Garments for One Another

Abstract

Chapter Three examines the lives of two of the most prominent Muslim women in the United States in the 1950s and 60s: wife/and later widow of Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, and jazz singer Dakota Staton. The Muslim-ness of both women was inexorably linked, and oftentimes, wholly predicated upon, to their status as wives of Black American Muslim men. Through an exploration of how each woman approached Islam and marriage in their daily lives, the chapter argues that Shabazz and Staton viewed their marriage and Muslim identities concurrently, and through racial and gendered contexts in which they approached marriage as an integral component of their practices of Islam.