Hall Funeral Home in the Bull’s Head neighborhood. He worked there for 10 years before opening his own business, Joseph E. They were starting a funeral home on Genesee Street and needed a director. In 1972, Hall was recruited to Rochester by Andrew Langston, founder of WDKX-FM, and Herbert Thornton, another well known Black businessman. “I can’t recall him telling people about it,” said George Dailey, his pastor at Prayer House Church of God By Faith in Rochester and a close friend for half a century. “Malcolm was such an important person at the time for Black folks, so for him to have been a part of that - he was quite proud.”Īnd yet, though he spoke about it on occasion to friends, Hall never attempted to gain notoriety from his experience or trade on Malcolm X’s name. “That was a point of pride to have been the person to prepare Malcolm’s body,” Thornton Hillery said. Instead they took the shovels in hand and did the job themselves, despite Hall’s pleading with them to leave. After Malcolm had been lowered into the ground at Ferncliff Cemetery, his followers refused to let white gravediggers toss dirt onto his casket. The funeral was extraordinary until the very end. He helped Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, select a $2,000 wrought copper casket with egg-shell velvet lining, then laid a sheet of protective glass over the top of it in anticipation of the thousands who would file by to pay their respects. “To me this is just another funeral,” he told reporters at the time. Nonetheless, Hall disavowed any particular significance. It will be cremated by fire bombs.” Police flooded the block, using a garage in the funeral home to sequester the floral arrangements and search them for explosives. One anonymous caller made an ominous promise: “Malcolm X’s body will never be buried. Death threats poured in initially it was difficult to find a church willing to hold the ceremony, so great was the concern about a bombing or shooting. More broadly, the extreme tension following the assassination dominated the funeral proceedings. There was so much damage to the body from the gunfire that I didn’t think it appropriate for anyone other than myself or the staff to see.” “Several of the Muslim brothers wanted to remove Malcolm’s suit and put (traditional burial garments) on him,” Hall said in a 1982 interview with about…time magazine.
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For Hall, the assignment was difficult in more ways than one.įrom a physical perspective, the Muslim leader’s body had been torn up by bullets - a dozen wounds from the initial shotgun blast that killed him, then many more from a flurry of handgun shots.
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Malcolm X’s killing at the hands of his former Nation of Islam acolytes was shocking but not surprising his house had been firebombed a few weeks earlier. 21, 1965, Malcolm X himself would receive one of the most memorable funerals Harlem had ever seen. Among the notable Harlemites to mourn there was Malcolm X, who conducted services at Unity on several occasions for Black Muslims. Unity quickly gained a strong reputation. Powell, publisher of the Amsterdam News, a Black New York newspaper, and one of the most successful Black entrepreneurs of his era. Unity had been founded a few years earlier by C.B. Hall graduated in 1956 and took a job at Unity Funeral Home, a Black establishment on Eighth Avenue in Harlem. In that role, Hall met Marilyn Monroe and Thurgood Marshall, among others. While studying he worked as a driver for Giovanni Buitoni, the millionaire president of the eponymous pasta maker. He took it north to the New York School of Embalming and Restorative Arts. His career was enabled by a moment of fortune: a college scholarship from an anonymous donor the year he graduated high school. “There’s a certain type of reverence around the lives of the people in our village, and there’s a respect and a dignity that goes around the preparation of your loved one and their final disposition.”īlack children’s professional aspirations meant little in rural Florida when Hall was growing up. “It’s about care and respect for the people we know, our families,” said Linda Thornton Hillery, a longtime friend whom Hall trained as a mortician in Rochester. That was particularly true in the Jim Crow South, where Black families could not depend on white churches, funeral homes or cemeteries to handle their loved ones’ bodies with respect - or at all. To some, morticians’ work seems ghoulish, but their importance is indisputable at the time of need. “It’s crazy, but that’s what he wanted to do.” “Chickens, frogs, whatever died, he buried it and he had a little funeral service for it,” Singletary said. Instead, Hall said simply, he’d just always wanted to be a funeral director. (Provided photo - Rochester Democrat & Chronicle) Joseph Hall’s funeral Home on West Main Street in downtown Rochester.