Rickford, who wrote the first biography of Shabazz, explains: “Malcolm X really was a hero for the street. Intellectually formidable, a trait memorialised by Lauryn Hill: “ My rhymes is heavy, like the mind of Sister Betty,” Shabazz carved her own place in the world after Malcolm X’s death, earning a PhD in education administration in 1975.Ī year later she began commuting over an hour from her home in Mount Vernon to teach a predominantly black, working-class student body in Brooklyn. “To think that she supported her husband during that trauma … and she would witness assassination.”īorn in 1936 and adopted by a middle-class couple in Detroit, Shabazz joined the black nationalist Nation of Islam when she married Malcolm X in 1958.įrom left: Malikah Shabazz, Attallah, Malaak and Gamilah, daughters of Betty Shabazz, talk to the media outside the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx following the death of their mother on 23 June 1997.

With black square glasses sitting on her angular cheekbones, her chin resting on her hand with one finger raised, Ilyasah is her father reincarnate. Having just written a new book exploring her father’s adolescent years – she is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice – she talks of her mother as the guardian of her father’s life and legacy. “My mother was just in her 20s when her home had been firebombed on the eve of Valentine’s Day,” says Ilyasah Shabazz, who was only two years old when her father was gunned down in front of her. The life of Dr Betty Shabazz was eclipsed by the hail of bullets that ripped into her husband’s angular frame, as she shielded her four infant daughters while pregnant with twins in 1965.īut for the seven years they were married and for over three decades until she died in 1997, Shabazz’s role as the formidable family backbone to her husband and six daughters, and her efforts in preserving Malcolm X’s legacy after his death, were cheapened to a patriarchal portrait of “Malcolm X’s widow”. Like most accounts of the civil rights titan, there’s a story Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X never told.

Born in 1936 and adopted by a middle-class couple in Detroit, Shabazz joined the black nationalist Nation of Islam when she married Malcolm X in 1958.

The autobiography of malcolm