On February 21, 1965, while delivering a speech in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom to a crowd of about 400 people, Malcolm X was shot in the chest and killed by a group of armed assassins. Three members of the Nation of Islam, an organization Malcolm X had once belonged to, were arrested and convicted of first-degree murder. Although in 1964, one year before his death, Malcolm X returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, proclaiming his new-found belief that blacks and whites could live in brotherhood, he is still remembered as a charismatic advocate of black separatism who rejected Martin Luther King, Jr's methods of non-violent protest.