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Paroled in 1952 after serving six years, Malcolm Little became Malcolm X,* loudly acclaimed the Muslims' professed prohibitions against tobacco, alcohol and pre-or extra-marital sex. He shrugged off his sordid past on the ground that "it was all done when I was part of the white man's Christian world." In 1958, he married a Muslim Sister named Betty Shabazz before a justice of the peace in Michigan. "An old hunchbacked white devil performed the wedding," Malcolm said later, "and all of the witnesses were devils." At the time of Malcolm's death, Betty was pregnant and the mother of four children: Daughter Attilah, named after the Hun; Daughter Quiblah, after Kublai Khan; Daughter Ilyasah, Arabic for Elijah; and Daughter Lamum-bah, named after the Congo's wild-eyed Patrice Lumumba.
Savage Speaker. Malcolm soon proved one of Elijah Muhammad's best recruiters—in an organization that, then and now, desperately needed recruits. The Black Muslims had received little public notice until the civil rights movement and its street demonstrations catapulted them into the news. Today, Black Muslims claim up to 250,000 members. A much more accurate estimate would accord the group 2,000 in New York, 500 in Chicago, 350 in Los Angeles, 230 in Detroit, 220 in Washington, 150 in both St. Louis and San Francisco, 100 in Kansas City, under 100 in each of 70 other cities, including Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis and Jacksonville. Still, it is a nice racket for Elijah, son of a Georgia sharecropper. He socks each member for $8.30 in dues a week, requires each to sell (or pay for) as many as 200 copies of the 200 Muslim newspaper every two weeks, saddles everybody with an additional $125 assessment for Savior's Day, Feb. 26.
Malcolm was also a savage speaker. After the 1962 plane crash in France that killed 121 whites from Georgia, he rose before a Los Angeles audience and said: "I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened. I got a wire from God today. He really answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We will continue to pray and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky."
The Comeuppance. In demand as a speaker, not just among Negroes but before white civic groups and on college campuses, Malcolm gained in popularity and became a threat to Elijah Muhammad's leadership of the Black Muslims.
All Elijah wanted was a chance to give Malcolm his comeuppance—and in 1963 Malcolm offered him the opportunity. After President Kennedy's assassination, Malcolm publicly called the murder a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." Cried he: "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad."
This was outrageous enough for Elijah to suspend Malcolm from the Black Muslim movement. Malcolm quit for keeps, soon had formed his own white-hating Organization of Afro-American Unity, and urged Negroes to form rifle clubs.