Malcolm X

A minister, and for twelve years the public voice of the Nation of Islam.

He was born Malcolm Little in Omaha on the nineteenth of May 1925. His father was a Baptist preacher and a follower of Marcus Garvey; the family was driven out of two states by threats, their house in Lansing was burned, and when Malcolm was six his father was found dead on the streetcar tracks. The insurance company called it suicide and would not pay. His mother was committed to a state hospital when he was thirteen and the children were split between foster homes.

A teacher he liked told him that a lawyer was no realistic goal for a black boy and he should think about carpentry. He stopped trying at school and left after the eighth grade.

He was sentenced to ten years in 1946 for burglary. In prison he read - the whole of a dictionary, copied out by hand, and then everything else - and his brother wrote to him about the Nation of Islam. He came out in 1952 and took the X for the African name that his family had lost.

He built the Nation from a few hundred people to tens of thousands, and made himself the most articulate and the most frightening black man in America, depending on who was listening. He broke with it in 1964, went to Mecca, prayed beside men of every colour, and came back saying something different from what he had said before.

He met Martin Luther King once, for a minute, in a corridor of the Senate in March 1964. There is one photograph of it.

He knew he would be killed. His house in Queens was firebombed a week before with his wife and four daughters inside. On the twenty-first of February 1965 he stood up to speak at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, and three men came forward out of the audience and shot him sixteen times. He was thirty-nine. His wife Betty, who was pregnant with twins, was in the audience with their daughters.

His wife Betty and their six daughters, the youngest two born after he died.