Having skirted disaster when a trove of Malcolm X’s personal archives was nearly thrown out because a family member neglected to pay bills at a storage unit, the estate of the slain civil rights leader has fallen behind on payments at another space, Page Six has learned.
According to sources, the estate of Malcolm X and wife Betty Shabazz owes $2,447 to a Manhattan Mini Storage in Inwood after neglecting to pay its bill since December.
The contents of the upper Manhattan space were scheduled to have been auctioned off yesterday, sources said. But reps of the estate intervened just in time and now have until Aug. 20 to pay up.
The situation echoes a near-disaster in 2002 when a bill for $600 went unpaid by daughter Malikah Shabazz at an Orlando, Fla., storage unit, and a valuable collection of Malcolm X’s personal archives was bought for a song by a flea-market owner who had bid on them in a move out of A&E’s bargain-hunter series “Storage Wars.”
The coveted documents surfaced when they were about to go up for sale by eBay-owned Butterfields. But the 2002 auction was halted at the 11th hour when Malcolm’s heirs questioned the documents’ ownership, prompting a legal fight in an ongoing probate battle between three heirs, Malikah, Ilyasah and Malaak Shabazz.
But a rep for the Malcolm X estate tells us the Manhattan storage bill is being settled and no precious materials were in danger of being lost.
“The notices were going to the wrong party,” L. Londell McMillan explained. “It’s a non-issue. The administrator who handles [the bills] was out of the country. The storage [facility] is being paid.” He added: “There is nothing valuable to the estate in [the storage unit]. Those things are in various intellectual property holdings, and would not be in mini-storage . . . All is well, there’s no issue.”
An employee at the Manhattan storage facility said he could not comment on clients but, “We’d never auction off anything that belonged to Malcolm X.”