Feb. 21, 1965 - “I live like a man who’s already dead,” Malcolm X said last Thursday in a two-hour interview in the Harlem office of his Organization for Afro-American Unity. This afternoon, he was shot to death at a rally of his followers at the Audubon Ballroom in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.
“I’m a marked man,” he said last week. “It doesn’t frighten me for myself as long as I felt they would not hurt my family.”Asked about “they,” Malcolm smiled, shook his head, and said, “Those folks down at 116th Street and that man in Chicago.”
The references, Malcolm confirmed, were to his former associates in the Black Muslim movement and to Elijah Muhammad, head of the movement. Before Malcolm left the movement last year, he was the minister of the Black Muslims’ Harlem mosque at 116th St. and Lenox Ave.
“No one can get out without trouble,” Malcolm continued, “and this thing with me will be resolved by death and violence.”
Why were they after him?“Because I’m me,” he replied. “I was the spokesman for the Black Muslims. I believed in Elijah Muhammad more strongly than Christians do in Jesus. I believed in him so strongly that my mind, my body, my voice functioned 100% for him and the movement. My belief led others to believe.
“Now, I’m out. And there’s the fear if my image isn’t shattered, the Muslims in the movement will leave. Then, they know I know a lot. As long as I was in the movement, anything Elijah Muhammad did was to me by divine guidance.”Malcolm said he knew many things that made him a “dangerous man to the movement.
“I know brothers in the movement who were given orders to kill me. I’ve had highly placed people within tell me, ‘Be careful, Malcolm.’ The press gives the impression that I’m jiving about this thing. They ignore the evidence and the actual attempts.”
Tonight, Malcolm’s older sister said her brother knew he was marked for death.
Mrs. Ella Mae Collins, proprietor of a rooming house in Boston’s South End, said she spent yesterday with her brother in New York, and he had told her: “They are after me. They won’t rest until they get me.”
Mrs. Collins said her brother, who she described as ‘living in fear,’ carried a gun as he walked about in his room yesterday and had kept peering through drawn window shades.
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