Special Delivery: Malcolm X Postcards Sent to Clevelander Up For Auction

A few months after activist Malcolm X caused controversy by leaving the Nation of Islam, he took a trip. From Saudi Arabia to Libya, Malcolm X sent brief postcards in 1964 to a friend in Cleveland, Gloria Owens, who was the sister of Maceo X Owens, the secretary at a temple where Malcolm ministered. Those cards remain some of the few artifacts from that period of the influential leader’s life. But now, those rare paper slivers of history are on the market in an online auction that starts Aug. 25, hosted by Los Angeles collector Nate D. Sanders. “The postcards support what he was saying and writing at the time,” says auction manager Laura Kirk. “They complement every historical thing we know about Malcolm during this era.” Here are a few insights to gain from these important pieces of correspondence.

They debut Malcolm X as “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.” By the time Malcolm X was writing from Algeria, he had converted to the Sunni faith after his landmark pilgrimage to Mecca. And the leader’s epiphany shows. In many of those following letters home, he signs off not as “Bro Malcolm,” as in a September 1964 letter from Kuwait, but with his newfound Sunni title. “When he went to Mecca, and toured the Middle East, he was incredibly inspired,” says Kirk, “because there were people of all races there. He actually felt afterwards that Islam could help to mend race relations in the U.S.”

They present a renewed Malcolm. “Since I’ve seen what a mess can be made of things by narrow-minded people,” Malcolm wrote to Gloria from Kuwait in September 1964, “I’m still traveling, trying to broaden my scope.” Often elusive and hazy in meaning, the postcards act as more than just a little note to his East Cleveland-based friend. Kirk says they’re capsules of a man awakened, one in the process of eschewing the teachings of Elijah Muhammad — a move that would get Malcolm killed the following year. “Who knows exactly who he was referring to by ‘narrow-minded people’,” Kirk adds. "But he was concerning on leaving the Nation of Islam at that time. It’s adds to what he was thinking.”