Races: Death and Transfiguration

Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred: "Your little babies will get polio!" he cried to the "white devils." His creed was violence: "If ballots won't work, bullets will."

Yet even before his bullet-ripped body went to its grave, Malcolm X was being sanctified. Negro leaders called him "brilliant," said he had recently "moderated" his views, blamed his assassination on "the white power structure" or, in the case of Martin Luther King, on a "society sick enough to express dissent with murder." Malcolm's death, they agreed, was a setback to the civil rights movement.

Alias John Doe. In fact, Malcolm X —in life and in death—was a disaster to the civil rights movement.

Malcolm's murder, almost certainly at the hands of the Black Muslims from whom he had defected, came on a bright Sunday afternoon in full view of 400 Negroes in the Audubon Ballroom, a seedy two-story building on Manhattan's upper Broadway. Characteristically, he had kept his followers waiting for nearly an hour while he lingered over tea and a banana split at a nearby Harlem restaurant.

Entering the auditorium at last, Malcolm cried "As-salaam alaikum [Peace be unto you]." The audience replied in unison: "Wa-alaikum salaam [And unto you be peace]." Suddenly a disturbance broke out several rows back. "Get your hand off my pockets!" a man shouted. "Don't be messing with my pockets!" At the distraction, Malcolm raised his hands. "Now brothers!" he cried, "Be cool, don't get excited . . ."

As he spoke, three men rushed down the aisle toward him. Eight feet away, they opened fire. One Negro with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun blasted Malcolm at point-blank range. "There was what sounded like an explosion," said a dazed woman. "I looked at Malcolm, and there was blood running out of his goatee." Men and women threw themselves to the floor as the gunmen squeezed off at least a score of shots. Thirteen shotgun pellets tore into Malcolm's chest and heart; several slugs from .45-and .38-cal. pistols shattered his thighs and legs. A woman screamed: "Oh, black folks, black folks, why you got to kill each other?"

The man with the shotgun was hit in the left leg by a bullet from the pistol of a Malcolm X bodyguard. Crippled, he was caught by Malcolm X's furious followers, knocked down, kicked and stomped on. Cops rescued him, took him to a hospital, and charged him with homicide. He was Thomas Hagan, alias Talmadge Hayer, a New Jersey thug with a dreary police record.

Minutes after the shooting, Malcolm's body was lifted from the stage, placed on a rolling bed that had been wheeled over from the nearby Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and rushed to an emergency operating room. A team of doctors laid open his chest, tried to revive him via open-heart massage. But Malcolm X was dead. Because he had not yet been formally identified, he was at first entered on hospital records as John Doe.