Shabazz Dies 3 Weeks After Being Set on Fire

Betty Shabazz, the widow of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, died Monday in a Bronx hospital after struggling for more than three weeks to overcome massive burns from a fire that prosecutors say was set by her 12-year-old grandson.

Her uphill fight elicited expressions of sympathy and prayers from civil rights leaders and ordinary people who turned out by the hundreds to donate blood for her treatment.

“My father lived strong, mother died honorably,” the oldest of Shabazz’s six daughters, Attallah, said outside Jacobi Medical Center as she stood with her sisters. “Now we must adapt to living a life without parents.”

“That was a very strong lady,” said Thomas L. Clark Jr., president of the Carver Federal Savings Bank in Harlem where the blood drive took place. “Up to the last moment, she was concerned about her fellow man . . . she loved life, was full of life, and lived her life so she could give back to others.”

President Clinton phoned Shabazz’s daughters with condolences. “Hillary and I were saddened to learn of the passing of Betty Shabazz earlier today,” Clinton said in a statement. “She devoted a long career to education and to uplifting women and children. She was also a loving mother and our prayers are with her family in this hour of grief.”

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Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced the death of Shabazz, 61, at a news conference after being informed by the head of New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corp. Shabazz died at 2:46 p.m. EDT.

Giuliani, who visited the hospital soon after she was burned, expressed sympathy to family members, who, he said, have “been through a very difficult period in hoping and praying she would make it.”

Shabazz had entered the hospital on June 1 after being critically burned in the fire in the hallway of her apartment in Yonkers, N.Y.

Hours after the gasoline-fed blaze, her grandson was arrested and accused of starting the fire because he wanted to return to living with his mother, Qubilah Shabazz, in San Antonio.

Prosecutors would not comment Monday on charges against the youngster, saying it was a matter for the Family Court.

In 1994, Qubilah Shabazz was charged with plotting to murder Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who Betty Shabazz had long believed was behind the 1965 murder of Malcolm X. She reconciled with Farrakhan at a fund-raiser for her daughter’s legal defense. Farrakhan denied involvement in the shooting, but conceded that his anti-Malcolm writings had helped create the atmosphere leading to the killing.

The indictment was dismissed this year as part of an agreement requiring Shabazz’s daughter to undergo drug treatment and commit no crimes for two years.

Because of the magnitude of the burns over 80% of her body, physicians had notified family members that Shabazz only had a 10% chance of recovery.

But the family asked the doctors to institute aggressive measures to try to save her life. She underwent five operations to remove charred skin and to cover the burns.

Last week, her condition worsened as she faced the most common complications of burns--infection and fluid loss.

From the start, the outpouring of sympathy for her plight was remarkable. A parade of visitors, including Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., poet Maya Angelou, Giuliani, activist Dick Gregory, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former New York City Mayors David N. Dinkins and Edward I. Koch traveled to the hospital.

Seven hundred people gave blood on her behalf. Prayers were said in churches for the woman who overcame tragedy once in her life, became a respected voice in the civil rights movement and a model of courage after adversity.

Shabazz was in her second year of nursing school when she met her future husband at a Nation of Islam meeting in New York in 1956. He was 31 years old and a minister.

“He was just an awesome kind of guy. He was disciplined, he knew what he was going to do, and if he said he was going to do it, he did it. He had a certain kind of worldly maturity that women my age at the time just dreamed about,” she once told a television interviewer in London. “And I was not disappointed.”

Later, Malcolm called her from Detroit and proposed.

“I was raised to be happy. I wasn’t raised to deal with any kind of agenda,” Shabazz later told audiences. But she supported her husband when he split with the Nation of Islam, and on Feb. 21, 1965, after Malcolm X received a series of death threats, Shabazz sat in the audience with her children at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan.

Shooting began just as Malcolm X started to speak. Three men with ties to the Nation of Islam were convicted in the killing.

“I can remember, shortly after the assassination, I found one of his old hats, and I put it on,” Shabazz later told and interviewer. “I was comforted by it. It was a lot like a security blanket.”

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She went on to raise her six daughters and to earn a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1975. Born in Detroit, she had also studied at the Tuskegee Institute, Brooklyn State Hospital School of Nursing and the Jersey City State College.

At the time of her death, she headed the office of institutional advancement at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, after serving as the school’s director of public relations.

“In the passing of Betty Shabazz, the nation has lost a great treasure,” said the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ. “Although her life exposed her to injustice, sorrow, hatred and violence, she did not answer in kind.”