Betty Shabazz
Betty Shabazz, also known as Betty X, was an American educator and civil rights advocate who 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.
Early life
Betty Dean Sanders was born on May 28, 1934 or 1936, 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.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.
Despite their lessons on black self-reliance, the Malloys never spoke with Sanders about racism. 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.'" 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".
Young adult years
After she graduated from high school, Sanders left her foster parents' home in Detroit to study at the Tuskegee Institute, 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. 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."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."
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.
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.
Nation of Islam
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." 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. 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." The Malloys were Methodists, and when she was 13, Sanders had decided she would remain a Methodist for the rest of her life.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." 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."
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.
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. "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."
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. 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. 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.
Marriage and family
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.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. By coincidence, Betty X became a licensed practical nurse on the same day.
At first, their relationship followed the Nation of Islam's strictures concerning marriage; Malcolm X set the rules and Betty X obediently followed them. In 1969, Shabazz wrote that "his indoctrination was so thorough, even to me, that it has become a pattern for our lives." Over time, the family dynamic changed, as Malcolm X made small concessions to Betty X's demands for more independence. 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.
The couple had six daughters. Their names were Attallah, born in 1958, Arabic for "the gift of God"; 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.
She had 6 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.
Leaving the Nation of Islam
On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam. He and Betty X, now known as Betty Shabazz, became Sunni Muslims.Assassination of Malcolm X
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. 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. Two other men charged the stage and fired handguns, hitting Malcolm X 16 times.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.
Angry onlookers caught and beat one of the assassins, who was arrested on the scene. Eyewitnesses identified two more suspects. All three men, who were members of the Nation of Islam, were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.