Betty X (born Betty Jean Sanders) lived from May 28, 1936 to June 23, 1997. The widow of civil rights leader Malcolm X, she died three weeks after being severely burned in a fire allegedly set by her 12-year-old grandson. Shabazz’s funeral service was held at the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City. Betty Shabazz Is buried next to her husband, Malcolm X. This is at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. There’s also a major mosque in Harlem named after Sister Betty X Shabazz.
Biography – Sister Betty X Shabazz
Nobody seems to know about Betty Sanders early life and family background. She was born, however, in Detroit, Michigan, and is the daughter of Shelman Sandlin and a woman named Sanders. Sanders was an illegitimate child, one with a troubled upbringing, and she was given over to foster parents, growing up in a nice, middle class house in Detroit. Due to her difficult childhood, she devoted her life to African American childcare, health and sexual education.
After high school, Shabazz left the comfortable home of her adoptive parents in Detroit to study at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), a well-known historically black college in Alabama. It was at Alabama that she encountered her first racial hostilities. She did not understand the causes for the racial issues, and her parents refused to acknowledge these issues. She mentioned this in an autobiographical essay she wrote in 1992, published in Essence Magazine: “They thought [the problems] were my fault.”‘
Betty moved to NYC to get away from the narrow minded views of the white South, studying nursing at Brooklyn State Hospital. One night, her friends took her to hear Malcolm X speak about the Nation of Islam at an Islamic temple in Harlem. Essence Magazine, a magazine specifically for American black women, stated in 1992 that Betty’s friend offered to introduce her to Malcolm X after he was done speaking.
Betty’s reaction to that was “Big deal!” But she went to the speech. She later continued in the interview: “But then, I looked over, and saw this man on the extreme right aisle sort of galloping to the podium. He was tall, he was thin, and the way he was galloping, it looked as though he was going someplace much more important than the podium…well, he got to the podium, and I sat up straight.”
Betty was quite impressed with Malcolm X’s speech. Afterwards, she caught him backstage, and they discussed racism in Alabama. She started attending all of his speeches and lectures, and by the time she graduated nursing school, she was a member of the Nation of Islam. As Elijah Muhammad bestowed the last name “X” on all of his followers, she was now Betty X, like Malcolm X, no longer encumbered with “a slave name.”
Betty X stated further in her autobiographical Essence interview: “I never ‘dated’ Malcolm as we think of it because at the time single men and women in the Muslims did not ‘fraternize’ as they called it. Men and women always went out in groups.” Once she had completed her nursing studies in 1958, Malcolm X proposed marriage, and by the time Betty X was 23 and Malcolm X was 32, they were legally wed in the Moslem church.
Like her husband, Betty walked the Hajj to Mecca, becoming a Sunni Muslim, and she maintained her faith in the Nation of Islam’s role in Malcolm X’s assassination until 1995. She then had a public reconciliation with Louis Farrakhan, then the leader of the Nation of Islam.
Betty X further stated in her Essence Magazine interview: “I really don’t know where I’d be today if I had not gone to Mecca to make Hajj shortly after Malcolm was assassinated. And that is what helped put me back on track. I remembered one of the things Malcolm always said to me is, ‘Don’t be bitter. Remember Lot’s wife when they kill me, and they surely will. You have to use all of your energy to do what it is you have to do.”
After the assassination, Betty X had at least six girl children to raise as a single mother. Her six daughters were: Attalla, Qubilah, Ilyasah, Gamilah, and the twins Malikah and Malaak. She was determined to raise her daughters in the Islamic faith, and one of them, Ilyasah Shabazz, wrote a famous autobiography, “Growing Up X.”
Betty X was a registered nurse, continuing her education at Jersey City State College, as she needed to provide for her large family. She also wanted to set a good example and provide a strong female role model for them. She received a degree in public health education, next attaining her Master of Arts in the same area in 1970. She finally received a Ph.D. in education administration at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
Disaster Strikes – Betty X Dies
Malcolm Shabazz, Betty X’s 12 year old grandson, set fire to her apartment in June of 1997. He had been living with his grandmother, and it was said he was unhappy about this, wanting to live with his mother Qubilah in Texas. Betty X suffered burns over 80 percent of her body and underwent five skin replacement operations, being in intensive care for three weeks in the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, New York. Doctors said most patients like her had only a 10 percent chance of going on living, so Betty X died of third degree burns on June 23, 1997. She was 61 years old. Her grandson served only eighteen months in juvenile detention for his heinous crime, even though it had resulted in the death of his grandmother.
About the time that she died, Betty X had headed the Office of Institutional Advancement and Public Relations at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. A larger crowd than the one attending Malcolm X’s funeral came to her memorial service at New York City’s Riverside Church. Prominent Black Community and other civic leaders spoke at the service: Coretta Scott King, widow of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers, Maya Angelou, famous poet, Ossie Davis, actor, and four New York City mayors: Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, Edward Koch and Abraham Beame; Maxine Waters, US Representative, and Governor George Pataki of New York. Plus, the US Secretary of Labor, Alexis Herman, gave a tribute from Pres. Bill Clinton.
Black civil rights leader Jesse Jackson released a statement saying, “She never stopped giving and she never became cynical. She leaves today the legacy of one who epitomized hope and healing.”
They held Betty X’s funeral at NYC’s Islamic Cultural Center, and her wake was held at the Unity Funeral Home in Harlem, where her husband’s wake had been held 32 years ago. Then Sister Betty X Shabazz was buried next to her husband, Brother Malcolm X Shabazz, at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. There is also a large mosque, major in Harlem, named after Sister Betty X Shabazz.
Malcolm X – Betty X’s Husband
Malcolm was largely into Truth and Justice – but not the American Way. He felt “patriotism” was a crutch certain people were using to get at his own kind, as they were not letting them have their full civil and human rights. However, potent patriotic forces, albeit Black Nationalist ones, were what inevitably killed him. He had stood up to the leadership of the Nation of Islam, perhaps mostly as a political power play, and it had cost him. But he had grown in his appreciation of desegregation and the human rights of all people, and in his acceptance of the Islamic faith.
Many people would talk to him strangely about his life. They asked him when he was going to become a college bound law student, and enter reality. I feel like he had entered circumstances from the moment he was born that precluded such a thing, not because he was incapable of studying law, but because of the extreme oppression against him. Primarily, he had to deal with that by becoming a militant, anti the USA, and anti everything white society stood for, including to some extent the law.
But Malcolm X did manage to become a kind of amateur lawyer. He kept some black men from going to jail, by lining them up, well dressed, outside of a courtroom in a famous and televised incident. They all seemed to want leadership from him. He kept trying to relate to and lead what was going on, but as he knew, his life was predestined to be short.
Robin DG Kelley, a famous black historian, wrote:
“Malcolm X has been called many things: Pan African, father of Black Power, religious fanatic, closet conservative, incipient socialist, and a menace to society. The meaning of his public life, his politics and ideology, is contested in part because his entire body of work consists of a few dozen speeches and a collaborative autobiography whose veracity is challenged…Malcolm has become a sort of tabula rasa, or blank slate, on which people of different positions can write their own interpretations of his politics and legacy.
“Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas can both declare Malcolm X their hero.”
I am certain that to Sister Betty X Shabazz, Brother Malcolm X Shabazz was her greatest hero, and that he was also a hero to their six (or eight) children as well, not to mention most of Black America during the 1950s and 1960s.
In his book about Malcolm X, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” in the final scenes about his assassination, Alex Haley wrote: “Sister Betty came through the people, herself a nurse, and those recognizing her moved back. She fell on her knees, looking down at his bare, bullet pocked chest, sobbing, ‘They killed him!'”
At least the two of them, Brother Malcolm X Shabazz and Sister Betty X Shabazz, met and loved each other, however briefly. They became a famous and beloved pair, about whom one story says they met during the taping of a Nation of Islam radio show, and another story says they met after a speech given by Malcolm X. At any rate, they finally made it to being with each other. This is an event which many people born on this Earth are not fortunate enough to enjoy in the course of their lifetimes.
