October 16, 1995: The Million Man March

October 16, 1995: The Million Man March is held, at the U.S. Capitol, and extending westward down the National Mall, in Washington, D.C.

How many people actually attended Louis Farrakhan's gathering is in dispute: The National Park Service said around 400,000 (which would still have been about 100,000 more than attended the 1963 March On Washington), while ABC hired a research firm that said 837,000 (not quite one million, but still one of the largest gatherings in American history).

Born on May 11, 1933, in The Bronx, with the name Louis Eugene Walcott, Farrakhan began his professional life as a calypso singer, before converting to the Nation of Islam, a.k.a. "The Black Muslims," and impressing their leader, Elijah Muhammad. After a few years using the name "Louis X," with "X" as an "unknown," standing in for his African name that had been lost, he took the name "Farrakhan," a corruption of "furqan," meaning "criterion."

He had written articles for the NOI's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, saying that Elijah Muhammad's former protege, Malcolm X, was "worthy of death." Once the NOI's most prominent public representative, Malcolm had split upon learning of Elijah Muhammad's personal and financial improprieties. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm was assassinated. Farrakhan has been accused of involvement (he was in Newark at the time), or, at least, through his writing, inciting the act. He has always denied it.

In 1975, Elijah Muhammad died, and his son, Warith Deen Muhammad, reorganized the NOI into a more mainstream Islamic group, dropping its anti-white and anti-Semitic stances. Farrakhan revived the NOI name and platform in 1981, proclaiming himself its leader. His views and statements have been condemned by a wide range of groups, including the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In 1994, a protégé of Farrakhan's, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, made a series of incendiary remarks, and subsequently survived an assassination attempt. Attempting a public relations repair job, Farrakhan agreed to an interview by Barbara Walters on ABC News' program 20/20. Instead, he dug his hole deeper with his answers. To make matters worse, the interview aired on April 22, and was cut off when news of the death of former President Richard Nixon was announced.

Farrakhan recognized two major needs: Helping the life status and the image of black Americans, especially black menl and helping the image of himself and his organization. He decided that a "Million Man March" on the nation's capital would be an unmistakable message.

He announced it as a "National Day of Atonement" -- a poor choice of words for a man so often accused of anti-Semitism, especially since Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day on the Hebrew Calendar, had been on October 3 and 4, only a few days before. October 3 had also seen the announcement of the Not Guilty verdict in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, which had raised racial tensions.

Farrakhan certainly couldn't be faulted for outreach, as he lined up several esteemed speakers. Mayors Marion Barry of host city Washington and Kurt Schmoke of nearby Baltimore spoke. So did Donald Payne, a black Congressman from Newark, then beginning a transition from a majority-black city to a majority-Hispanic city. Noted writers Maya Angelou and Cornel West also spoke. So did Jeremiah Wright, a Chicago minister who would get in trouble with remarks he made that nearly derailed the 2008 Presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

Representing the original Civil Rights Movement were Martin Luther King III; King allies Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson, Dorothy Height, Joseph Lowery and James Bevel; Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz; and, perhaps an unwise choice, Tynnetta Muhammad, who had been a mistress of Elijah Muhammad, and the mother of 4 of his children.

Introduced by Benjamin Chavis, national coordinator of the March, and formerly the executive director of the NAACP, Farrakhan had a chance to change a lot of minds that day. Instead, he spoke for two and a half hours, leading to many people walking away, and possibly inspiring the discrepancy in the spectator count.

The length of his speech wasn't its only problem: He went off on tangents, quoting from African-American hymns (the kind of songs that used to be known as "Negro spirituals"), and launched into a focus on the number 19 and its apparent significance to Islam. It reached a point where anyone who hadn't heard him before, and wasn't used to this sort of thing, didn't have the slightest idea of what he was talking about.

In spite of a Spike Lee's film Get On the Bus, depicting a fictional trip to the March and released a year later, the March was a wasted opportunity. The idea was copied: Marches were done on the 10th and 20th Anniversaries, and a "Million Mom March" in favor of gun control was held in 2000.

But, as of October 16, 2022, Farrakhan is still alive, and still running the NOI, with no apparent successor -- Khalid Abdul Muhammad seemed like the most obvious choice, but, having survived his 1994 shooting, he died of a brain aneurysm in 2001 -- but has faded into the background. With the rise of Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Kamala Harris, and other black leaders, and his own bigotry rendering him a pariah, Farrakhan had been all but irrelevant since 1995.

*

October 16, 1995 was a Monday. Just as the 1963 March On Washington was held on a Wednesday, Farrakhan held his march on a weekday. It didn't make any sense, in either case: Why force the potential attendees to choose between attending and risking losing their jobs?

In baseball, the National League Championship Series had already been decided, as the Atlanta Braves had swept the Cincinnati Reds in 4 straight games. It was a travel day for the American League Championship Series. The next day, in Game 6, the Cleveland Indians beat the Seattle Mariners, and clinched their 1st Pennant in 41 years. The Braves would beat the Indians in the World Series, in 6 games.

The NBA season started 18 days later. There was 1 game played in the NHL: The Hartford Whalers beat the New York Rangers, 7-5 at Madison Square Garden.

And on ABC Monday Night Football, the Denver Broncos beat the Oakland Raiders, 27-0 at Mile High Stadium in Denver.

February 21, 1965: Malcolm X Is Assassinated

February 21, 1965: Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City. He was 39 years old -- the same age at which his competitor for the hearts and minds of black Americans, Martin Luther King Jr., would be, 3 years later.

He was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, with the name Malcolm Little. His parents were admirers of Marcus Garvey, a believer in self-determination for black Americans through building their own economy within the larger American economy.

But when Malcolm was 6 years old, and the family was living in Lansing, Michigan, his father died under mysterious circumstances. Officially, he was hit by a streetcar. Both suicide and murder were suggested, as he had willingly run afoul of a local Ku Klux Klan offshoot. When Malcolm was 12, his mother had a nervous breakdown, and was committed.

He did well in school, but dropped out of high school at age 16, after telling a white teacher he wanted to become a lawyer, and the teacher told him that was "no realistic goal for a (N-word)." He moved in with his sister in Roxbury, a mostly-black neighborhood in Boston, then to the most classically black neighborhood of them all, Harlem in Upper Manhattan.

He worked for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, then as a restaurant dishwasher. Another dishwasher was also a black man with red hair, and was known as Chicago Red because he was from Chicago. Malcolm became known as Detroit Red, because he had lived in Michigan, even though he'd never actually lived in Detroit. Chicago Red's real name was John Sanford, but he went into comedy, and became Redd Foxx, later taking then name Fred Sanford for his TV sitcom Sanford and Son.

Malcolm developed side hustles, the kind normally associated with organized crime. When he was drafted to serve in World War II, he convinced the U.S. Army that he was mentally unstable, and received an exemption. In 1945, he went back to Boston, and built a gang that robbed the homes of wealthy white families.

But it was a smaller crime that got him sent to prison: In 1946, he went to a jewelry shop, to pick up a watch he'd left to be fixed. The watch was stolen, and he was caught, and was sentenced to 8 to 10 years.

In 1948, his brother Reginald wrote to him, telling him of the Nation of Islam, a black-oriented offshoot of mainstream Islam. Malcolm wrote to the Nation's leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the response he got led him to a regular correspondence and conversion. He began using the name "Malcolm X," the X, being a symbol of the unknown, taking the place of the family name he would have had if his family hadn't been taken out of Africa in slavery.

Malcolm was paroled in 1952, and went to Chicago, the NOI's headquarters, and met Elijah Muhammad face-to-face. He visited Detroit for the first time when Muhammad sent him to establish a Temple there. Much like an old-style Protestant "circuit rider," he was moved around quickly, to Boston, to Philadelphia, and settled in Harlem, where he led Temple Number 7 starting in 1954.

With his close-cropped hair, horn-rimmed glasses and sharp suits, he looked every inch the intellectual he was. He was 6-foot-3, and at 180 pounds, slim but strong. He was already one of the country's most effective public speakers, and had charisma to spare. Through his efforts, the NOI gained hundreds of new black members every month through the latter half of the 1950s.

That got the attention of the FBI. At the time, "Islamic terrorism" was unknown in North America, but Director J. Edgar Hoover didn't like it when black people demanded more power or, dare they say it, equality with white people. He considered both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to be Communists, though neither was true.

In 1958, Malcolm married Betty Sanders, who took the name Betty X. They had 6 children, all daughters. Malcolm had also begun using the name Malik el-Shabazz, though he was still usually referred to as "Malcolm X" in public. His wife Used the name Betty Shabazz for the rest of her life. In 1959, he was interviewed by Mike Wallace for a televised documentary, which was titled The Hate That Hate Produced.

That hate included calling white people "devils," and using lines like, "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us!" He called Dr. King "a chump," and the 1963 March On Washington "the farce on Washington."

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the NOI sent a message of condolence to the Kennedy family, whose work in electing the country's 1st President who was not a Protestant had moved the cause of religious freedom forward. Elijah Muhammad ordered his ministers not to comment on the assassination.

Malcolm did: On December 1, he cited the assassination, the bombing of a Birmingham church that killed 4 girls 2 months earlier, the murder of NAACP official Medgar Evers 3 months before that, and the assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba 2 years before that, as "chickens coming home to roost." This statement seemed to infuriate everybody, and Elijah Muhammad suspended him from public speaking for 90 days.

The following month, Malcolm went to Miami, where he met with Cassius Clay, who was training to fight Sonny Liston for the Heavyweight Championship of the World. They became close, and after Clay won, he announced his conversion to the NOI, and took the name Muhammad Ali, which Elijah Muhammad had given him.

Something else was going on: Malcolm had begun to hear about Elijah Muhammad taking advantage of women in the NOI, including his secretaries. When Malcolm confronted him, Muhammad not only admitted it, but justified it, through his interpretation of prophecy.

On March 8, 1964, 12 days after Ali's win, Malcolm X announced that he had broken with the NOI. This caused a schism from which the NOI has never recovered. Ali sided with Elijah Muhammad. So did Malcolm's protege, Louis X, who later took the name Louis Farrakhan. Ali would eventually publicly regret his choice; Farrakhan, still alive at this writing, never has.

On March 26, Malcolm was at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, observing the debate over the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dr. King was also there, and the two men met for the only time. They were together for only a minute or so, but photographs suggest that the meeting was cordial.

In April, he traveled to Saudi Arabia, to do what Islam demands that all of its followers able to do so do: Make a pilgrimage to the faith's the holiest site, the Kaaba in Mecca, a city that prohibits non-Muslims from entering. Ironically, given his intelligence and his chosen faith, he had never learned how to speak Arabic, and that caused Saudi officials to question his sincerity. Prince Faisal, who became King later in the year, intervened, and the pilgrimage was made.

Malcolm saw Muslims from all over the world there, from the darkest-skinned natives of Africa to pale, blue-eyed white people, to Asians from the nations of Indonesia and Malaysia. He soon dropped his "white devils" rhetoric, and began to speak of mainstream Sunni Islam as a unifying influence.

Upon his return, threats against him from the NOI -- far more from them than from white supremacists -- increased. In 1963, he had begun meeting with journalist Alex Haley, for the writing of an authorized biography. He told Haley, "If I'm alive when this book comes out, it will be a miracle." On December 4, 1964, Muhammad Speaks, the NOI's official newspaper, published a column by Farrakhan, saying, "Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death."

And on February 14, 1965, his house in East Elmhurst, Queens, New York City was burned down. On February 19, he told photojournalist Gordon Parks, who would later direct the film Shaft, that the NOI was actively trying to kill him.

On February 21, he prepared to address a new organization he had founded, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, at the Audubon Ballroom at 165th Street and Broadway, in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan. Before he could begin his speech, a man yelled out for another man to get his hand out of his pocket. There was some pushing, and Malcolm's bodyguards came forward to try to stop the disturbance.

It was a ruse. Malcolm said, "Cool it, brothers!" They did not: Talmadge Hayer, a NOI member, took out a sawed-off shotgun, and shot Malcolm in the chest. Two other gunmen opened fire with pistols. Malcolm was taken across the street, to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, but he had no chance. He was pronounced dead at 3:30 PM.

Dr. King did not attend his funeral, but other civil rights leaders did, including Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Andrew Young and John Lewis. Actor Ossie Davis delivered the eulogy, and would repeat it for Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X, in which Malcolm was played by Denzel Washington. Davis' wife, actress Ruby Dee, and actor Sidney Poitier's wife Juanita raised money for a new home for Betty and the 6 Shabazz daughters. Malcolm was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, Westchester County, New York.

Hayer was convicted, and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, where he took the name Mujahid Abdul Halim. He was paroled in 2010, after 45 years. As of February 21, 2025, he is still alive, and has never identified his accomplices, only saying that the other 2 men convicted in the shooting were innocent. He is still a practicing Muslim, but has left the Nation of Islam, no longer agreeing with their ideology. He has expressed "regrets and sorrow" for having shot Malcolm X.

Norman Butler, later Muhammad Abdul Aziz, served 20 years, and his conviction was later overturned. Thomas Johnson, later Khalil Islam, served 22 years, and maintained his innocence until his death in 2009.

In 1975, Malcolm's widow, who had been studying to be a nurse when they met, completed her doctorate in nursing, and was known as Dr. Betty Shabazz from then on. She occasionally joined Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, for joint appearances until her death in 1997. Afterward, their daughters Bernice King and Attallah Shabazz, each having followed their father into their respective faiths' clergy, have worked together.

In 1992, most of the Audubon Ballroom was demolished, but its outer facade was kept, and Columbia University's Audubon Business and Technology Center was built on the site. On May 19, 2005, which would have been Malcolm's 80th birthday, the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center opened in the building's lobby.

Other nearby memorials include the renaming of 6th Avenue in Harlem, which had already been Lenox Avenue, as Malcolm X Boulevard; and the renaming of Newark's South Side High School for him.

*

February 21, 1965 was a Sunday. Although Martin Luther King was a baseball fan, I know of no source that connects Malcolm X to sports. However, many athletes were named Malcolm or Malik after him, including basketball star Malik Sealy, a New Yorker, who was killed in a car accident in 2000, and also buried in Ferncliff Cemetery.

Baseball and football were out of season on the day of the assassination. There were 4 games layed in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Cincinnati Royals, 109-104, 115 blocks downtown at the old Madison Square Garden. Oscar Robertson scored 40 points for the Royals, but the Knicks had a more balanced attack, with Willis Reed leading the way with 22 points and 22 rebounds.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Baltimore Bullets, 107-106 at the Baltimore Civic Center (now the CFG Bank Arena). Wilt Chamberlain had 40 points and 18 rebounds.

* The St. Louis Hawks beat the Detroit Pistons, 112-107 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis.

* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Boston Celtics, 129-114 at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Jerry West led all scorers on the day with 47 points.

And the NHL's entire "Original Six" were in action:

* Also at the old Garden, the New York Rangers and the Montreal Canadiens played to a 2-2 tie.

* The Detroit Red Wings beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-2 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

* And the Chicago Black Hawks beat the Boston Bruins, 7-0 at the Chicago Stadium.