Michael X

Michael de Freitas
Michael X posing in front of the poster for the film Khartoum
Born	1933 Trinidad and Tobago
Died	16 May 1975 Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Cause of death	Execution by hanging
Occupation	Activist
Political party	Black Liberation Army

Michael X (1933 – 16 May 1975), born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad and Tobago, was a self-styled black revolutionary and civil rights activist in 1960s London. He was also known as Michael Abdul Malik and Abdul Malik. Convicted of murder in 1972, Michael X was executed by hanging in 1975 in Port of Spain's Royal Jail.

Michael de Freitas was born in Trinidad to an "Obeah-practising black woman from Barbados and an absent Portuguese father from St Kitts". Encouraged by his mother to pass for white, "Red Mike" was a headstrong youth and was expelled from school at the age of 14. In 1957, he immigrated to the United Kingdom, where he settled in London and worked as an enforcer and frontman for the slum landlord Peter Rachman.

By the mid-1960s he had renamed himself "Michael X" and became a well-known exponent of Black Power in London. Writing in The Observer in 1965, Colin McGlashan called him the "authentic voice of black bitterness."

In 1965, under the name Abdul Malik, he founded the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS).

In 1967 he was involved with the counterculture/hippie organisation the London Free School (LFS) through his contact with John "Hoppy" Hopkins, which both helped widen the reach of the group, at least in the Notting Hill area, and create problems with local police who disliked his involvement. Michael and the LFS were instrumental in organising the first outdoor Notting Hill Carnival later that year.