Malcolm X’s family plan to sue authorities for his death: Who was Malcolm X and how did he die?

“For years, our family has fought for the truth to come to light concerning his murder,” Shabazz said in a press conference in the Harlem auditorium where the assassination had taken place. Shabazz was only two when her father was killed, and was present in the audience on the day of the crime.

The lawsuit will be seeking damages in the range of $ 100 million, reported Reuters.

Who was Malcolm X?

Malcolm X is one of the United States’ most iconic historical figures, a hero of the civil rights movement, and one of black America’s most radical voices. “I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man’s problem,” he once said. A proponent of black nationalism, Malcolm X would join the Nation of Islam in the 1950s, where his militant anti-racism earned him followers and enemies alike.

Malcolm’s views on black freedom were widely considered controversial at the time. He was a proponent of black people creating their own structures of wealth and power and rejected the then-increasingly popular notion of racial integration and acceptance. He famously referred to white people as “blue-eyed devils” and strongly believed in self-defence as an alternative to the nonviolent resistance promoted by fellow civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Malcolm X is often presented as the philosophical contrast to the integrationist and more moderate Martin Luther King Jr. But such characterisation is overblown. Malcolm X was a far more complex thinker than how he is often portrayed and MLK himself was far more radical than his modern liberal co-option suggests.

Crucially, both men stood for the basic dignity and humanity of their fellow African Americans, a dignity that had been denied to them first through the horrors of slavery and then through the cruelty and segregation of Jim Crow America.

“The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings. … We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans…”, Malcolm X said in one of his many fiery speeches.

Why was Malcolm X assassinated?

In the 1960s, Malcolm’s views slowly started to change. This is largely attributed to his travel through Africa, where he interacted with Muslims of all races. He began to question parts of Nation of Islam’s ideology, and in 1964, he left the organisation. This decision came amidst growing tensions between him and the organisation’s leader Elijah Muhammad.

After he left, members of NOI started to see him as a traitor and some even threatened to kill him. “I live like a man who is dead already,” he once told reporters, The Washington Post reported.

On February 21, 1965, during a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, the 39-year-old Malcolm was attacked by three gunmen, who rushed onto the stage and opened fire right in front of his pregnant wife and three of his daughters. One of the gunmen was shot and apprehended by his bodyguards at the scene while the others were all arrested and charged with murder within a week.

What is the controversy around Malcolm X’s death?

While one of the assailants, Islam, admitted to shooting Malcolm X, he did not name his accomplices and insisted that the other two men implicated, Aziz and Halim, were not responsible for the murder. While multiple eyewitnesses located both Aziz and Halim at the scene of the crime, there were contradictions in these statements. Despite this, all three of them were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

After the docuseries “Who Killed Malcolm X?”, debuted on Netflix in 2020, Cyrus R. Vance Jr, the Manhattan district attorney, announced that he would reopen the case. During the subsequent investigation, it was found that key evidence that could have exonerated the two was withheld by the authorities.

Notably, one of the witnesses, a man named Ernest Greene, had said he had seen a man with a shotgun. But his description of this man did not match Islam’s but rather pointed to William Bradley, another member of the NOI. Bradley’s description was with the FBI at the time, and Halim even identified him as one of the assassins, The New York Times reported. Furthermore, according to the latest investigation, the FBI was aware that the NOI was targeting Malcolm, ahead of his assassination.

Investigators said that if the available evidence had been presented at the time of trial, Aziz and Halim could have been acquitted. Thus, both Aziz and Halim were exonerated following a 22-month investigation, with their families suing and winning $26m from New York City and $10m from New York state.

A larger conspiracy?

“It’s not just about the triggermen,” said Benjamin Crump, the lawyer representing Malcolm X’s family. “It’s about those who conspired with the triggermen to do this dastardly deed,” he said.

There have always been murmurs of a larger conspiracy to assassinate Malcolm X. It is a well-known fact that American federal agencies and police departments were actively trying to infiltrate civil rights organisations at the time.

Notably, journalist Louis Lomax wrote in 1987 that John Ali, national secretary of the Nation of Islam, was a former FBI agent. Malcolm X had confided to a reporter that Ali exacerbated tensions between him and Elijah Muhammad and that he considered Ali his “archenemy” within the Nation of Islam leadership. On the night before the assassination, Ali had a meeting with Islam, one of the men convicted of killing Malcolm X.

In 2021, members of Malcolm X’s family made public what they referred to as a letter written by a deceased police officer which stated that the New York Police Department and FBI were behind the assassination. Attributed to Raymond Wood, an undercover officer of the NYPD, the letter stated that he had been pressured by his supervisors to lure two members of Malcolm X’s security detail into committing crimes that resulted in their arrest just days before the fatal shooting. This then left a hole in Malcolm X’s security detail, a hole which the assassins exploited.