Malcolm X’s former home in Queens remains unmarked, 60 years after his death
For some historians who specialize in Malcolm X, it's a sign of a mainstream effort to dismiss complicated a nuanced civil rights leader.
Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights 60 years ago. But another key location in his story remains unmarked and largely forgotten: a modest brick house in East Elmhurst, Queens, where Malcolm X lived with his wife and daughters in the final years of his life.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s homes in Atlanta and Montgomery, Alabama, are preserved as historic landmarks, and his assassination site at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis became the National Civil Rights Museum. But nothing marks Malcolm X’s residence. The home has no plaque, official designation or visible acknowledgment of its significance. An honorary street sign reading “Malcolm X Place” sits at one end of the block, but the house itself blends into the quiet, residential neighborhood, its history known only to those who seek it.
A house under siegeThe house was central to the turmoil that marked Malcolm X’s final months. On Feb. 14, 1965, he had just returned from Europe and was scheduled to speak in Detroit the next day, but wanted to spend one night at home with his pregnant wife and their four daughters, according to Mark Whitaker, author of “The Afterlife of Malcolm X,” a forthcoming book about the civil rights leader’s posthumous legacy.
Around 2:45 a.m., assailants threw Molotov cocktails through the living room windows. Malcolm X hustled his family into the backyard; few of their possessions survived the fire, the New York Times reported at the time.
“Malcolm assumed it was done by members of the Nation of Islam, likely on the orders of [the group’s leader] Elijah Muhammad,” Whitaker said.
At the time of the firebombing, Malcolm X had broken with the Nation of Islam, the Black separatist movement he’d helped to build. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, he publicly embraced Sunni Islam and a broader, more global vision of racial justice, disavowing Black separatism and violent revolution.
After he confronted Muhammad in 1963 about the Nation of Islam leader impregnating several female assistants, the organization suspended Malcolm X, citing inflammatory comments he’d made about the JFK assassination. It moved to evict him from the East Elmhurst house, which it owned. Malcolm X claimed that Muhammad had given him the house as a gift, and a protracted legal fight over the eviction played out in court, Whitaker said.
Despite Malcolm X’s suspicions, there’s never been an official determination as to who was responsible for the attack on his home.
“The house really mattered to Malcolm because he was not a wealthy man. He lived on whatever the Nation of Islam gave him in terms of salary, which wasn’t much,” Whitaker said. “For him, the house stood for the one thing he could do for his family to give them a sense of security.”
After the firebombing, Malcolm X’s family stayed with neighbors, Whitaker said. He and his wife Betty Shabazz found a new home they wanted to buy on Long Island, but couldn’t afford the down payment and sought an advance on his unpublished autobiography, Whitaker said.
A few days later, on Feb. 21, Malcolm X was killed while preparing to speak at the Audubon Ballroom, which has been partially preserved and now contains the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center. The murder remains unsolved. Two men who had been convicted of the crime were exonerated in 2023 after a lengthy investigation.
A forgotten landmarkOver the years, various attempts have been made to commemorate the home, which is now a private residence. The honorary street naming happened in 2005.
In 2007, then-City Councilmember Hiram Monserrate secured funding for a bust of Malcolm X outside the house, but the project was never completed.
More recently, conversations about landmarking the house have gone nowhere, in part because the current residents of the house do not want it landmarked, according to current Councilmember Francisco Moya’s office, which worked on the effort.
The Nation of Islam owned the house until 1987. The family that took ownership of it did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Some Malcolm X historians and scholars are frustrated by what they see as minimal efforts to preserve important sites from his biography. Among them is Najha Zigbi-Johnson, an adjunct professor of architecture at City College and editor of “Mapping Malcolm,” a scholarly essay collection about his legacy in physical places. She considers the minimal efforts to mark his assassination site and home part of a mainstream effort to dismiss Malcolm X’s role in the civil rights movement, and to ignore his eventual turn toward a peaceful Sunni ideology.
Columbia University had planned to tear down the Audubon Ballroom in the 1980s, but after community protests led by Shabazz, a small portion of the original building was preserved. The other part of the block was redeveloped into space for biomedical research laboratories.
She said the ballroom's treatment “reflects this larger national trend to forget Malcolm X.”
“Malcolm X experienced two deaths,” Zigbi-Johnson said. “This physical death, on Feb. 21, and then somewhat of a metaphysical death in the miscaricaturing of his politics.”
While King is celebrated as a nonviolent civil rights leader, Zigbi-Johnson said, Malcolm X is more often portrayed as extremist and divisive. But she argues that ignores his nuanced complexity and tenderness, especially after his conversion to Sunni Islam and commitment to peace in his late 30s.
“Malcolm had a butterfly collection,” Zigbi-Johnson said. “He carried a love sonnet in his pocket and wrote poetry to his wife before going on trips abroad.”
“The importance of remembering and honoring the physical spaces that Malcolm lived in helps center his political memory as something we can engage with in a very tangible way,” she said.
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