Malcolm X: Fifty years after, his star becomes brighter

After being shot dead in New York on Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm Shabazz, known as Malcom X' legacy lives on and his star become brighter on daily basis.
His ideas are at the core of a national debate over the treatment of African-Americans and other minorities by the U.S. criminal justice system that heated up after last summer's killings of unarmed black men by white police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City.
Those two galvanizing cases echo an incident in April 1957, when a black man named Johnson Hinton was beaten by police in New York's Harlem neighborhood and a young Malcolm X famously came to his defense. The incident helped propel him to the national stage.
"Some of what you see in terms of the pride of being black in America, or just being black period, come from the teachings of Malcolm X," said Angelo Pinto, 32, an organizer for Justice League NYC, one of the groups that staged rallies across the country last fall to protest police violence against minorities.
He was a powerful orator who rose to prominence as the national spokesman of the Nation of Islam, an African-American Muslim group that opposed integration with whites.
Later, he broke with the organization and moderated some of his earlier views on the benefits of racial separation.
He was killed at New York's Audubon Ballroom while preparing to deliver a speech. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted in the shooting.
Five decades later, the Audubon is long gone and the building now houses a bank, a restaurant and Columbia University offices. It also is home to the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, set up by the activist's late wife and six daughters.
Malcolm X's eldest daughter, Attalah Shabazz, was a schoolgirl in 1965 when she witnessed her father's death. "I was watching it as it all happened," she said.
She remembers her father as "one of those persons you wait for all day to share that special something."
Since then, Attalah has worked to recast the image of her father, who critics have said rejected non-violence as a strategy, in contrast with the approach championed by Martin Luther King Jr., the leader to whom Malcolm X is most often compared.