Private papers and personal effects covering two decades of the life of slain civil-rights leader Malcolm X have been placed on long-term deposit at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and will be available to researchers as early as May 19, 2004, which would have marked Malcolm X’s 79th birthday.
Malcolm X’s daughters Ilyasah and Malaak Shabazz turned over to the library for a 75-year period two large crates of hundreds of pages of materials—including letters, speeches, journals, and photographs—that had been the subject of an ownership dispute.
The documents, which have yet to be assessed by scholars, were stored for years at the home of Malcolm’s late wife Betty Shabazz in Mount Vernon, New York, and had been removed after her death in 1977. The material was to be sold at auction by others claiming rights to the property last March after it was discovered in a Florida storage locker. The sale later was called off, and the family reached an agreement that allowed them to recover the entire collection.
“This is the one of the single most important collections to come to the New York Public Library,” NYPL President Paul LeClerc said. It is also believed to the largest collection of Malcolm X’s papers in one place. Other papers are housed at Columbia, New York, and Emory Universities, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and scattered among more than 200 private collectors.
Posted January 13, 2003.