Attallah Shabazz

Attallah Shabazz (born November 16, 1958) is an American actress, author, diplomat, and motivational speaker, and the eldest daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz.

Shabazz was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 16, 1958.

Shabazz says her name is Arabic for "the gift of God" and she is not named after Attila the Hun as her father's autobiography states.

In February 1965, her sister Qubilah woke the family in the middle of the night with her screams; the house was on fire.

She received religious education at the Islamic Center at Riverside Drive and 72nd Street in Manhattan.

With her sisters, she joined Jack and Jill, a social club for the children of well-off African Americans.

As a teenager, she attended the United Nations International School.

In 1979, Moneta Sleet Jr.. of Ebony brought Shabazz together with Yolanda King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, for a photo shoot.

Before the meeting, both women were worried that the bad feelings between their fathers might spoil the encounter.

Instead, they found that they liked one another and had many things in common besides being in their early 20s: they both lived in New York City, they were aspiring actresses, their birthdays were one day apart, and they shared an optimism and interest in activism that one might expect from the eldest children of civil rights martyrs.

Within a few months, King and Shabazz went on a joint lecture tour and co-wrote a play for teenage audiences, Stepping into Tomorrow.

The play explored difficult themes about growing up through the story of six friends seeing one another again at a ten-year high school reunion.

Responding to critics who found the play too soft, Shabazz said that it was not meant to be a "cerebral piece of writing", but to be "socially uplifting" and "give direction".

Stepping into Tomorrow quickly grew into a collaboration called Nucleus, an eight-member theatre troupe based in New York and Los Angeles that performed in about 50 cities a year.

In the mid-1980s, Shabazz and King co-wrote another play, Of One Mind, about their fathers and what course history might have taken had they not been killed.

Their collaboration lasted about twelve years.

Although officials at the school prepared for "an onslaught of militancy" when 13-year-old Shabazz enrolled, "instead I walked in wearing my lime-green dress, my opaque stockings, my patent leather shoes, and carrying my little patent leather pocketbook," she recalled in a 1982 interview.

After graduating, she studied international law at Briarcliff College, but the school shut down before she graduated.

Shabazz told People in 1983 that she sometimes had flashbacks.

"I would bump into people from the Nation of Islam, and I thought they were going to do the same thing to me."

Shabazz had an apolitical upbringing in a racially integrated neighborhood in Mount Vernon, New York.

Her family never took part in demonstrations or attended rallies.

Ebony included Shabazz and King among its "Fifty Young Leaders of the Future" in 1983.

Shabazz recalled that night in a 1989 interview: "I almost didn't realize how dangerous it was—my father was that calm, that together a parent. My eyes were burning, I was coughing, but before you knew it, he had us all out of there, and we were safe at a friend's house. My mother's like that too. Together."

A week later, Shabazz was at Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, with her mother and sisters, when her father was assassinated.

She was six at the time and reportedly the only one of his children who has clear memories of him.

In December 1990, shortly after celebrating the tenth anniversary of Stepping into Tomorrow, King and Shabazz found themselves at the center of a controversy concerning a long-scheduled performance of the play in Arizona.

In November, voters in that state had defeated two competing ballot measures that would have established a paid holiday for state employees on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

(The day was an unpaid holiday.) Civil rights groups called for a boycott of the state as a result of the vote.

Days after the two women announced they would proceed with their performance, King cancelled her appearance, saying an understudy would take her place.

Shabazz performed as scheduled.

In February 1992, Shabazz spoke at the funeral of her godfather, Alex Haley.

Before his death, he had asked her to write a foreword to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which her father had written with him.

Shabazz signed a contract in 1994 to write her memoirs.

The book's publication was postponed several times.

A 1997 review of the book, From Mine Eyes, called it the "powerful and uplifting story of a young girl who came of age during the height of the civil rights movement and is now able to share, in vivid detail, the most tragic events of her life".

The new edition of the book, featuring Shabazz's foreword, was published in 1999.

Black Issues Book Review called the foreword "superbly realized".

In 2005, she told journalist Gabe Pressman that she remembered the events of that day "vividly":

"It was a Sunday morning and we were at the Wallaces, this is Aunt Ruby's [ Ruby Dee's] brother's house, and my father called and said to my mother, "Why don't you come down?," and that was out of sorts, and I knew it, but at the same time excited. And so two of my little sisters—I had three little sisters at that time—but the baby was six months, and my two sisters after me, we all got ready to go down.... My mother was pregnant with my baby sisters, the twins. We thought it was a boy at the time, so we referred to her stomach as Malik, and six months later they were born. But I remember the day, and it changed everything."