Malcolm X

Malcolm Little was born on 19 May 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and later Boston. After a prison sentence in the late 1940s he joined the Nation of Islam, took the name Malcolm X, and became its most widely heard minister, especially at Temple No. 7 in Harlem. He argued for Black self-reliance and rejected the nonviolent strategy of the southern civil-rights mainstream. A 1959 television documentary, The Hate That Hate Produced, made him a national figure.

He left the Nation of Islam in 1964 after disputes with Elijah Muhammad, completed the hajj, and founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He was assassinated on 21 February 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley and published later that year, remains widely read. Speeches from those last months, including work on Mecca and African tours, record the shift in his public argument. The site’s 1925 Chinese New Year is 24 January, so 19 May is Ox/Taurus.

No public-domain portrait is used on this page; the Year of the Ox emblem stands in.