Today, May xix, 2015, marks what would have been Malcolm X'due south ninetieth birthday. His life was cut tragically short in 1965, however, when three Nation of Islam members shot him expressionless at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.

X, who was born in Nebraska and raised in various cities of the Midwest, emerged in the late 1950s equally a charismatic Nation of Islam government minister based in New York. Under the tutelage of Reverend Elijah Muhammad, Ten led the Nation of Islam to furious prominence within the ceremonious rights movement, providing a militant, separatist contrast to the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1957, Malcolm X's primeval mass-sit-in against the NYPD wasn't his first brush with the law, but it was certainly his boldest.

It all started at the Nation of Islam'due south Temple No. seven, at present known as Masjid Malcolm Shabazz (and disassociated from NOI), on 116th Street in West Harlem. On Apr 26, 1957, local law officers cornered a suspect, Reece Poe, and fought him to the ground when he resisted arrest. Every bit several NYPD officers were beating Reece Poe, NOI member Johnson Hinton interrupted the scene. Hinton reportedly shouted to the officers, "Yous're non in Alabama! This is New York!"

The officers and so turned their nightsticks on Hinton, as fearful onlookers watched.

Appointed by the Reverend Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X had served as government minister of Temple No. 7 since 1953. (Though Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little, he updated his proper noun in 1950, during the six-year prison house term in Boston when X converted to Islam.) Onlookers eventually alerted X to the police altercation that had taken place outside the mosque. After learning that Hinton had been taken into police force custody without medical attention to his injuries, X rallied a few hundred protesters to march on the 28th precinct on West 123rd Street to petition for Hinton's release.

When officers finally escorted Hinton to Harlem Hospital, the protesters followed.

Spike Lee dramatized the uptown march from the precinct to the hospital, where doctors treated Poe's injuries and then turned him back over to the NYPD. Police force then escorted Hinton from the infirmary dorsum to the precinct, where he was one time once more detained.

According to Peter Goldman's biography of Malcolm X, Deputy Inspector McGowan of the NYPD recruited X's friend and neighbor James Hicks, managing editor of the New York Amsterdam News, to talk Malcolm down. When Hicks met up with X at the epicenter of the protests on 123rd Street betwixt Sixth and Seventh Avenues, the Nation of Islam had mobilized a disciplined oversupply of thousands. The police force were outnumbered just unyielding until the following morning, Apr 27, when the Nation of Islam paid Hinton'south bail and escorted him toSydenham Hospital in Harlem.

Earlier the NYPD clobbered Reece Poe, the Nation of Islam was a curious simply marginal development in American political life. Despite its expanding influence in the black communities of New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles, white America had all the same to face up the radical teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the charisma of NOI'south leadership.

Less than two years after the Hinton incident, New York-based WNTA-TV reporter Louis Lomax pitched ABC news anchor Mike Wallace on a full-length documentary covering the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad refused to allow himself or his subordinates, including Malcolm X, to be interviewed past a white reporter, and then Lomax, who is black, conducted the interviews. Wallace hosted the segment and provided narrative voice-overs.

The documentary, titled "The Hate That Hate Produced," exposed the largest black separatist move in America. "US News, The New York Times, Fourth dimension, Newsweek, the [Detroit] Free Press, and others followed upward," Wallace told an interviewer in 1988. "It was the offset time that the Black Muslims came to the attending of White America."

Fifty-eight years after Malcolm 10 and the Nation of Islam first gained major traction and national headlines, the civil rights motion marches onward. From Alabama to Staten Isle, to Ferguson and Baltimore, activists have rallied to challenge national indifference to police brutality, disproportionate incarceration, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and other issues affecting blacks in the U.South.

While the Nation of Islam'southward occasionally violent separatism is no longer and so broadly appealing, the modernistic civil rights movement is however indebted to both Malcolm and Martin, two martyred revolutionaries who, ultimately, weren't as irreconciled or bitterly divided as the pundits would have y'all believe.