![]() ![]() This transformation was not appreciated among the ranks of the Nation. He travelled to Selma, Alabama, in solidarity with Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s push for voting rights there, and met with his wife, Coretta. He attended a secret meeting of civil-rights leaders at the home of the actor Sidney Poitier, where he proposed working together to bring American race relations to the United Nations. He had grown tired of being pigeonholed as a violent agitator, and had begun to forge connections with the nonviolent civil-rights movement, which he had previously spurned. But, over the past few years, he had come to see the group’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, as a charlatan, and had grown skeptical of his teachings-among them, that white people were all “blue-eyed devils.” In addition to the O.A.A.U., Malcolm had founded Muslim Mosque, Inc., a group that would allow his followers to explore more orthodox versions of Sunni Islam. Malcolm had been the national spokesman of the Nation of Islam, and had become famous as a fierce and eloquent advocate of Black Nationalism. “It was like an invisible weight sitting on my shoulder, on my back.” “I felt something that was ominous in the air,” Benjamin 2X Goodman, one of Malcolm’s assistants, told me, years later. Despite the potential dangers, he had called off the body searches, which set his advisers on edge. At most of Malcolm’s rallies, security guards frisked guests before they entered, but Malcolm worried that this would scare off the younger, better-educated, non-Muslim attendees that he hoped to attract to his new organization. He envisioned the event as an afternoon of rousing rhetoric for a diverse crowd: a reverend campaigning for school desegregation would give opening remarks. He was in Harlem to launch the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a new, secular group that he hoped would allow him to engage in mainstream civil-rights activism in a way that the Nation-which was both rigidly devout and expressly militant-had made difficult. He had recently left the Nation of Islam, the Black-Muslim group that had nurtured his rise to prominence. ![]() Malcolm was thirty-nine, tall and serious, with a dark suit and a new beard, and he was in the midst of remaking himself. on Sunday, February 21, 1965, Malcolm X arrived at the Audubon Ballroom, in Harlem, to give a speech. ![]()
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