بتي شباز

بتي شباز Betty Shabazz (born Betty Dean Sanders; May 28, 1934 – June 23, 1997), also known as Betty X, was an American educator and civil rights advocate. هي زوجة مالكوم اكس.

بتي شباز
وُلِدَ	Betty Dean Sanders (1934-05-28)مايو 28, 1934 Pinehurst, Georgia, U.S. or Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
توفي	يونيو 23, 1997(1997-06-23) (aged 63) New York City, U.S.
المثوى	Ferncliff Cemetery
أسماء أخرى	Betty X
التعليم	Tuskegee University Brooklyn State College School of Nursing
الزوج	Malcolm X (ز. 1958; died 1965)
الأنجال	6, including Attallah, Qubilah, and Ilyasah
الأقارب	Malcolm Shabazz (grandson)

Shabazz grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where her foster parents largely sheltered her from racism. She attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she had her first encounters with racism. Unhappy with the situation in Alabama, she moved to New York City, where she became a nurse. It was there that she met Malcolm X and, in 1956, joined the Nation of Islam. The couple married in 1958.

Along with her husband, Shabazz left the Nation of Islam in 1964. She witnessed his assassination the following year. Left with the responsibility of raising six daughters as a widow, Shabazz pursued higher education, and went to work at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York.

Following the 1995 arrest of her daughter Qubilah for allegedly conspiring to murder Louis Farrakhan, Shabazz took in her ten-year-old grandson Malcolm. In 1997, he set fire to her apartment. Shabazz suffered severe burns and died three weeks later as a result of her injuries.

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 Leaving the Nation of Islam

للمزيد من المعلومات: Malcolm X § Leaving the Nation of Islam

On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam. He and Betty X, now known as Betty Shabazz, became Sunni Muslims.

 Assassination of Malcolm X

Betty Shabazz in February 1965, after identifying Malcolm X's body at the New York City Morgue

On February 21, 1965, in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X began to speak to a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity when a disturbance broke out in the crowd of 400. As Malcolm X and his bodyguards moved to quiet the disturbance, a man rushed forward and shot Malcolm in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun. Two other men charged the stage and fired handguns, hitting Malcolm X 16 times.

Shabazz was in the audience near the stage with her daughters. When she heard the gunfire, she grabbed the children and pushed them to the floor beneath the bench, where she shielded them with her body. When the shooting stopped, Shabazz ran toward her husband and tried to perform CPR. Police officers and Malcolm X's associates used a stretcher to carry him up the block to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Angry onlookers caught and beat one of the assassins, who was arrested on the scene. Eyewitnesses identified two more suspects. All three men, who were members of the Nation of Islam, were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

 After Malcolm's assassination

 Pilgrimage to Mecca

In late March 1965, Shabazz made the pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj), as her husband had the year before. Recalling the experience in 1992, Shabazz wrote:

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. ... That is what helped put me back on track. ... Going to Mecca, making Hajj, was very good for me because it made me think of all the people in the world who loved me and were for me, who prayed that I would get my life back together. I stopped focusing on the people who were trying to tear me and my family apart.

Shabazz returned from Mecca with a new name that a fellow pilgrim had bestowed upon her, Bahiyah (meaning "beautiful and radiant").

 Raising her family

Raising six children by herself exhausted Shabazz. Providing for them was difficult as well. Shabazz's share of the royalties from The Autobiography of Malcolm X was equivalent to an annual salary. In 1966, she sold the movie rights to the Autobiography to film-maker Marvin Worth. She began to authorize the publication of Malcolm X's speeches, which provided another source of income.

 Volunteer work

Shabazz at St. Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago

 Louis Farrakhan

For many years, Shabazz harbored resentment toward the Nation of Islam—and Louis Farrakhan in particular—for what she felt was their role in the assassination of her husband. Farrakhan seemed to boast of the assassination in a 1993 speech:

Was Malcolm your traitor or ours? And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours? A nation has to be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats.

In a 1994 interview, Gabe Pressman asked Shabazz whether Farrakhan "had anything to do" with Malcolm X's death. She replied: "Of course, yes. Nobody kept it a secret. It was a badge of honor. Everybody talked about it, yes." Farrakhan denied the allegations, stating "I never had anything to do with Malcolm's death", although he said he had "created an atmosphere that allowed Malcolm to be assassinated."

In January 1995, Qubilah Shabazz was charged with trying to hire an assassin to kill Farrakhan in retaliation for the murder of her father. Farrakhan surprised the Shabazz family when he defended Qubilah, saying he did not think she was guilty and that he hoped she would not be convicted. That May, Betty Shabazz and Farrakhan shook hands on the stage of the Apollo Theater during a public event intended to raise money for Qubilah's legal defense. Some heralded the evening as a reconciliation between the two, but others thought Shabazz was doing whatever she had to in order to protect her daughter. Regardless, nearly $250,000 was raised that evening. In the aftermath, Shabazz maintained a cool relationship with Farrakhan, although she agreed to speak at his Million Man March that October.

Qubilah accepted a plea agreement with respect to the charges, in which she maintained her innocence but accepted responsibility for her actions. Under the terms of the agreement, she was required to undergo psychological counseling and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse for a two-year period in order to avoid a prison sentence. For the duration of her treatment, Qubilah's ten-year-old son, Malcolm, was sent to live with Shabazz at her apartment in Yonkers, New York.

 Death

On June 1, 1997, her 12-year-old grandson Malcolm set a fire in Shabazz's apartment. Shabazz suffered burns over 80 percent of her body, and remained in intensive care for three weeks, at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, New York. She underwent five skin-replacement operations as doctors struggled to replace damaged skin and save her life. Shabazz died of her injuries on June 23, 1997. Malcolm Shabazz was sentenced to 18 months in juvenile detention for manslaughter and arson.

The gravesite of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz in Ferncliff Cemetery

More than 2,000 mourners attended a memorial service for Shabazz, at New York's Riverside Church. Many prominent leaders were present, including Coretta Scott King and Myrlie Evers-Williams, poet Maya Angelou, actor-activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, New York Governor George Pataki, and four New York City mayors—Abraham Beame, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani. U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman delivered a tribute from President Bill Clinton. In a statement released after Shabazz's death, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said, "She never stopped giving and she never became cynical. She leaves today the legacy of one who epitomized hope and healing."

Shabazz's funeral service was held at the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City. Her public viewing was at the Unity Funeral Home in Harlem, the same place where Malcolm X's viewing had taken place 32 years earlier. Shabazz was buried next to her husband, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

 References

 Footnotes

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 Works cited

• Brown, Jamie Foster (1998). Betty Shabazz: A Sisterfriends' Tribute in Words and Pictures. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-85294-2.
• Evanzz, Karl (1992). The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 978-1-56025-049-4.
• Haley, Alex (1992). "Alex Haley Remembers". In Gallen, David (ed.). Malcolm X: As They Knew Him. New York: Carroll & Graf. pp. 243–250. ISBN 978-0-88184-850-2. Originally published in Essence, November 1983.
• Lanker, Brian (1989). Summers, Barbara (ed.). I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang. ISBN 978-1-55670-063-7.
• Levine, Suzanne Braun; Thom, Mary (2007). Bella Abzug. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-29952-1.
• Perry, Bruce (1991). Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill. ISBN 978-0-88268-103-0.
• Rickford, Russell J. (2003). Betty Shabazz: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks. ISBN 978-1-4022-0171-4.
• Shabazz, Betty (نوفمبر 1995). "From the Detroit Riot to the Malcolm Summit". Ebony. pp. 62–64.
• Shabazz, Betty (يونيو 1969). "The Legacy of My Husband, Malcolm X". Ebony. pp. 172–182.
• Shabazz, Betty; as told to Susan L. Taylor and Audrey Edwards (فبراير 1992). "Loving and Losing Malcolm". Essence. pp. 50–54, 104–112.
• Shabazz, Betty (1990) [1969]. "Malcolm X as a Husband and Father". In Clarke, John Henrik (ed.). Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. pp. 132–143. ISBN 978-0-86543-201-7.

 Further reading

• Cobb, William Jelani (مارس–أبريل 2004). "Betty Shabazz: Uncovering the Woman Behind the Widow Veil". The Crisis. p. 52.
• Edwards, Audrey (أكتوبر 1997). "The Fire This Time". Essence. pp. 74–76, 155–156.
• "First Ladies of the Struggle". Ebony. Johnson Publishing Company. فبراير 1984. p. 122.
• Malcolm X; with Alex Haley (1965). The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press. OCLC 219493184.
• Nakao, Annie (فبراير 22, 2004). "A Young Author Looks Back at the Tragedy—and Triumph—of Betty Shabazz's Life". San Francisco Chronicle.
• Shabazz, Ilyasah; with Kim McLarin (2002). Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X. New York: One World. ISBN 978-0-345-44495-0.
• Shabazz, Ilyasah (فبراير 2, 2013). "How Betty Shabazz Persevered After Her Husband, Malcolm X, Was Killed". The Daily Beast.
• Shabazz, Ilyasah (فبراير 27, 2018). "My Mother, Dr. Betty Shabazz, Taught Me Every Child Deserves to Know They're Worthy". NBC News.

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 External links

• A 1990 interview by David Mills for The Washington Post