1.5 In the Sixties, black rage spoke with many voices, but the touch- stone for all the various separatist sects was the loving, integrationist message of the great Baptist, Martin Luther King. Malcolm X, however, was his own man, his voice both violent and self-doubting. In an age when Marxism seemed to hold the answers, Malcolm became a Muslim ahead of his time, and 20 years before the Ayatollah declared war on the "Great Satan of western imperialism". Allah, declared Malcolm, possesses the full "360 degrees of knowledge". After seven years' imprisonment as a Harlem hoodlum, this auto-didact emerged to preach black power and black separation; by calling himself X he erased his own slave name. "What shade of black African polluted by devil white man are you?" he asked his Muslim congregation. He described his own grandfather as a "red-headed devil", a rapist who "pollutes my complexion". But Malcolm X's Autobiography backs away from racism. During a pilgrimage to Mecca he had discovered that Islam is colour-blind. On February 21, 1965 he was assassinated by Muslims loyal to Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, with which he had broken. He became a symbol of pride and integrity to which many African-Americans remain fiercely loyal @ 2.2 One of the eight children of Louise and Earl Little, Malcolm saw his father, a Baptist preacher from rural Georgia, constantly hounded by the Ku-Klux-Klan, first in Omaha, Nebraska, and then in Lansing, Michigan, where finally he was killed by being thrown under the wheels of a trolley; his mother, Louise, ending up in a mental hospital; and his brothers and sisters scattered over various foster homes. He was "adopted" by the white lady of one of the foster homes, and stayed with the family until he was 14. He was brilliant at school, winning straight A's, but was told to scale down his aspiration of a career as a lawyer to becoming "a mechanic or a carpenter". He quit school and went to Harlem, where he became a successful hustler. He was in and out of jail. It was during a long prison sentence in Boston, in 1952, that he came under the influence of the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. Eventually, he was to become the most prominent and articulate minister of this faith, a bowdlerized version of Islam. @ 2.3 Malcolm X became the chief spokesman of the Black Muslim movement in New York. Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole) lives in seclusion at the so-called Temple of Islam in Chicago. Their quarrel is believed to have arisen from a struggle for power in the movement, whose membership is put variously between 50,000 and 250,000. It is puritan, separatist, and transcendental. Malcolm X's declared policy was to establish a non- sectarian black nationalist party. He accused the Black Muslims of perverting the creed of Islam. Recently he said the Black Muslims were working with the American Nazi Party and the Ku-Klux-Klan to perpetuate segregation for their own purposes. He said that in December 1960, he and another member of the movement, Jeremiah X, went to Georgia to discuss tactics with a leader of the Klan who "wanted to sell us a county-size parcel of land so that our programme of segregation would sound more feasible". At this time, he continued, he was blinded by his faith in Elijah Muhammad. The leader of the Nazi Party was permitted to attend Black Muslim meetings, and the Nazis and the Klan wanted militants kept in the Black Muslim movement because if they were unleashed into the civil rights movement "they'd get all the 'Uncle Tom' so-called leaders to stop talking and start doing something". The Black Muslims wanted him out of the way, he said, because he knew of these contacts. @ 2.5 By the early 1960s, Malcolm X had also emerged as a vehement opponent of the mainstream civil rights movement then being led by Martin Luther King. And it was this that created a body of thoughts and sentiments, later to be labelled Black Power. "Once we accept ourselves, we're acceptable to everyone", he once said to fellow Afro-Americans. In short, he called for an end to the self-hatred with which black Americans, conditioned by history and contemporary white European aesthetic and cultural values, had come to regard themselves. He emphasized the connexion with Africa and the African past not as part of the "Back to Africa" movement but as a source of political and economic power to be used by Afro-Americans in their struggle to liberate themselves by "any means necessary". @ 2.6 Malcolm X, the American Negro leader, spent less than three hours in Smethwick today and exchanged a brief word with two or three local people. His visit, described by Alderman C.V. Williams, mayor of Smethwick, as a deplorable attempt to create more tension, was openly regretted by other Midlanders in touch with the immigration problem. Malcolm X told a reporter: "I have heard that the blacks in Smethwick are being treated in the same way as the Negroes were treated in Alabama - like Hitler treated Jews." If he were a coloured immigrant, he said, he would not wait until the fascists had built the gas ovens. At a press conference at the Grand Hotel, Birmingham, Malcolm X said the English were becoming increasingly racialist and the Smethwick situation could develop into a brutally violent affair. The source of his information was not clear and on other subjects his facts seemed arguable - for instance, it became obvious that he had not realized that the Government's immigration restrictions also applied to white immigrants. Mr. Cedric Taylor, chairman of the Standing Conference of West Indian Organizations for Birmingham and District, said: "Remarks about gas ovens are, I feel, the worst thing that anybody could say. I am upset at this sort of thing when people are trying to sort themselves out. Conditions here are entirely different from those in Alabama. The West Indians are not the sort of people who would want to follow Malcolm X." This evening Malcolm X spoke at a private meeting called by Islamic students at Birmingham University. Tomorrow he will return to America, where he will report to a four- college seminar in Massachusetts on his visit to Smethwick and Birmingham, England. @ 3.1 Malcolm X, the Negro nationalist who was a leader of the Black Muslim movement until he broke with it, was shot dead this afternoon while addressing a rally in a ballroom in Manhattan. Police said two other men were injured by gunfire, and arrests had been made. Malcolm X, whose real name was Malcolm Little, was on the stage at the Audubon ballroom in Washington Heights, a district in upper Manhattan on the fringe of the Negro quarter of Harlem. Eight or 10 shots were fired altogether, and Malcolm X fell to the floor with three shots in the face. He was taken to the Vanderbilt clinic of the Columbia- Presbyterian Medical Centre, a few doors down the street, where he was found to be dead. There was immediate uproar in the hall. A man was seen running away with a .45 revolver in his hand, and the 300 or 400 people attending the rally ran out into the street shouting and screaming. Police said later that the crowd in the hall seized two Negroes and fought with the police for possession of them. One of them was spreadeagled by one group of men while others punched and kicked him. The other was thrown to the ground and kicked. It took 10 policemen to get them away to a patrol car. A sawn-off rifle was discovered behind the stage, wrapped in a jacket. Mrs. Little, the dead man's wife, was among the crowd. She was escorted away by an angry group of Malcolm X's followers, who threatened press photographers in the street outside. Last week, Malcolm X's house in the Long Island borough of Queens was set on fire by petrol bombs. The house was bought for him by the Black Muslims, and after he left the organization he stayed on, claiming that the house had been given to him and resisting eviction proceedings. After the fire, he and his family moved out, a few hours before a city marshal arrived with an eviction order. The incident followed a quarrel with Elijah Muhammad, the founder and leader of the Black Muslims. @ 3.3 She was only four when she saw the bloody body of her father, the famous black activist Malcolm X, lying on the ground after being torn apart by bullets in a theatre in Harlem. Three decades later, the tables have turned. She stands accused of plotting to murder the man she thinks was responsible for her father's death At first it looked like a simple case of revenge, in which Qubilah Shabazz, Malcolm X's 34-year-old daughter, was so haunted by the memory of her father's murder that she decided to settle scores with the man she accuses of being one of the assassins. But it is much more complicated. Far from being the grim sequel to a long-running family feud, the case has had the surprising effect of uniting Malcolm X's family and supporters with the very figure they have blamed for his murder: Louis Farrakhan, America's most controversial black leader. The intended victim of Shabazz's alleged plot has offered an olive branch to Shabazz, saying that she, not he, is the real victim. Farrakhan, a flamboyant figure known for his snappy suits and rabble-rousing rhetoric, is accusing the government of entrapping Shabazz in a plot against him - intended, he argues, to divide the black community and weaken his Nation of Islam movement, which has become a potent mouthpiece for black American grievances. This has made it a potentially explosive case: the government will risk stoking up black anger if it convicts the daughter of a man regarded by many in black America as a martyr in the same league as Martin Luther King. She faces 90 years in jail and a $2.5m fine if found guilty. Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam while in prison for theft and was once the foremost spokesman of its racist party line. But he left the movement after a bitter row, when he discovered that its then leader, his mentor Elijah Mohammed, had secretly fathered seven illegitimate children. The Nation of Islam could not forgive such treachery. Two months before Malcolm's assassination, Farrakhan, who took over the movement's leadership in 1978, wrote in the Nation's newspaper: "The die is set and Malcolm shall not escape. Such a man is worthy of death." Although three men were convicted of Malcolm X's murder, no coherent explanation of their culpability emerged. Farrakhan always maintained his innocence and apologised for creating an atmosphere of hatred. Yet he showed no real repentance: two years ago he sounded glad that Malcolm X had been killed. "And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?" he told one interviewer. But instead of igniting the old feud, the case has had the reverse effect, with the Shabazz family and Farrakhan seemingly reunited after three decades of animosity. "I held her in my arms as a baby," said Farrakhan last month, recalling happier times before his rift with Malcolm X. Together they have concluded that the government is out to pursue black activists into the next generation. The prosecution's case has been weakened by its key witness. Michael Fitzpatrick, an old boyfriend of Shabazz, is a former FBI informer who once co-operated in an investigation aimed at Jewish militants, for which he was paid $12,000 a month. He is now in trouble with the authorities over a charge of possession of cocaine. The FBI says that eight telephone calls between Shabazz and Fitzpatrick clearly show that she discussed the possibility of assassinating Farrakhan. But the latter's refusal to complain can only undermine the FBI's case. In addition, Shabazz's alleged down-payment to a hit man of $250 seems too little to provide proof of her commitment to murder. William Kunstler, the flamboyant New York civil rights lawyer leading Shabazz's defence, believes the FBI sting was designed ultimately to harm Farrakhan. "It's the same thing that happened 30 years ago with Malcolm," he said. "The government doesn't have to pull the trigger, but they create the atmosphere in which the nuts operate. There are people out there who love Malcolm and also some who are deranged, so they will kill Farrakhan thinking they will avenge Malcolm's death. "It's this whole threat of a black messiah - that someone can galvanise the black community, and it scares the bejesus out of the system."