17. Her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, was none other than Malcolm X’s wife
Unlike Martin Luther King. Jr, Malcolm X wanted a separate all-black state and saw all white people as evil. He later renounced these views when he left the Nation of Islam and promoted racial integration, but in February 1965 his former organization murdered him in Manhattan. Despite popular myth, Malcolm did not live next door to Nina in New York, but his wife, Betty Shabazz, did. Nina heard Malcolm speak in Harlem and approved of some of his ideas, but never met him. ‘Even now I wish I had known the man’, reflected Nina in later life.
