Malcolm's Life

In the years that followed, Louise deteriorated emotionally and mentally and in 1939 was committed to a mental institution in Kalamazoo, Michigan and the younger children were placed in foster homes. Malcolm had already been removed from his mother’s home and was in foster care for juvenile delinquency. He was eventually made a ward of the state and sent to a county juvenile home in Mason, Michigan. Malcolm did well in Mason and graduated from junior high at the top of his class academically and athletically. Malcolm was discouraged from continuing academically past the eighth grade due to his race and accepted an offer from his sister, Ella, and her husband to move to Roxbury, Boston.

A few months after his arrival in Roxbury, a predominantly black section of Boston, Malcolm took a job as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom in Boston's Back Bay section and learned the role of a hustler. Roxbury proved to be too small for him, and in 1942 he took a job as a railroad dining-car porter, working out of Roxbury and Harlem. Settling in Harlem, he became involved in several criminal activities including robbery, prostitution, and narcotics. After a year in Harlem, he returned to Boston and continued a life of crime, forming his own house-robbing gang. Arrested for robbery in February 1946, he was convicted and sentenced to the Charlestown, Massachusetts prison for seven years.

While in prison, Malcolm became a follower of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of a small, urban prophet-cult, the Nation of Islam, with branches in Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Malcolm's brother, Reginald, and sister, Ella, visiting him in prison, urged him to join Muhammad's cult, and while still in prison he did. He discarded his "slave name," Little, and was assigned the new name "X". After his parole in 1952, Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam under the guidance of Elijah Muhammad and eventually was made a minister and top administrator of the Muslim movement. Malcolm founded mosques in Boston, Philadelphia, and Harlem and was credited with the national expansion of the movement, which included a membership of approximately 30,000 by 1963.

Partly because of tensions within the Black Muslim movement, Malcolm became critical of Elijah Muhammad. He was eventually "silenced," for 90 days after commenting on the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy with the phrase "chickens come home to roost." But before his silence was lifted, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam to form the Muslim Mosque, Inc. (March 1964). He began to articulate a more secular black nationalism, arguing that blacks should control the politics within their own community and, through his speeches, encouraging his followers to use the ballot to effect change.

The Queens, New York home Malcolm X shared with his wife, Betty (whom he had married in January 1958) and his six children was firebombed February 14, 1965 but the family survived. Two weeks later, on February 21, as Malcolm addressed a filled house at the Audubon Ballroom, multiple assassins shot him. The reason for the assassination has never been definitely established. Three men were convicted in March 1966 of first degree murder: Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson.