The question of a government conspiracy has shrouded the assassination of Malcolm X since the moment gunfire erupted in the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965.
A lawsuit filed by Malcolm’s daughters presents a historic opportunity for the agencies involved to lay to rest the ghosts of their corrupt past and provide healing for a still-festering wound.
The FBI’s illegal surveillance, infiltration and manipulation of racial justice leaders and organizations — to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify” the movement and to prevent them “from gaining respectability” —began to be exposed in 1971.
But, as the daughters’ complaint makes clear, “To this date, FBI documents, including those relevant to this complaint that have been publicly revealed rather than destroyed or still suppressed, contain deletions of crucial names and conduct. On information and belief, there is more information that exists in government archives that would further substantiate these allegations.”
What has never been in dispute is that Malcolm’s murder was retaliation for his public denunciation of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. In a 1969 memo, on “action taken with Bureau approval” to discredit the Nation of Islam, the FBI appears to assume responsibility for developing “factional disputes,” the most notable being Malcolm’s.
The four men historians believe carried out the assassination along with Talmadge Hayer, who confessed to the shooting, were never arrested, and the sequence of events that led them to approach Hayer never have been explained.
The two men convicted in 1966 along with Hayer, now known as Mujahid Abdul Halim, were exonerated last year after an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office found the New York Police Department and FBI withheld key evidence.
That investigation did not identify a conspiracy among the government agencies and individuals named in the lawsuit. But justice and common decency demand answers to the questions raised by the evidence outlined in the complaint.
On Feb. 9, 1965, just 12 days before the assassination, French authorities denied Malcolm entry into the country. At the time officials offered no explanation, saying only that his presence was “undesirable.”
A year later, journalist Eric Norden reported “a highly-placed North African diplomat” said French authorities had “quietly informed” his country’s intelligence apparatus of a CIA plot to murder Malcolm, “and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil.”
Days after Malcom returned from France, an undercover NYPD detective told the department he’d seen “a dry run” of Malcolm X’s assassination, which he believed would happen during Malcolm’s planned speech at the Audubon Ballroom the next Sunday.
The next day, two members of Malcolm X’s security team were arrested and detained in connection with a bogus plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty.
“It was my assignment to draw the two men into a felonious federal crime, so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcom X’s Audubon Ballroom door security on February 21, 1965,” the undercover officer who drew the security team into the plot wrote in a letter unveiled after his death.
The unanswered questions that have lingered for nearly six decades after Malcom’s death have contributed to mistrust among Black Americans and other communities of color of law enforcement and many other government institutions.
The FBI, CIA, and NYPD could make tremendous strides in restoring that trust by responding to the lawsuit with transparency, honesty and a spirit of true reconciliation.
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.
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