told to Alex Haley and published in 1965, and on fees for consulting work for Malcolm X College in Chicago and other institutions. Dr. Shabazz, who had attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and nursing school in New York, returned to classes at Brooklyn State Hospital and earned certification as a registered nurse.
Later, she attended Jersey State College and earned a bachelor's degree in public health education and a master's degree in early childhood education. In 1975, after a decade of juggling the obligations of motherhood, her studies, consulting work and public appearances, she received a doctorate in education administration from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
A year later, Dr. Shabazz joined Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, a part of the City University, becoming director of communications and public relations, a position she held for many years. In recent years, she was director of institutional advancement, raising money for scholarships and books.
Meanwhile, she raised six daughters -- Attallah, Qubilah, Ilyasah, Gamilah and the twins Malikah and Malaak -- in Queens and later in Mount Vernon, N.Y., teaching them about their father by emulating his self-discipline. ''I taught them about him by myself being disciplined and strict,'' she said in a 1993 interview. ''My children think my persona is me, when actually it is their father's.''
The girls attended good schools. Qubilah graduated from the United Nations School in Manhattan, attended Princeton University and had a son, Malcolm Shabazz. The others include a playwright, a professional speaker and a singer.
Dr. Shabazz also began an irregular but busy speaking schedule, at high school and college commencements, at conferences on black history and race relations, on television and at the openings of plays, films and other events based on Malcolm X. She usually spoke of health and education for disadvantaged children, but also of Malcolm X and the causes for which he lived and died.
Alhough Malcolm X was enigmatic and controversial -- he preached black self-determination with the caveat ''by any means necessary'' -- Dr. Shabazz always struck positive themes in her recollections.
''Malcolm's agenda was human rights and self-determination,'' she said in a 1992 interview with The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. ''Free people have a right to self-determination, self-defense. Now, a lot of people say, 'Self-defense? Oh, my God, that's violence.' If people think 'by any means necessary' means violence, what that says is that that individual is violent and hostile. But not my husband.''
The future wife of Malcolm X was born Betty Sanders in Detroit on May 28, 1936. She was adopted and raised by an upper-middle-class Methodist family, who sent her to Tuskegee. But she was determined to study nursing in New York, and met Malcolm X in 1956 at Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, one of the Nation of Islam's main temples.
She was 20 and he was the 30-year-old minister in charge, a charismatic orator with stunning confidence. ''He was just an awesome kind of guy,'' she recalled. ''He was disciplined. He knew what he was going to do, and if he said he was going to do it, he did it. And he had a certain kind of worldly maturity that women my age at the time just dreamed about.''
Only later did she learn that he had been born Malcolm Little, the son of a Nebraska preacher, and had grown up in Michigan, moved to Boston, become a thief and gone to prison. There, he had undergone a conversion to Islam and, after emerging from jail in 1952, became a sonlike aide to the Nation of Islam's leader, Elijah Muhammad.
In 1958, after a two-year relationship with Miss Sanders in which, by his own account, ''there had never been one personal word spoken between us,'' Malcolm X proposed marriage in a telephone call from Detroit. She accepted, convinced, as she later put it, of his greatness and of the importance of his work. They settled into a home in Queens and began raising a family.
By the early 1960's, many white Americans, and many blacks who had begun to put their hopes in integration and their faith in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., saw Malcolm X as a menacing figure with a message of hate. He preached a militant black nationalism that branded whites as ''devils'' and dismissed Dr. King as an ''ignorant Negro preacher.''
In 1964, however, Malcolm X broke with Mr. Muhammad and was in turn denounced by Mr. Farrakhan, who succeeded him at Mosque No. 7 and at the right hand of Mr. Muhammad. Malcolm X went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, became a Sunni Muslim and chose a new name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, signifying rebirth. His wife became Betty Shabazz.
Returning home, he formed his own Muslim group and began preaching a message of black self-determination that allowed for some cooperation with whites of good will. While the ferocious images that had frightened many were softened in his last year, Malcolm X was constantly being vilified in the pages of ''Muhammad Speaks,'' the Black Muslim newspaper, and Mr. Farrakhan had said he was ''worthy of death.''
After Malcolm X's assassination, suspicion swirled around the Nation of Islam, and three Black Muslim zealots were eventually convicted of the killing. But for years afterward, speculation persisted that Mr. Farrakhan was somehow involved.
Throughout those years, the suspicions fed the tensions between Mr. Farrakhan and Dr. Shabazz's family. In a 1994 television interview, Dr. Shabazz strongly intimated that Mr. Farrakhan had been involved in the assassination. Mr. Farrakhan denied it, as he had many times.
In a bizarre twist to the feud, Dr. Shabazz's daughter, Qubilah, was charged in Minneapolis in 1995 with plotting to kill Mr. Farrakhan because she believed that he had had a role in her father's death and was a threat to her mother. She was said to have paid an old friend, who turned out to be a government informer, to carry out the plot.
After Ms. Shabazz's arrest, Dr. Shabazz and Mr. Farrakhan made a public reconciliation.
The indictment was dismissed last month under an agreement that required her to undergo two years of psychiatric and chemical dependency treatment, partly in Texas. Her son, Malcolm, 12, apparently angry over his mother's absence and his long stay with his grandmother, was said to have set the gasoline fire that fatally burned Dr. Shabazz.
Over the years, Dr. Shabazz was a frequent speaker at women's conferences as well as civil rights and education gatherings. She appeared at tributes, plays and other cultural events tied to her husband's name, including a 1986 opera called ''X.''
Her closest friends included Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. King, and Myrlie Evers-Williams, the chairwoman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the widow of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader slain in 1963.
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Shabazz, Betty
Betty Shabazz (b. Betty Dean Sanders, May 28, 1934, Pinehurst, Georgia – d. June 23, 1997, New York City, New York), also known as Betty X, was an American educator and civil rights advocate. She was married to Malcolm X.
Shabazz was born in Pinehurst, Georgia, and grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where her foster parents largely sheltered her from racism. She attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she had her first encounters with racism. Unhappy with the situation in Alabama, she moved to New York City, where she became a nurse. It was there that she met Malcolm X and, in 1956, joined the Nation of Islam. The couple married in 1958.
Along with her husband, Shabazz left the Nation of Islam in 1964. She witnessed his assassination the following year. Left with the responsibility of raising six daughters as a widow, Shabazz pursued higher education, and went to work at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York.
Following the 1995 arrest of her daughter Qubilah for allegedly conspiring to murder Louis Farrakhan, Shabazz took in her ten-year-old grandson Malcolm. In 1997, her grandson, Malcolm, set fire to her apartment. Shabazz suffered severe burns and died three weeks later as a result of her injuries.
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Betty Shabazz (b. Betty Dean Sanders, May 28, 1934, Pinehurst, Georgia – d. June 23, 1997, New York City, New York), also known as Betty X, was an American educator and civil rights advocate. She was married to Malcolm X.
Shabazz was born in Pinehurst, Georgia, and grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where her foster parents largely sheltered her from racism. She attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she had her first encounters with racism. Unhappy with the situation in Alabama, she moved to New York City, where she became a nurse. It was there that she met Malcolm X and, in 1956, joined the Nation of Islam. The couple married in 1958.
Along with her husband, Shabazz left the Nation of Islam in 1964. She witnessed his assassination the following year. Left with the responsibility of raising six daughters as a widow, Shabazz pursued higher education, and went to work at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York.
Following the 1995 arrest of her daughter Qubilah for allegedly conspiring to murder Louis Farrakhan, Shabazz took in her ten-year-old grandson Malcolm. In 1997, her grandson, Malcolm, set fire to her apartment. Shabazz suffered severe burns and died three weeks later as a result of her injuries.
