Betty Shabazz: Uncovering the Woman Behind the Widow Veil

Betty Shabazz: Uncovering the Woman Behind the Widow Veil

Setty Shabazz: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X By Russell Rickford (Sourcebooks, $35)

There are, of course, always the women left behind. In the case of Betty Shabazz, she remained in the looming shadow of Malcolm X for 39 years - though she was only married to him for seven. On Feb. 21, 1965, Shabazz was inducted into a sorority in which no one really wants membership: the widows of slain Black leaders. Along with Myrlie Evers-Williams (who wrote the foreword to this biography) and Corelta Scott King, she came to be viewed as a living extension of her husband's legacy - a perspective that obscured far more about Shabazz than it illuminated.

Russell Rickford's excellent new biography of Shabazz does much to highlight the enigmatic woman who was born to difficult circumstances in Michigan, yet would go on to study nursing, marry the Black leader most feared by Whites at the time, raise six daughters as a single parent and earn a doctorate in education. Relying upon an impressive array of interviews with friends and family members, newspaper accounts and archival materials, Rickford, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University, pulls together the disparate strands of this fascinating life. What emerges in the pages of Betty Shabazz is a portrait of a self-possessed woman with a penchant for salty humor whose human frailties were augmented by an incredible reserve of inner strength.

Born to a teenage mother in Depression-era Detroit, Betty was informally adopted by a childless couple who owned a local shoe store. Helen and Lorenzo Malloy, active members of the local Urban League chapter, took in the 11-year-old Betty after her mother locked the doors to the home one night - punishing her for staying outside too late. After studying nursing at Tuskegee Institute for five semesters, she transferred to Brooklyn State College School of Nursing in 1953.

Her introduction to the Nation of Islam came via a nurse's aide who invited her to a dinner given by the organization. It was there in 1956 that she first saw the Muslim firebrand who was to become her husband. While the meeting was, in her words, "the turning point in my life and racial consciousness," her first impression of Malcolm X was that the slim minister could use a good meal. After what can best be described as an elliptical courtship, the two were married in January 1958.

There was to be no quiet domestic bliss for Malcolm and Betty -though they seemed to have had a genuine and loving relationship. The stresses and demands of his role as Elijah Muhammad's spokesperson were taxing in the extreme, so much so that Betty briefly left Malcolm after the birth of each of their first three daughters. The situation intensified as Malcolm's relationship with Muhammad unraveled. Betty Shabazz, Rickford asserts, was likely aware of Muhammad's extramarital liaisons before her husband and may have tried to nudge him toward the terrible realization about his mentor.

Rickford deftly narrates the horrifies of the day of Malcolm's assasination at the Audubon Ballroom: "There was an eerie hush, as if the room had plunged into a vacuum. Everyone had hit the floor when the fusillade began. They lay there now, splayed about like cadavers. The killers stood frozen in their topcoats, their guns smoking at their sides."

A quarter of a million people sojourned to Atlanta for the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968; after her husband's death, Shabazz found herself stranded in HarJem, sorting friend from enemy, and planning her husband's funeral amid threats. Shabazz - who was pregnant with twins when her husband was assassinated - was forced to endure the spectacle of Malcolm's own brother denouncing him for his alleged betrayal of Muhammad and the stinging rejections of 15 Harlem churches before finding one that would host his wake.

As admirable as her grace was in that moment of despair, the tendency to freeze her in that moment - as a permanently grieving widow - left much unsaid and unrealized about Shabazz.

Income from Malcolm's autobiography helped, and with funds from a memorial project, she purchased a home in suburban Mount Vernon, N. Y. The demands of single parenthood, Shabazz conceded, were exhausting. (She sometimes found herself invoking her late husband's memory with questions like, "Would your father be proud of that?") She struggled to give her daughters a sense of normalcy - enrolling them in Jack & Jill and exclusive prep schools. On some level she succeeded, creating a life whose hallmarks were familiar: bills, grades, summer camps and managing six puberties. Given the looming memory of Malcolm X in national history, this was no minor accomplishment.

In the ensuing years, she enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, hoping, in Rickford's phrasing, "to transcend the Widow Shabazz." She traveled from New York to Massachusetts weekly, earning a doctorate in education in 1975. But the ghosts of 1965 were never fully quieted. In January 1995, Qubilah Shabazz was arrested for conspiring to assassinate Louis Farrakhan. Ironically, Betty Shabazz was forced to reconcile with Farrakhan -whom she believed was involved in the assassination of her husband - to spare her daughter a prison sentence.

Qubilah's emotionally troubled adolescent son, Malcolm, came to live with his grandmother in April 1997. Two months later he set a fire in the hallway of her home, hoping to cause enough trouble to be sent back to live with his mother. Betty Shabazz might have survived the blaze had she not run through the house, frantically searching for her grandson who was already outside. She died on June 23, 1997.

Betty Shabazz is a thorough, insightful and engaging book, befitting its enigmatic - and ultimately heroic - subject.

William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2004
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