By Abayomi Azikiwe
On Sunday afternoon February 21, 1965, Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) was gunned down as he stood at the podium of the Audubon Ballroom to address hundreds of people attending a rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).
Since this fateful day, there has been much speculation over who actually was behind the martyrdom of Malcolm X.
Although three members of the Nation of Islam, two from New York City and the other captured at the scene from New Jersey, were convicted in 1966 for the murder of the revolutionary leader, many believed that they were used as pawns in a larger conspiracy to eliminate the OAAU Chairman. Talmadge Hayer was caught while attempting to flee the ballroom and was taken into custody by the New York City police outside the building while he was being held and beaten by those attending the rally.
Hayer, during the trial, testified that he was one of the assailants. However, he declared that the other two co-defendants were not involved. Many years later in 1981, in an exclusive interview with journalist Tony Brown, Hayer revealed the names of the others who carried out the killing of Malcolm X.
These individuals who were, in all likelihood, still alive at the time were never pursued by the New York police or the FBI. Even at the time immediately following the assassination, the New York police and prosecutors suppressed eyewitness statements which placed those responsible for the killing at the scene of the crime.
The surviving daughters of Malcolm X filed a $100 million lawsuit against the New York police, the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in November 2024. Attorney Ben Crump is the lead counsel in the lawsuit and says that his complaint is based on the failure of the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to protect Malcolm X.
Crump called for the declassification of the files related to the surveillance of Malcolm X over a period of years while he worked as a minister, spokesman and organizer for the NOI and later the Muslim Mosque Incorporated (MMI) and the OAAU. The attorney was also quoted by CBS news as saying that Malcolm X’s security team had been arrested several days before his assassination, a claim never made before in which he provided no documentation.
Thousands of Pages of FBI Files Have Been Declassified and Released Since the Late 1970s
Despite Crump’s call for the release of classified documents on Malcolm X held by the FBI, CIA and the NYPD, the reality is that more than 9,000 pages of files have already been released since at least 1977 when the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was utilized to obtain the heavily redacted documents extending from 1953, when Malcolm X was living in Inkster, Michigan with his older brother Wilfred X, who was also a member of the NOI. The FBI files, many of which were shared with other intelligence agencies as well as the State Department and several divisions of the U.S. military, are available online.
The files released by the FBI are based upon information received from special agents, informants, wiretaps and open sources such as newspaper and magazine articles along with radio and television broadcasts recorded and transcribed by bureau operatives. Other information was taken from obvious collaboration with fellow governmental agencies such as the U.S. Passport Office, diplomatic outlets along with airline companies.
Assessments found in the FBI files clearly reveal the atmosphere of panic regarding the work of Malcolm X particularly after his intervention on behalf of the OAAU at the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Summit in Cairo during July 1964. The entire 8-page memorandum presented by Malcolm at the gathering was reprinted and circulated to various FBI field offices along with the State Department, the CIA, military intelligence units and other authorities. Not only was the memorandum circulated, they also copied the resolution passed by the OAU in support of the African American struggle for human rights.
In one of the documents in the FBI files it says that Malcolm X’s speeches in Ghana were damaging to U.S. interests. It noted that he had spoken before members of the Ghana Parliament which was dominated at the time by the ruling Convention People’s Party (CPP) led by President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. The memorandum later said that Malcolm had spoken at the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba which was founded by the Ghanaian and Pan-Africanist leader in 1961 in order to train cadres for the party as well as freedom fighters from other African states. The government documents said that the Nkrumah Ideological Institute was communist-oriented and already hated the U.S.
Obviously, U.S. diplomatic personnel, many of whom were CIA agents with official cover, followed his travels and organization work in Africa, West Asia and Europe. During his April-May 1964 sojourn overseas, the FBI documents convey an account of Malcolm’s lecture at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria where his remarks received thunderous applause. A co-panelist at the lecture attempted to defend U.S. domestic and foreign policies and was run out of the hall by the students. A similar situation occurred at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon.
The OAAU’s strategy of linking the African American and African liberation struggles together was a cause for concern internationally and inside the U.S. A report found in the FBI files dated December 22, 1964, reported on a public rally held on December 20 where Malcolm spoke extensively on the African Revolution emphasizing the crimes being committed by the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the eastern Congo. This same gathering, which the FBI said attracted an estimated 175 people, was addressed also by Detroit Attorney Milton Henry, a leader in the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL) and a co-founder of the independent Freedom Now Party which ran candidates for state offices in Michigan during the November 1964 elections.
Later the rally heard from leading members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the personage of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, who also served as the Vice-Chairwoman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The MFDP had challenged the all-white segregationist Democratic delegates at the national convention held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In addition to Mrs. Hamer, the SNCC Freedom Singers performed at the rally.
During this gathering Malcolm X called for the formation of self-defense units to protect Civil Rights workers in the South, particularly in the aftermath of the combined police and Ku Klux Klan kidnapping and brutal lynching of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner who were involved in the Freedom Summer project aimed at registering African Americans to vote in Mississippi.
A memorandum to Director J. Edgar Hoover dated January 15, 1965 cites a CIA communication which reports on an article published by the New China News Agency (NCNA) released on November 5, 1964 indicating that Malcolm X had praised the successful testing of a nuclear weapon. The article was datelined from Accra, Ghana and said in part that:
“In an interview with the NCNA here he said that China’s nuclear test helped the cause of the Afro-Americans, but also that of all people of the world fighting against the imperialists. Referring to the present struggle of the American Negroes in the firm support given to this struggle by the Chinese people, he said that the United States imperialists would never lose their grip on the 22 million colonized American Negroes before the peoples of Asia and Africa cast off the yoke of imperialism and became strong. ‘Bearing this in mind, we therefore appreciate the great strides that the Chinese people have made towards true independence in the unlimited contribution they are making to help the oppressed peoples in other parts of the world to throw off the chains of imperialism’.”
In response to the political impact of Malcolm X on behalf of the OAAU, the then U.S. Assistant Attorney General J. Walter Yeagley wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover encouraging him to pursue evidence for the potential indictment of Malcolm X for violations of the Logan Act. This slave-era law was adopted by the government in 1799 amid tensions between the U.S. and France. The act makes it a crime for an unauthorized American citizen to negotiate with a foreign government in a dispute between the United States and that foreign government. It is a felony which could be punishable with up to three years in prison.
The Plot Reaches a Crescendo
The intensive surveillance of Malcolm X domestically and internationally strongly indicates that the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies were well aware of the movements and activities of the Pan-Africanist leader. Malcolm conveyed during a mass meeting of the OAAU on Monday, February 15, 1965, just one day after his home was bombed, that police were well aware of the criminal operations of the NOI and doing nothing about it. He suggested that the authorities were waiting until the job was done before they stepped in.
On the day of his assassination Malcolm X was scheduled to address a rally of the OAAU at the Audubon Ballroom. As he began to speak, five assailants shot him numerous times resulting in his death.
The lawsuit filed by his family members has plenty of documented evidence from the authorities that the U.S. government and the local New York Police Department could have prevented the assassination. In reality, the martyrdom of Malcolm X was viewed by the ruling class and the capitalist state at the time as a necessary effort to further ensure the dominance of U.S. imperialism in Africa and throughout the world.
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