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In 1964, shortly after his break with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X made a pilgrimage to Mecca, the holy Muslim city in Saudi Arabia that was the birthplace of the founder of Islam. He also visited several other African and Arab nations. While on this trip, he wrote a highly publicized letter expressing his own faith as a follower of traditional Islam and renouncing the Black Muslim teaching that all white men are evil. He became an orthodox Sunni Muslim (Sunni Islam). He also adopted a religious name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, meaning the Malcolm (or Malik) who is from the tribe or family of Shabazz and has made the Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca. However, most people in the United States continued to call him Malcolm X, a name he did not reject.
When Malcolm X returned to America, he held the first rally for a black nationalist group he had founded, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). This group, which had no direct religious ties, advocated racial solidarity and strove to unify all black organizations fighting white racism. At the same time, Malcolm X renounced his previous racism against whites, declaring that in Mecca he had realized that people of all colors were children of Allah
