Harlem was mostly asleep when around the Black Muslim Mosque Number 7, on the top floor of
a four-story building at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, an explosive sound at 2:15 A.M. ripped
the night. Firemen were instantly summoned by the four policemen who had been guarding the
sidewalk entrance to the mosque. Within a few minutes flames burst through the building's roof
and leaped thirty feet into the air. For the next seven hours firemen would pour water into the
building. On an adjacent roof they found an empty five-gallongasoline can, a brown, gasoline-
stained shopping bag, and oily rags. Southbound IRT subway service was re-routed for a while,
also three bus lines. At the spectacular five-alarm fire's height, a wall of the building collapsed; it
smashed two fire engines at the curb and injured five firemen, one seriously, and also a
pedestrian who had been across the street buying a newspaper. By daybreak, when the fire was
declared "under control," the Black Muslim mosque and the Gethsemane Church of God in Christ
on the floor beneath it were gutted, and seven street-level stores, including the Black Muslim
restaurant, were "total losses." Fire Department sources said that replacing the ruined equipment
would cost "around $50,000." Joseph X of the Black Muslims, who once had been the immediate
assistant of Malcolm X, said that Elijah Muhammad's followers had two alternative mosques to
meet in, one in Brooklyn and the other in Queens, Long Island. Both these mosques were under
continuous police guard.
Across the nation in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon two policemen discovered a fire
beginning in the San Francisco Black Muslim Mosque, and quickly extinguished it. Kerosene had
been splashed on the sidewalk and door and set afire.
The body of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz originally had been scheduled to go on public view at 2:30
P.M. Tuesday. Crowds stood in line behind police barricades waiting to be admitted and the
policemen wherever one looked included numerous patrol cars and even sharpshooters on the
roofs around the Unity Funeral Home. But the telephoned bomb-threats which had begun shortly
after noon made necessary two evacuations of the funeral home for bornb-squad searches,
which proved futile. A search was conducted even in the 43rd Street offices of the New York
Times after a man telephoned complaining of an editorial about Malcolm X and said, "Your plant
will be destroyed at four o'clock."
At the funeral home in Harlem, policemen inspected all packages and floral pieces being
delivered, as well as the large handbags of women mourners. It was 6:15 P.M. when a cordon of
policemen arrived flanking Sister Betty and four close relatives and friends who entered the
funeral home in a glare of flashbulbs. "She's a black Jacqueline Kennedy," observed a white
reporter. "She has class, she knows what to do and when, she handles herself beautifully."
It was 7:10 P.M. when the family party emerged and left. After ten minutes, the first of the waiting
public was admitted. Between then and an hour before midnight, two thousand people, including
scores of whites, had filed past the open coffin in which the body lay dressed in a dark business
suit, a white shirt and dark tie, with a small, oblong brass plate above it inscribed,
"El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz-May 19, 1925-Feb. 21, 1965."
Malcolm X followers had been canvassing with growing anxiety for a Harlem church that would
accept the Saturday funeral. Officials of several churches had refused, including a spokesman for
the community's largest church, Abyssinian Baptist, of which Congressman-Reverend Adam
Clayton Powell is the pastor; others which turned down requests, according to the Amsterdam
News, included the Williams C.M.E. Church and The Refuge Temple of The Church of Our Lord
Jesus Christ. Then the funeral was accepted by Bishop Alvin A. Childs for the Faith Temple,
Church of God in Christ located at 147th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The Faith Temple, a
former movie theater which had been converted fifteen years previously, could seat a thousand in
its auditorium and another seven hundred in its basement. Bishop Childs, who in 1964 had been
elected as Harlem's "locality mayor," told the press that it was "as a humanitarian gesture" that he