1936? - 1997

Also known as Betty Jean Sanders
African-American educator

Betty Shabazz was born in Detroit, Michigan. She used several different dates of birth: 1936, 1938 and 1940. She was soon adopted by Lorenzo and Helen Malloy and raised in their religious, middle-class family (she never took their last name: Sanders is her birth mother’s name; Malik Shabazz was Malcolm X’s name when they were married).

After high school she attended Tuskegee Institute, then nursing school at Brooklyn State Hospital. A friend invited her to listen to a speech by Malcolm X, met him that evening, and in 1958 she joined the Nation of Islam. In 1958 she and X were married. They had four daughters, and Shabazz was pregnant with twins, when in 1965 she and the girls saw him assassinated as part of an internal power struggle within the Nation of Islam.

In spite of having six children to raise, Shabazz returned to college and got a masters in health administration and a PhD in education from the University of Massachusetts. In 1976 she became a faculty member at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.

Qubilah, one of their daughters, was ordered by the court to undergo psychological counseling and treatment for substance abuse, and her son, Malcolm, went to live with his grandmother. He set fire to the home and Shabazz died three weeks later from extensive burns.
[Last updated: 2 JUL 2004]

References

“Betty Shabazz.” [Includes portrait]. Available at: http://www.edwardsly.com/shabazzb.htm [Last visited: 1 July 2004]
“Betty Jean Sanders Shabazz.” Available at: http://www.brothermalcolm.net/family/bettyshabazz.html [Last visited: 1 July 2004]

© Roger Ridley Fenton