CHAPTER 15
When a bleary-eyed Malcolm disembarked at Detroit airport at nine thirty a.m. and checked in at the Statler Hilton hotel, his friends were worried for his safety and his sanity. His home had just been firebombed, and his wife and children were in hiding. His coat jacket stank of smoke; he had grabbed the clothing from the half-burned residence. Since being shaken from sleep by the firebombs, he had not slept. One Detroit friend gave him a sedative; Malcolm napped briefly, yet he had a schedule to keep, and soon he was awakened to be interviewed by WXYZ-TV at four p.m. He was then taken to the Ford Auditorium, where he delivered the keynote address at the first annual Dignity Projection and Scholarship Award, where Sidney Poitier and the opera star Marian Anderson also received honors. The program was sponsored by the Afro-American Broadcasting Company, and chaired by a good friend of Malcolm’s, attorney Milton Henry, who was also a leader of the Freedom Now Party in Michigan.
The Reverend Albert Cleage remembered Malcolm’s troubled condition backstage before the event, tired and irritable from the effects of smoke inhalation, and when he took the podium his usual sharpness had abandoned him. At first he rambled through stories of his African and Middle Eastern travels, but eventually found surer footing on the theme of cultural identity that had recently traced its way through his speeches. He characterized the decade 1955-65 as “the era in which we witnessed the emerging of Africa. The spirit of Bandung created a working unity that made it possible for the Asians, who were oppressed, and the Africans, who were oppressed . . . to work together toward gaining independence.” In the United States, the civil rights movement and the Black Muslims emerged. The Nation of Islam “frightened the white man so much he began to say, ‘Thank God for old Uncle Roy [Wilkins] and Uncle Whitney and Uncle A. Philip.’” The audience laughed; Malcolm not only ridiculed the moderates, he tried to paint the Nation of Islam’s role in the most favorable light. Black Muslims, he said, “made the whole civil rights movement become more militant, and more acceptable to the white power structure. . . . We forced many of the civil rights leaders to be even more militant than they intended.” But in 1965, the situation calls for “new methods. . . . It takes power to talk to power. It takes madness almost to deal with a power structure that’s so corrupt.”
Back in New York, a media circus had gathered outside the charred wreckage of his home. The Molotov cocktails had totally destroyed two of the rooms and left three others severely damaged. In a bold move, Captain Joseph drove to the house and met with reporters standing outside. “We own this place, man,” he protested. “We have money tied up here. . . . He didn’t even give us the courtesy of a phone call.” Allegations swirled suggesting the Nation’s involvement, but Newark minister James Shabazz told reporters that the Nation “was unlikely to bomb a house which it was about to repossess. Of course, we would rather have had our property than a burned-out building. . . . We sure didn’t bomb it.” Speculation was also rife that Malcolm had been responsible after detectives found a small bottle containing gasoline on a child’s dresser, and the Nation amplified these rumors in the press. For his part, Malcolm threw the blame back at them. “I have no compassion or mercy or forgiveness for anyone who attacks sleeping babies,” he told the press. “The only thing I regret is that two black groups have to fight and kill each other off.” Yet to confidants, he broached more conspiratorial possibilities. “The Nation of Islam does not attack women and children,” Herman Ferguson recalled him saying. “The Nation would not have burned my house with my wife and children in that house. That was the government.” He could not have known what Thomas 15X later confirmed, that the NOI had in fact been responsible.
He arrived back in New York on February 15, and spent part of the day checking on damage to the house and conducting interviews. The OAAU had planned to unveil its program that evening, but the firebombing had changed the agenda, bringing out a large crowd of seven hundred to hear what Malcolm had to say about it. Benjamin 2X opened up the evening meeting with a short talk. Malcolm’s speech, “There’s a Worldwide Revolution Going On,” was not his final public lecture, but it was certainly the most significant of those he gave in the last two weeks of his life. He began by mentioning the firebombing, and how stunned he was to see the Nation “using the same tactic that’s used by the Ku Klux Klan.” After bouncing through a few other topics, he circled back to offer his interpretation about how the Nation of Islam had lost its way. Before 1960, he explained, “there was not a better organization among black people in this country than the Muslim movement. It was militant. It made the whole strength of the black man in this country pick up momentum.” But after Muhammad’s return from Mecca in early 1960, things changed. Muhammad began to be “more interested in wealth. And, yes, more interested in girls.” The audience erupted with laughter. According to Malcolm, a conspiracy existed to “suppress news that would open the eyes” of NOI members about their leader. As long as Elijah Muhammad ran the Nation of Islam, “it will not do anything in the struggle that the black man is confronted with in this country.” One proof of this was the Nation’s failure to challenge the terrorist activities of the Ku Klux Klan. “They know how to do it. Only to another brother.” As the audience applauded, Malcolm added soberly, “I am well aware of what I’m setting into motion. . . . But I have never said or done anything in my life that I wasn’t prepared to suffer the consequences for.”
After a one-night trip to Rochester to deliver a speech, he returned to New York City to face the ugly business of emptying his ruined home. The court order to evict the Shabazz household was to be enforced on the morning of February 18, so just after one a.m. he and about fifteen MMI and OAAU members drove out to the house in advance of the city marshal’s arrival. In four hours they cleared the building of all items—furniture, clothing, files, desks, photographs, correspondence—and placed everything in a small moving van and three station wagons. When the marshal pulled up a few hours later along with several assistants, they discovered the house completely vacant.
For a second day, Malcolm was working without sleep, compelled forward through a whirlwind of activity by nerves and sheer will. Several weeks earlier, he had planned to travel to Jackson on February 19, to address a rally of Hamerʹs Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The firebombing forced him to reschedule, and instead of traveling, he gave more interviews. That morning he spoke with the New York Times, telling the paper that he lived “like a man who’s already dead.” The remarks he had been making for months about his own demise took on new gravity in light of the firebombing. “This thing with me,” he said plainly, “will be resolved by death and violence.”
Later that morning he was interviewed by an ABC camera crew. In the afternoon, Malcolm delivered his final public address, before fifteen hundred students at the Barnard College gymnasium, explaining that the black revolt in the United States “is part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era.” His speech cast a wide net and suggested a breadth of reading in its echoes of Du Bois and even Lenin. “We are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor,” he declared, “the exploited against the exploiter.” Malcolm condemned Western industrialized nations for “deliberately subjugating the Negro for economic reasons. These international criminals raped the African continent to feed their factories, and are themselves responsible for the low standards of living prevalent throughout Africa.”
The day then took him to the home of his friend Gordon Parks, the great photographer and writer whom he had first met and come to trust in 1963 when Life magazine assigned Parks to cover the Nation of Islam. For the last year, Malcolm had been sending Parks postcards from abroad, and Parks, intrigued by his friend’s evolving beliefs, had asked Malcolm to sit for an interview. Their tone was friendly, the discussion serious. “Brother, nobody can protect you from a Muslim but a Muslim—or someone trained in Muslim tactics,” Malcolm explained when Parks asked how he was keeping safe. “I know. I invented many of those tactics.” As the interview progressed, Malcolm seemed almost wistful, and his words brimmed with regret for what he perceived as the damage done by the racial intolerance in his past. “Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn’t a ghost of a chance and she went away crying?” Parks nodded. Malcolm continued, “I’ve lived to regret that incident.” He had seen many white students working to assist people throughout Africa. “I did many things as a Muslim that I’m sorry for now.”
During this same week, about sixty MMI and OAAU members met to discuss the firebombing and its security implications. “We said that from that day forward every person that came to one of our rallies was going to be searched,” recalled Peter Bailey, “and this [is] where we made a crucial error—[Malcolm] overruled this because he wanted to break away from this image of searching people before they came to rallies.” Malcolm insisted not only that no one should be searched, but that all MMI security personnel should be unarmed at the event coming up that Sunday, February 21. The sole exception to this rule would be Malcolm’s bodyguard and security chief, Reuben X Francis. Nearly everyone argued against Malcolm’s position, but there was no tradition or practice of democratic decision making inside the MMI and OAAU. When Malcolm demanded something, he received it.
The fact that his guards would be unarmed was surely communicated to the NYPD through its MMI and OAAU informants and undercover police officers. The most important police operative inside the MMI and OAAU was Gene Roberts. A four-year veteran of the U.S. Navy, Roberts was admitted to the NYPD academy, and after induction as an officer was transferred to BOSS as a detective. His first assignment was to infiltrate the newly formed MMI; his NYPD code name was “Adam.” BOSS supervisors took steps to ensure Roberts’s safety and anonymity, even from fellow officers. Along with other undercover cops, his ID photo was kept separately in BOSS headquarters. Roberts was given a cover job as a clothing salesman in the Bronx. By late 1964 Roberts had become an integral member of the MMI security team, standing guard at public events as one of Malcolm’s bodyguards. Throughout his assignment Roberts feared he would be revealed as a cop. Roberts and his wife, Joan, even sent their daughter away to Joan’s parents’ home in Virginia for her safety. Through Roberts, all of MMIʹs and OAAUʹs major decisions and plans would be promptly revealed to the NYPD.
On Saturday, February 20, Malcolm and Betty went looking for a new place to live. A real estate agent escorted them to look at a property in a predominantly Jewish but racially integrated community on Long Island. The house was attractive and to their liking, but the three-thousand-dollar down payment was well beyond their reach. The estimated moving cost for their furniture, clothing, and other personal items was one thousand dollars. Once again, Malcolm looked to Ella to solve his financial problems. Either before or just after the firebombing, when it became clear that Malcolm would have to find a new place to live, he had spoken to her and she agreed to purchase a new home for him under her name; after a short period of time, the title would be transferred to either Betty or Attallah (then age six). All agreed that Malcolm’s name was so controversial that it would have been impossible for him to purchase a home in an integrated neighborhood.
That afternoon, Malcolm called Alex Haley to check in on the state of the manuscript. In a strange and timely coincidence, Haley told him that the completed autobiography would be mailed off to Doubleday by the end of the following week. As night fell, Malcolm dropped Betty off at the home of Tom Wallace, where he stayed and talked for several hours before leaving to check in to the midtown New York Hilton, paying eighteen dollars for a single room on the twelfth floor. He ate dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, the Old Bourbon Steak House, and returned to his room, remaining there until the next day. That evening, Sharon 6X may have joined him in his hotel room.
Later that night, several African-American men entered the Hilton lobby asking for Malcolm’s room number. Someone contacted the hotel’s head of security, who confronted the men. They promptly left.
The plans to murder Malcolm X had been discussed within the Nation of Islam for nearly a year before the morning of February 21, 1965. The delay in carrying out the crime had occurred for several reasons. First, up to the final days prior to the assassination Elijah Muhammad had not given an explicit order that his former national spokesman be killed, and for as much anger as had been stirred up against Malcolm in the preceding months, no one would actually take action without clear orders from on high. Second, although Malcolm was being pilloried as a heretic, he retained the respect and even love of a significant minority of NOI members. Some still recognized the contributions he had made to the sect, despite his errors. The best proof of his lasting legacy was the fierce jihad his enemies waged against him in every NOI mosque, month after month. Third, Malcolm made himself an elusive and difficult target by being out of the United States for twenty-four weeks from April to November 1964. An assassination attempt in an Islamic or African nation would have been unthinkable, even for the Nation of Islam. As long as he was abroad, he was safe.
From where the Nation stood in late 1964, the benefits of killing Malcolm outweighed the potentially significant costs. His involvement in publicizing the individual paternity cases of Evelyn Williams and Lucille Rosary, and his success in establishing MMIʹs connections with international Islamic organizations, had created a new and threatening situation. Some NOI officials fretted that the very legitimacy of the sect might be called into question; the defections of Wallace and Akbar Muhammad only reinforced these fears. They were now convinced that only Malcolm’s death would void the inroads he had made and allow them to once again grow membership and continue business unmolested.
Still, Elijah Muhammad knew that if Malcolm were to suffer a violent death, the Nation of Islam would immediately become the primary suspect. Killing him would almost certainly bring a local and perhaps even federal investigation down on the group, so the assassination’s architects within the Nation would need to devise a plan that could deflect attention from national headquarters such that it might plausibly deny any involvement. From this perspective, the year spent ginning up anger with the membership carried an added benefit: it would be easier to cast the killing as rogue members taking matters into their own hands.
They were helped in creating distance by the punishment structure that had developed within the organization, which had grown into a well-oiled machine as the Nation of Islam came to be dominated by fear and violence in the months after Malcolm’s departure. Most NOI members knew that disciplinary units and hit crews almost never carried out extreme actions in the cities where their mosques were located. In other words, Captain Joseph might authorize Harlem crews to attack Malcolm’s people, or to harass him, but not to commit homicide. Such extreme measures would first have to be authorized by Chicago officials, then carried out by a crew from Newark, Boston, or Philadelphia. The Newark group would have been deployed against Malcolm in New York City, but only on the direct orders of Captain Joseph, Raymond Sharrieff, and John Ali. Other assassination crews may have been organized on both the West and East Coasts.
Finally, the convergence of interests between law enforcement, national security institutions, and the Nation of Islam undoubtedly made Malcolm’s murder easier to carry out. Both the FBI and BOSS placed informants inside the OAAU, MMI, and NOI, making all three organizations virtual rats’ nests of conflicting loyalties. John Ali was named by several parties as an FBI informant, and there is good reason to believe that both James Shabazz of Newark and Captain Joseph fed information to their local police departments as well as the FBI; BOSS carried out extensive wiretapping and/or surveillance against all three organizations, while the CIA had kept up surveillance of Malcolm throughout his Middle Eastern and African travels. Yet while the channels of information remained open among various organizations interested in Malcolm’s silencing, it remains difficult to determine what the FBI and the police authorized—whether, for instance, either subtly suggested certain crimes could be committed by their nonpolice operatives. Circumstantial evidence that they may have done so is both BOSSʹs and the FBIʹs refusal nearly a half century after Malcolm’s murder to make available thousands of pages of evidence connected with the crime.
What has been established is that around the time Malcolm returned from Africa in May 1964, two members of the Newark mosque began planning how to carry out his murder, almost certainly at the direct order of minister James Shabazz, whose control of the mosque necessitated his involvement. The older of the two members was mosque assistant secretary Benjamin X Thomas, a twenty-nine-year-old father of four employed at a Hackensack envelope manufacturing company. His younger partner was electronics plant employee Leon X Davis, of Paterson, New Jersey, about twenty years of age. Both men were active in the Fruit of Islam. Probably while driving Ben’s black Chrysler, the two men spotted young Talmadge Hayer, another Newark mosque member in his early twenties, on a street in downtown Paterson. They invited Hayer into the car, and drove around for a while. Ben and Leon fished for Hayerʹs attitudes about Malcolm and his split from the NOI. Within weeks Hayer became the third member committed to participating in the murder. “I had a bit of love and admiration for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” he later wrote, “and I just felt that like this is something that I have to stand up for.”
In short order, two more NOI members joined the Newark conspiracy. Willie X Bradley was twenty-six years old, tall, dark in complexion, and heavyset, with a history of violence. Wilbur X McKinley, by contrast, was over thirty-five years old, thin, and like three other men in the conspiracy, only about five feet, nine inches tall. The proprietor of a small construction business, Wilbur X had worked at the Newark mosque.
While beatings like the one carried out against Leon Ameer in Boston had become disturbingly common for the Nation, executions of members or dissidents remained extremely rare. Yet as the Nation seemed to flounder in the wake of Malcolm’s defection, brutal disciplinary measures were taken with greater frequency. In the Bronx in late 1964, for example, NOI member Benjamin Brown started his own “Universal Peace” mosque, which featured a large photograph of Muhammad in its storefront window. Since Brown had not requested the prior approval of Mosque No. 7 or the Chicago headquarters, his actions were judged insurrectionary. In the early evening of January 6, 1965, three Muslims dropped by Brown’s mosque, complained about the display of Muhammad’s portrait, and departed. Several hours later, as Brown left the mosque, he was killed by a shot in the back by a .22 caliber rifle. The NYPD investigated the death and arrested three men, all NOI members, two of them Mosque No. 7 lieutenants: Thomas 15X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler. The police found a .22 caliber Winchester repeating rifle in Johnson’s home. It had been fired once, then jammed. Butler and Johnson were subsequently bailed out of jail, but police were convinced that both men were involved in Brown’s shooting, because they were well-known “enforcers.”
Thomas 15X presented a curious case in the Nation’s crusade to poison its members’ opinions. Malcolm’s driver for years, Johnson had abandoned his boss during the schism with the Nation. However, at first, he had not shared the obsession to destroy Malcolm that had infected other FOI members. When in December 1963 Malcolm had been silenced, Johnson stated that like all mosque members he was surprised, but had assumed that the minister soon would be reinstated. Yet after Malcolm established the MMI and OAAU, Johnson firmly sided with the Nation against him. Thomas 15Xʹs hardening of purpose began with the Queens court hearing over the disputed ownership of the Shabazz home. “Malcolm wasn’t just a minister; he was top minister,” Johnson stated, going on to explain that, because of his status, NOI members had agreed to purchase a house for him and his family. “But if you leave, you can’t have that house. We bought you a brand-new car and everything. . . . As long as you are correct, you’ve got that.”
Johnson claimed that the order to assassinate Malcolm came directly from national secretary John Ali, who while visiting New York City gathered Mosque No. 7’s lieutenants separately from Captain Joseph and gave a series of reasons why Malcolm had to die. In the more than four decades that have passed, however, nothing has emerged that could definitively prove or disprove Johnson’s claim of Ali’s involvement. Johnson had great difficulty accepting some of the national secretary’s reasoning, and noted that “the other lieutenants didn’t [buy Ali’s arguments] either.” Several weeks later new instructions came down from Chicago: “Elijah Muhammad sent specific orders. He said, ‘Don’t touch [Malcolm].’” Consequently Johnson and his crew beat up and harassed Malcolm’s people, but no active plan was set in motion to murder him. Johnson claimed, “I used to see Malcolm every day in the Theresa Hotel.” Malcolm would walk over and say, “How you doing?” That his intended victim maintained a degree of civility impressed Johnson.
By the fall of 1964, though, as the rage against Malcolm infected every part of the Nation, Johnson was finally persuaded that Malcolm had to be killed. He received instructions with four other lieutenants “that we had to go to Philly. He was speaking over there . . . and we were supposed to hit him then.” The crew drove to Malcolm’s lecture site (probably on December 26), but Malcolm had anticipated such an assault. “He sent a brother out that sort of favored him.” The would-be assassins chased after the decoy, and Malcolm escaped. Johnson may have also participated in at least one other failed attempt to assassinate Malcolm in Philadelphia. Had he been present at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, Thomas would have eagerly participated in the assassination. The fact that he was absent that afternoon, but was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime, raises profound questions about both U.S. law enforcement and the courts.
During the final weeks of Malcolm’s life, there were two topics that preoccupied his followers. First, the obvious political, ideological, and religious changes Malcolm was experiencing disoriented both his critics and supporters. His evolution seemed to keep unfolding toward tolerance and pluralism along racial and religious lines. In Rochester on February 19, Malcolm had told his audience, “I believe in one God, and I believe that God had one religion. . . . God taught all of the prophets the same religion. . . . Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, or some of the others. . . . They all had one doctrine and that doctrine was designed to give clarification of humanity.” This, along with his increasing statements about not judging men by the color of their skin, produced deep concern among followers who clung to the belief that Malcolm’s new pronouncements were merely cosmetic changes designed to increase his public appeal. Some die-hards like James 67X simply refused to believe that their boss had changed. Betty, for her own reasons, took the same position. But in the Harlem audience that had loyally turned out for Audubon rallies, there was tremendous uneasiness.
After Betty publicly accused Lynne Shifflett of sleeping with Malcolm, Shifflett resigned from her position as general secretary of the OAAU in late 1964. Weeks later, after Malcolm returned home from Africa, he replaced Shifflett with another articulate, intelligent black woman, Sara Mitchell, the young woman from the New Yorker who had written him in June. Although Mitchell shared some of Shifflett’s middle-class views about politics, at heart she was a progressive black nationalist who viewed Malcolm from that vantage point. Describing Malcolm’s 1965 activities years later, for instance, Mitchell argued that “underlying [his] efforts was his still unfulfilled and paramount ambition: the redemption of the ‘disgraced’ manhood of the American Blackman. That was the spur piercing him; it would not let him stop or even rest.” To Mitchell, the two new organizations Malcolm had established performed distinctly different functions. Muslim Mosque, Inc. “was set up to encourage study and consideration of a religious alternative” while the Organization of Afro-American Unity had been designed “for eventual correlation and unification of varied aspects of the black struggle.” She recognized the limitations of both groups, lacking resources and permanent, full-time staff. “Consequently,” she recalled, “deadlines were not met and postponements were inevitable. During the lagging interim, dissatisfied fingers shook in his face from all directions.”
Mitchell could sense that broad elements of the black nationalist community outside the Nation were displeased with Malcolm’s new orientation. Many African Americans had “experienced discreet self-pride” when Malcolm had promoted “black supremacy,” but as his change progressed “they were disappointed and annoyed; for he was no longer providing the bold, caustic, chastising voice.” She also thought that Malcolm’s preoccupation with lecturing at elite universities had a negative effect among sectors of the black dispossessed. “Grassroots black people began wondering if his participation on Ivy League type forums meant that ʹtheirʹ Malcolm was abandoning them for the ‘good life’ and higher stakes.” From an organizational standpoint, Mitchell found this effect highly problematic. Virtually alone within Malcolm’s inner administrative circle, Mitchell worried that her leaderʹs ideological leaps in new directions alienated many old core supporters, while not converting enough new followers. As a result, “isolation and loneliness were prices paid for his radical pioneering.”
James 67X was relieved to be rid of Lynne Shifflett and quickly found a much better working relationship with Mitchell. But the tensions and disaffections that Mitchell described created an atmosphere of uncertainty that benefited opportunists like Charles 37X Kenyatta. During December and part of January, after Malcolm had discovered his involvement with Betty, Kenyatta had disappeared from MMI and OAAU events. On January 24 he finally showed up at an OAAU rally, voicing complaints. He bitterly announced to several members that he was now “finished” with both the MMI and the OAAU. He hinted that James was responsible for financial irregularities. The “best way to get money is to go out and work for it,” Charles advised.
Yet the worries over Malcolm’s positions were trumped by fears about his safety. By early 1965 most of Malcolm’s closest associates believed that without a change of course he would soon be dead, and they grew preoccupied with exploring ways to save their leaderʹs life. They knew that various African governments had offered him positions; Ethiopia had been willing to grant sanctuary; the Saudis would have permitted both him and his family to live in the kingdom as guests of the state. The entire African-American expatriate community in Ghana urged him to bring Betty and the children to Accra. Even Malcolm’s celebrity friends had offered their summer homes and second houses, where the family could live in anonymity. A nervous Ruby Dee had even suggested hiding Malcolm behind a secret wall in her home, a plan vetoed by her husband, Ossie Davis.
On Friday, February 19, Maya Angelou arrived from Ghana, ready to volunteer for the OAAUʹs staff. She had heard about the firebombing and was so shaken that she phoned Malcolm while still at JFK airport. “They almost caught me,” he admitted to her. Malcolm offered to pick up Angelou at the airport, but she informed him that she planned to travel straight to San Francisco to see her family first. However, when she returned home, her mother cautioned her not to work with that “rabble-rouser.” “If you feel you have to do that—work for no money—go back to Martin Luther King,” her mother advised.
Although most Malcolmites thought the Nation of Islam was actively conspiring to kill their leader, many also suspected the U.S. government as being behind the murder attempts. “We all knew what was happening to black people, and [Malcolm] always talked about the government being involved in the problems we were having,” Herman Ferguson recalled. Malcolm supposedly had been worried that “the CIA was out to kill him” when he was abroad, and his rejection at French customs made him further suspect government meddling in his affairs. Ferguson felt that during the final weeks OAAU members did too little to protect Malcolm: “We didn’t pick up on the signs that we should have picked up on. . . . Like cannon fodder, people sat around and talked about the danger that Malcolm was in. It was just like, ‘The brother should be more careful.’ ” Several OAAU members had places in Manhattan that Malcolm could use as safe houses to spend the night. There was some discussion about assigning him drivers, but nothing was done about it. The drift toward disaster continued.
It is difficult to know what Malcolm may have contemplated as he pondered the likelihood of impending murder. For decades after the assassination, James 67X struggled privately with the question of whether his leader truly wanted to die. He had lived for over a year with death threats coming from the Nation, and in his final days he seemed of two minds, partly accepting of what he believed to be his fate and partly wishing or hoping that the problems might disappear and allow him to go back to a normal life. In his last week, he spent much of his time away from his family, so as not to put them in danger. He also appears to have traveled around without bodyguards, though he had long had either James 67X or Reuben X accompanying him wherever he went. He communicated infrequently, and sometimes it was impossible for MMI and OAAU members to reach him with information. As the world closed in on him, Malcolm, always an extremely private individual, kept his own counsel. He fought desperately to shield others’ doubts and fears.
That he continued to harangue the Nation even when he knew that doing so would leave little choice but to strike at him seems to suggest that on some level he may have been inviting death. As Malcolm became more aware of Islamic tradition in his last years, he probably learned about the third Shiite imam, Husayn ibn Ali, and his tragic murder. Husayn was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib and Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. After the murder of Ali and the abdication of his older brother, Hasan, Husayn became the object of allegiance for many Muslims. At Karbala in 680 CE in what today is Iraq, Husayn and a small band of supporters were attacked by religious opponents ; nearly all of them were killed or captured. Husayn died bravely and gloriously, so much so that his murder became central to the Shiite ethos of martyrdom, suffering, and resistance to oppression. The Shiite mourning observance of Ashura reenacts the tragedy as a passion play, in which participants engage in remorse and self-punishment over Husayn’s assassination, and rededicate themselves to the struggle for freedom and justice.
Like Husayn, Malcolm made the conscious decision not to avoid or escape death. This he could have accomplished easily; had he remained in Africa for several years, the level of the Nation of Islam’s animosity surely would have diminished. That he chose to return to the United States meant he recognized the real possibility of being killed at any moment, even while asleep inside his home. If he did not desire death, he still seemed prepared to embrace it as an inevitable part of his personal destiny. Such an interpretation would help explain why Malcolm was so insistent that no one at the Audubon be searched and that none of his men except Reuben X carry weapons. By not checking for guns, Malcolm made the assassination more likely; by disarming his security personnel, he protected them from being targets in an exchange of gunfire as Malcolm’s murderers probably would not shoot unarmed security personnel. If anyone should die, Malcolm may have reasoned, let it be him.
Law enforcement agencies acted with equal reticence when it came to intervening with Malcolm’s fate. Rather than investigate the threats on his life, they stood back, almost waiting for a crime to happen. “They had the mentality of wanting an assassination,” said Gerry Fulcher of the NYPD brass, though it is unlikely that NYPD officers were directly involved in the murder. “They would want to keep their hands clean from the actual thing.” Fulcher knew that the NYPD and BOSS had placed Gene Roberts inside the MMI and OAAU, but they had also recruited other informants who provided the police with internal information. By early 1965, Fulcher had been taping conversations at the MMI and OAAU office for over nine months. After Malcolm’s return from abroad, Fulcher listened carefully to his arguments and became even more convinced that the police were making a big mistake about him. “This is a guy we should be supporting,” he concluded. One of the favorite topics for cops was “‘them niggers on welfare.’ [Malcolm] wants them off, too,” he argued. Malcolm “should have been a companion, not an enemy” of law enforcement, Fulcher insisted. “But they always viewed him like the enemy.”
By that time, however, Malcolm and the NYPD had already reached a practical détente. Even before leaving the Nation, Malcolm had developed what Peter Goldman called “distant cooperation” with the police, hoping to avoid the confrontations and shootings that had occurred in Los Angeles. He consequently informed the police whenever he was having public rallies, and ordered Reuben X Francis and other subordinates to share information with them. In 1964 and 1965, the NYPD regularly assigned between one and two dozen officers to the MMI and OAAU rallies held at the Audubon. Several would be stationed inside the building but rarely the Grand Ballroom, where the rallies were held. Most were positioned outside the building, either clustered around the entrance or standing across the street in the small neighborhood park. The detail’s commander and one or two other policemen sat in a glassed-in booth on the second floor, overlooking the entrances to the building’s two ballrooms, the Rose and the larger Grand.
Across the Hudson in Newark, the small assassination crew that had been formed in the spring of 1964 had fallen apart when Malcolm was out of the country. But after his return, the question of whether, and how, to commit the murder became active once again. Talmadge Hayer had several conversations with Ben Thomas and Leon Davis. Hayer later told Goldman that, since Ben was a mosque administrator, he naturally assumed from the outset that senior NOI officials had authorized the mission. “I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions,” Hayer explained. “I thought that somebody was giving instructions: ‘Brother, you got to move on this situation.’ But I felt we was in accord.”
As the group began exploring how to go about the killing, they contemplated gunning Malcolm down outside of his East Elmhurst home; however, when they drove out one day to case the house, they found it heavily protected by armed guards. For a time they considered just following Malcolm around Harlem and striking at some public event where he was scheduled to talk, but, according to Hayer, practical considerations got in the way. All of the Newark conspirators worked full-time, and they couldn’t take off work to spend hours driving around Harlem. The group finally settled on a simple but bold tactical approach: shooting Malcolm at an Audubon rally, in front of hundreds of supporters and several dozen probably armed security people. The plan’s advantage was the element of surprise. Malcolm’s people believed he was safe at the rallies; they never considered a direct, frontal assault, because it would be suicidal. Yet every member of the assassination team was a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammad, prepared to sacrifice his life to kill Malcolm. If a would-be assassin is willing to die, anyone can be killed.
The likelihood of success was “a long shot,” Hayer remembered. “But we just felt we would have to move on it . . . and that’s what we did. Why there? . . . It was the only place we knew he’d be.” Hayer was familiar with weapons, so he was assigned to purchase the guns, using his own money. He and several others in the assassination crew attended an OAAU rally, probably in January 1965, where they were surprised to discover that no one was being searched at the main entrance. They sat down and studied where guards were positioned and when they were relieved. On the night of February 20, the group paid to enter a dance in the Audubon Ballroom, checking out all possible exits.
The conspirators then drove back to Ben Thomas’s home. It was decided that the initial round aimed at Malcolm, the decisive kill shot, would be fired by William Bradley. “Willie” had been a star athlete in high school, excelling in baseball. By his mid-twenties, however, he had grown fat, weighing over 220 pounds. But he was still athletic in his movements and he had learned how to handle a shotgun. Everyone agreed that the assassination would take place the next afternoon, Sunday, February 21.
On the morning of the twenty-first, a phone call awakened Malcolm in his room at the Hilton. A voice over the receiver menacingly said, “Wake up, brother.” He checked the time; it was eight o’clock on a winter morning, but the day would not be frigid. Still, Malcolm wasn’t taking chances with the weather. He put on long underwear beneath his suit—the same suit coat he had worn during his tour through Great Britain.
At about nine a.m., he phoned Betty, asking her to come to the afternoon rally, and to bring the children with her. His request surprised and pleased her. Since his return from Africa Malcolm had again discouraged her involvement in MMI and OAAU affairs, and earlier that week had strictly ordered her not to come on Sunday because of the threat of violence. He failed to explain why he had changed his mind. Betty and her daughters were still staying with the Wallaces, and around one p.m. she began getting ready. All of the little girls were stuffed into attractive children’s snowsuits. The children were thrilled. As Attallah Shabazz recalled, “It was still an exciting adventure to get ready and go see Daddy.” If Malcolm expected a day of reckoning, why would he ask Betty to bring the children to witness his possible murder? One reason might be that, despite his observations about the dangers surrounding his daily life, he still wasn’t absolutely sure. Or it might have been ambivalence as a kind of defense mechanism, a way of not thinking about something terrifying and inevitable. Perhaps, like Husayn, he wanted his death to be symbolic, a passion play representing his beliefs.
At one p.m. Malcolm checked out of the Hilton and drove uptown in his Oldsmobile. When he reached West 146th Street and Broadway in West Harlem, he pulled over and parked. He had made it a habit not to park his car at speaking venues, where he might be vulnerable to attack. As he waited for the uptown bus, an automobile with New Jersey plates slowed and stopped where he was standing. Malcolm did not recognize the driver, a young African American named Fred Williams, but he did know MMI member Charles X Blackwell in the backseat. Thus reassured, Malcolm slipped into the rear to join him. The car quickly covered the twenty blocks north to the Audubon Ballroom. It was by now just after two in the afternoon, but people were still standing about, indicating that no formal program had started on the main ballroom’s stage.
As Malcolm walked into the Audubon, he might have noticed the absence of the usual police presence stationed in front of the building. According to Peter Goldman, one of Malcolm’s “senior people had talked with the duty captain, requesting that the police leave the building and station themselves in a less public place.” Given the firebombing and the restrictions Malcolm had placed on the MMIʹs security—the lack of weapons, and no frisking at the main door—it is difficult to imagine the rationale for such an odd request, or why the police would grant it. In any event, about eighteen officers were relocated several blocks away, up Broadway, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
When Malcolm entered the Grand Ballroom on the second floor, he was immediately encountered by Peter Bailey, holding a bundle of copies of Blacklash. There was something in the OAAUʹs publication that wasn’t quite right, and Malcolm ordered him not to distribute copies of the issue. “For the first time,” remembered Bailey, Malcolm appeared “harried, not fearful . . . but just [like] somebody who had a lot on their mind.” Malcolm asked Bailey if he recognized the Reverend Galamison, and Bailey said that he could. Malcolm further asked him to wait near the main entrance downstairs for Galamison; when he arrived, the civil rights leader should be escorted to the rear room behind the Grand Ballroom’s main stage.
From its entrance to the far end of its plywood stage, the ballroom stretched 180 feet. Behind the stage, waiting in the small room for Malcolm to arrive, was his core MMI and OAAU staff: Sara Mitchell, James 67X, and Benjamin 2X. They immediately sensed that their leader was in a terrible mood. He flopped down on a metal folding chair, but a few minutes later was up, nervously pacing the floor. Benjamin recalled, “He was more tense than I’d ever seen him. . . . He just lost control of himself completely.” When James explained that Galamison’s secretary had contacted him hours before, saying that the ministerʹs schedule was so crowded that afternoon that it would be impossible for him to drive uptown to address the Audubon audience, Malcolm demanded to know why he had not been informed earlier. James cautiously reminded Malcolm that he had neglected to notify him the previous day where he would be spending the night, so he had no idea where to contact him. Several hours ago, he explained, he had phoned Betty with this information and asked her to pass it on. Malcolm exploded: “You gave that message to a woman! ... You should know better than that!” He continued to lash out at anyone near him. When Sheikh Hassoun tried to embrace him, he yelled, “Get out of here!” Both Benjamin and Hassoun left the rear room together, and Benjamin walked up to the podium to start the program.
Within a few minutes Malcolm quietly apologized to those still left in the room. “Something felt wrong out there,” he told them. He added that he felt almost at his “wit’s end.” The OAAU program that was to have been announced at the rally, already postponed once because of the firebombing, was still not ready; Galamison and several other invited speakers would not be present. A successful event now all depended on his giving a suitably spirited speech. “When he came backstage, Malcolm was trying to brush aside his own problems,” Mitchell observed. “When someone suggested that he should let the people worry about him for a change, he answered with some irritation, ‘No matter what has happened to me, I can’t go out there complaining about it. What I say has to be said with their problems in mind.’ ”
Rattled by Malcolm’s anger, Benjamin spent the first few minutes of his remarks trying to find focus. Repeatedly he implored audience members to “remain seated” and to “keep the aisles clear.” It took about five minutes before he finally found his footing on familiar rhetorical terrain, and having established his rhythm, he reminded the audience that for more than a year, Malcolm had spoken frequently against the U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia. “So tonight, when Brother Minister Malcolm comes before you, I hope you will open your minds, open your ears,” he told the crowd. “He’ll try to do anything for us without the approval of the power structure that controls the policy systems that you and I live under.” Without mentioning the recent firebombing and the growing death threats, Benjamin underscored the leade’s personal courage and many sacrifices for their common cause. Any time such a person is “in our midst, he does not care anything about personal consequences, but only cares about the welfare of the people, this is a good man. A man like this,” Benjamin emphasized, “should be supported. A man like this should be successful. Because men like this don’t come every day. Few men will risk their lives for somebody else.” A person in the audience shouted with approval, “That’s right!” Most people would be “running away from death, even if they’re in the right,” Benjamin continued. Malcolm X was without question a leader who “cares nothing about the consequences, cares only for the people . . . I hope you understand.” At this, the Audubon audience burst into applause.
As Benjamin 2X continued his address, the Audubon’s main entrance and second-floor lobby became packed with late arrivals. At about 2:50 p.m., Betty arrived at the Audubon. For some of Malcolm’s followers, Sister Betty’s attendance was a pleasant surprise, as she had made few if any public appearances since his return from Africa. MMI member Jessie 8X Ryan left his seat beside his wife and escorted Betty and her children to a booth close to the stage. Betty’s prominent appearance undoubtedly told the audience that Malcolm would soon emerge onstage. There were now approximately four hundred people seated in the ballroom.
At 2:55 p.m., the MMI’s security detail made its third and final change of assignments. A few minutes before three p.m., without advance warning Malcolm walked briskly out onto the stage with a portfolio in his hand and sat down next to Benjamin 2X. “Without further ado, I bring before you Minister Malcolm,” Benjamin hastily announced. As the applause began, Benjamin dutifully turned from the speaker’s platform and moved to sit down on the stage, but Malcolm stopped him from sitting down and, leaning over slightly, asked him to look out for Galamison’s arrival. Since Galamison had canceled his appearance, the order made no sense, but Benjamin obediently left the stage and Malcolm walked up to the podium.
The enthusiastic applause lasted almost a full minute as Malcolm surveyed his admiring audience. To his immediate left, bodyguard Gene X Roberts quietly left box two and walked swiftly to the rear of the ballroom, only a few feet from Reuben X Francis. By doing so, whether by coincidence or design, he would escape being near the primary line of fire that ensued seconds later. “As—salaam alaikum,” Malcolm declared in Arabic, extending the traditional Muslim words of greeting. “Walaikum salaam,” hundreds in the audience responded. Before he could utter another sentence, a disruption broke out in the front center of the ballroom, approximately six or seven rows from the stage. “Get your hands out of my pockets!” Wilbur McKinley exclaimed to another conspirator seated next to him. As both pretended to tussle, the pushing and shoving distracted the entire audience, including the MMI security team. From the rostrum, Malcolm shouted repeatedly: “Hold it! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!”
The principal rostrum guards that afternoon were Charles X Blackwell and Robert 35X Smith, unusual choices as they did not usually serve in this role and had little experience guarding Malcolm. William 64X George had guarded Malcolm at the rostrum many times, yet on this day he had been stationed outside. When the commotion broke out, Blackwell and Smith made a tactical blunder: they moved from their posts and began walking toward the two bickering men. Gene Roberts, George Whitney, and several other security personnel approached the men from the rear. Malcolm was now completely alone and unguarded onstage. At that precise moment, an incendiary smoke bomb ignited at the extreme rear of the ballroom, instantly creating panic, screams, and confusion. It was only then that Willie Bradley, sitting in the front row, got to his feet and walked briskly toward the rostrum. When he was fifteen feet away, he elevated his sawed-off shotgun from under his coat, took careful aim, and fired. The shotgun pellets ripped squarely into Malcolm’s left side, cutting a seven-inch-wide circle around his heart and left chest. This was the kill shot, the blow that executed Malcolm X; the other bullets caused terrible damage but were not decisive.
This single shotgun blast oddly failed to topple Malcolm. As Herman Ferguson recalled, “There was a loud blast, a boom that filled the auditorium with the sound of a weapon going off.” On cue, two men—Hayer in the first row, with a .45 next to his stomach, and Leon X Davis sitting next to him, also holding a handgun—stood up, ran to the stage, and emptied their guns into Malcolm. Ferguson, still sitting only feet from the stage, took in everything that happened next:
Malcolm straightened up momentarily . . . his hand came up and he stiffened. The shotgun blast [had been fired] at him by one of the assassins, who fired from the crook of his elbow. . . . He hit Malcolm point-blank in his left chest. . . . Then a fusillade of shots rang out. . . . This kept up for several seconds. And I remember saying, “If they would just stop firing, maybe he could survive. . . .” And when they did, Malcolm toppled over backwards . . . and the back of his head hit the floor with a crash.
Ferguson was perhaps the only eyewitness who had not fallen to the floor to escape the line of fire. He continued his account:
After so much noise, shooting and so on and the screaming of people, there was this sudden silence. . . . I could see all of the chairs and the people lying on the floor. There were three men standing in the center aisle, facing the door. And one of them appeared to have some sort of weapon in his hand. They [were] standing in a row, one behind the other. And they stood frozen in time [and] space for another few seconds, and then they took off, running and hopping over chairs and people’s bodies.
Most of the MMI security force had also scrambled for cover at the first shot, making no effort to protect Malcolm or to apprehend his murderers. Rostrum guards Charles X Blackwell and Robert 35X Smith both had pulled out of position and had rolled to the floor seeking their own safety. John X Davis, nominally the chief of MMI’s rostrum detail, subsequently admitted to police that when the shooting started, he, too, “fell to the ground.” Charles 37X Kenyatta had also flopped to the floor and later claimed that he “did not see anything.”
Several eyewitness accounts suggest that Bradley then pivoted to his left and may have fired a second blast above the heads of the audience, narrowly missing Ferguson. He then ran down the right corridor of the ballroom and quickly ducked into the women’s lavatory, located barely sixty feet from the stage. Discarding his shotgun, he and perhaps a second conspirator descended a narrow, seldom-used flight of stairs leading down to the street, making an easy escape. The other two gunmen, Hayer and Leon X Davis, inexplicably chose to run a virtual gauntlet, leaping over chairs and people, attempting to escape through the ballroom’s main entrance on West 166th Street, 180 feet away. Adding to the confusion, the homemade incendiary device, composed of a bundle of matches and film stuffed in a sock, was still smoking up the ballroom.
The two shooters, trying to escape through the main entrance, hoped to conceal themselves within the large, panicking audience, but even before they were halfway across the ballroom, Gene Roberts intercepted them. One assailant, probably Hayer, fired at him at point-blank range. The bullet tore through Roberts’s coat but did not hit him. Roberts grabbed a folding chair and hurled it into Hayer’s legs, causing him to stumble and fall, after which Hayer tried to scramble up toward the now packed exit. As he did so, Reuben X Francis took aim and fired at him from eight feet away, pulling off three shots. Hayer was struck just once, in the left thigh; in pain, he stumbled and continued running down the stairwell, where he was immediately surrounded by Malcolm’s enraged followers and viciously beaten. In the confusion, Leon X and the other conspirators managed to escape.
From his lone security outpost at the front door, William 64X George had heard the gunfire and immediately ran down the street to tell police, who within a minute were outside the Audubon. Turning back to the main entrance and front stairwell, William saw Hayer being grabbed by two MMI and OAAU brothers, Alvin Johnson and George 44X, who dragged the wounded shooter to the ground. “The crowd started to beat him,” William would later recount. At that moment, police patrolman Thomas Hoy arrived at the scene and attempted to pull Hayer into the rear of his squad car. Seconds later Sergeant Alvin Aronoff and patrolman Louis Angelos drove up in a squad car and assisted Hoy in dispersing the angry crowd. Aronoff fired his revolver into the air and the officers were finally able to secure Hayer into a squad car.
The most detailed eyewitness account by a journalist was that of freelance writer Welton Smith, whose story appeared in the New York Herald Tribune . Smith first observed a man wearing “a black overcoat in the middle of the hall” rise to his feet and “[yell] at the man next to him, ‘Get your hand out of my pockets!’ ” Gunshots then erupted from the front stage as Smith found himself violently pushed to the ballroom floor by others. All the shots took place “within fifteen seconds.” By the time Smith rose to his feet, he saw two men chase the man in the black overcoat, who turned and fired at his pursuers as he ran toward the main entrance. Smith located the smoke bomb at the back of the ballroom, smothered the fuse, and looked for water to douse it. Several minutes later, he could see that about eight people were bending over Malcolm. As several MMI security personnel attempted to keep others from crowding onto the stage, Smith saw Yuri Kochiyama, an OAAU member, bend over Malcolm and heard her shout, “He’s still alive! His heart’s still beating!”
Mercifully, Betty had witnessed only the first terrible seconds of her husband’s murder. When she first heard the boom of the shotgun blast, she instinctively turned her body toward the stage. “There was no one else in there they’d be shooting at,” she recalled later. Two more killers with handguns stepped forward, firing into Malcolm. Betty would later claim that she had seen her husband collapse onstage under this withering fire. Observers, however, saw her quickly gathering her terrified children, pushing them to the floor, shielded partially by a wooden bench and her own body. As the shooting continued, Betty screamed out, “They’re killing my husband!” While the assassins fled the scene, the Shabazz children began to cry and to speak up. “Are they going to kill everyone?” one daughter asked. Betty could see people running up to the stage, overwhelmed by the terrible damage that Malcolm had sustained. Finally rising to her feet, she began to run toward the body, sobbing and screaming; friends tried to hold her back because she was clearly hysterical. After Gene Roberts checked on the safety of his wife, Joan, who had been seated in the front near several reporters, he rushed to the stage. Immediately he sensed that Malcolm was dead, yet he desperately attempted to revive him with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Joan Roberts was deeply traumatized by Malcolm’s assassination and her husband’s near death. She wept uncontrollably in the taxi as she went home with her husband. Forty years later, Gene Roberts observed that “the horror of the incident stayed with her for years.”
As the smoke still wafted overhead, MMI and OAAU members stumbled around the ballroom aimlessly, in stunned disbelief at what they had just witnessed. The journalist and OAAU member Earl Grant had been using the pay telephone near the front entrance, making a follow-up call to solicit funds at Malcolm’s request, when the first shot rang out. He tried to reenter the ballroom but was pushed aside by the stampede of people fleeing the building. When he finally reached the stage, Malcolm’s shirt had been opened and blood covered his torso. Grant retrieved his reporter’s camera and began taking photographs. His photos would become the main images of the death of Malcolm X.
When Herman Ferguson finally managed to reach the Audubon’s main entrance, he saw to his immediate right “a big commotion going on in the street. . . . A crowd of people had a man up in the air and they were pulling and tugging on him.” Wandering in shock, Ferguson found himself on the corner of Broadway and West 166th Street brooding over “what I had just seen—Malcolm’s death.” A few minutes later he recognized several MMI and OAAU brothers rushing by with a hospital gurney, which they wheeled into the building. Soon a group of policemen and the brothers returned with the gurney bearing a familiar figure: “I looked down at Malcolm. I could already see the pallor, the grayish pallor of his face. . . . His shirt was opened and his collar and tie were pulled down. You could see his chest . . . [and] a pattern of about seven bullet holes, holes large enough to fit your little finger. And I [thought] to myself that he was gone.”
Ferguson stood disoriented at the corner for several minutes, trying to decide what to do next. Just then a police car, traveling north up Broadway, turned sharply and stopped only a few feet from him. The squad car held two policemen, one of whom he judged to be “police brass,” due to “the scrambled eggs on his hat.” The officer left the car and entered the Audubon, returning moments later with a man with an olive complexion who was “obviously in great pain.” As the man was assisted into the backseat, Ferguson walked to the car. “He was slumped over, holding his midsection, and I had to bend down and look into his face.” Ferguson figured the man had been shot; thinking that the wounded man was “one of our guys,” he asked what was happening. The squad car sped away—only instead of making a right turn across Broadway toward Columbia Presbyterian, the nearest hospital, “they kept going down towards the [Hudson] river, across the street, down that incline, and disappeared out of sight.”
When the frantic MMI and OAAU members and police carrying Malcolm’s body reached Columbia Presbyterian’s emergency room, one physician immediately performed a stab tracheotomy in an effort to revive him. Malcolm was then taken to the hospital’s third floor, where other physicians set to work. The doctors knew Malcolm was almost certainly dead by the time he was brought into the emergency room, but they continued to try to revive him for fifteen minutes before giving up. At three thirty p.m., in a small office overflowing with Malcolm’s supporters and a growing cluster of journalists, a doctor announced in an oddly detached manner: “The gentleman you knew as Malcolm X is dead.”
Malcolm’s principal lieutenants did not personally witness the shooting. Mitchell, Benjamin 2X, and James 67X were all together backstage. “I heard a sound like firecrackers,” Benjamin recalled. “I heard blasts of gunfire. . . . The perspiration broke out of every pore of my body. I knew that he was gone.” He had tried to get up but physically couldn’t. “I just sat there, stunned, staring through the open doorway at the body on the stage. . . . Then, all at once, it left me, the weight on my shoulders, and I felt a great relief come over me, Malcolm’s relief from all his suffering. Death ends a thing on time. Whatever may be the instruments to bring it about, when it comes, it comes on time.”
Sara Mitchell was struck by the actions of Malcolm’s disciples, who clustered around his body: “‘Maybe he can still make it,’ they told each other and his wife, Betty. And together, they tried to beg him, pray him, will him back to life.” Mitchell later complained, “After the gunfire ceased, terrible minutes passed and still there were no policemen on the scene.” Although one of the city’s major medical centers was only several blocks away, no ambulance arrived at the Audubon, which is why Malcolm’s own men had to run to the emergency room to pick up a gurney. Several women “steered [Malcolm’s] dazed wife outside and gathered his four little girls to be taken home. Only then did policemen come inside.” MMI and OAAU members were outraged when the police finally showed up. “Their appearance was so ridiculously late,” Mitchell recalled, “that one tearful woman yelled and waved them aside, saying, ‘Don’t hurry; come tomorrow!’ ”
“When the shots rang out,” James 67X recalled, “Benjamin . . . dived down to the floor. I then walked out. . . . People were up on the stage, Malcolm was laying down, and I saw the life go out of his body.” A film taken of the assassination’s aftermath shows James kneeling over Malcolm and apparently removing something from the body. Then, inexplicably, without giving orders to subordinates or assuming command, he promptly walked through what remained of the disoriented crowd, passed by several police officers who were just arriving, and left the building. James 67X would claim years later that his immediate intention was “to shoot [Captain] Joseph” in retaliation.
Patrolmen Gilbert Henry and John Carroll had been assigned to the smaller Rose Ballroom, the farthest distance from the shooting site. When the sounds of gunfire erupted, Henry frantically attempted to call for police backup, but “couldn’t get an answer” on his walkie-talkie. Both officers scrambled toward the Audubon’s entrance, the only direct route into the main ballroom, but they were blocked by hundreds of screaming, jostling people fleeing down the main stairwell into the street. In the chaos and confusion, it was impossible for the two officers to identify a fleeing assailant.
At approximately 3:05 p.m., less than two minutes after the shooting, Lieutenant Bernard Mulligan of BOSS learned that Malcolm had been shot. NYPD detectives Henry Suarez and Kenneth Egan were immediately dispatched to the crime scene.
Several minutes later, the two men arrived at the Audubon, where they were met by several other officers desperately attempting to restore order. Informed that Malcolm had been taken to Columbia Presbyterian, Suarez and Egan promptly went over to the hospital, where they consulted with NYPD detectives Ferdinand “Rocky” Cavallaro and Thomas Cusmano of the 34th Precinct. The officers jotted down the names of all those who had gone to the hospital from the ballroom; they also learned that although the assassination had occurred only ten minutes earlier, a wounded suspect, “Tommy Hagan,” was already being interrogated at the 34th Precinct. At 3:14 p.m., doctors told them that Malcolm had been “dead on arrival” upon reaching the emergency room.
At the hospital, Egan and Suarez secured the personal items found in Malcolm’s clothing. They carefully cataloged them: “One 1965 Red Diary which had been in his breast pocket, had 3 bullet holes; one tear gas pen devise [sic] ‘Penguin’ with two TG-4 cartridges for same, one of which was in the pen for immediate use.”
By 3:35 p.m., Cavallaro and Cusmano had returned to the Audubon, where they learned that one of the probable murder weapons, a sawed-off J.C. Higgins shotgun “wrapped in a man’s suit jacket,” had been found lying on a table in the left rear of the stage. Together with other officers they proceeded to comb the vacant ballrooms for additional physical evidence related to the crime. Locations of bullet holes and other ballistics debris were duly marked off, and the NYPD’s photo unit was called up. Investigators also learned that several others had been wounded during the assassination, all of whom were relocated to the hospital, and proceeded to interrogate them. The fifty-one-year-old OAAU member Willie Harris had been sitting three rows from the back of the ballroom when the trouble started. After the barrage of gunshots, he had tried to flee through the ballroom’s main entrance. As he explained to detective James Rushin, “I was hit by a bullet. I then left the hall and went to a patrolman . . . and told him I had been hit.”
NYPD detective James O’Connell took the statement of another man receiving medical attention, thirty-six-year-old William Parker, a building superintendent in Astoria, Queens. Parker had taken his six-year-old son Nathaniel to the rally just “to see what the meeting was all about.” Sitting three rows back from the stage near the middle aisle, he had grabbed his son and dropped to the floor when the first shot was fired. As the fusillade continued, Parker felt a sharp pain in his left foot. It was only after he and the boy walked down the crowded stairwell that he realized that he had been shot. Given the number of bullets fired in an enclosed space, it was remarkable that, apart from minor wounds such as this, Malcolm’s was the sole fatality.
As the remaining MMI and OAAU members still inside the Audubon surveyed the initial stages of the NYPD’s investigation, most officers at the crime scene appeared apathetic about the shooting. Earl Grant recalled that the first police officers who entered the Audubon were “strolling at about the pace one would expect of them if they were patrolling a quiet park. . . . Not one of them had his gun out!” A few cops “even had their hands in their pockets.” As many as 150 members of the audience who had initially fled into the street by now had returned to the Grand Ballroom. One frustrated black man cried out, “There ain’t no goddamn hope for our people in this lousy country. You got to fight them lousy whites and fight the stupid niggahs too.” An elderly West Indian woman confronted reporter Welton Smith: “Don’t you menfolk let them get away with it. They done hurt Malcolm and don’t you let them get away with it. They can’t stop us. And the white man can’t stop us. We know the white man put them up to it.” Another man angrily declared to Smith, “I know the cops had a hand in it. . . . [L]ook how long it took the cops to get up to the hall after this happened. It must have been ten minutes, and it took the ambulance almost half an hour to come from the hospital right across the street. Now you tell me that this wasn’t nothing but coincidence.”
The deep skepticism about the NYPD’s unprofessional behavior was not without merit. Most street cops were contemptuous of Malcolm, whom they considered a dangerous racist demagogue. Many believed that Malcolm had firebombed his own house in some kind of publicity stunt. Besides, they thought, given Malcolm’s incendiary rhetoric, it was inevitable that the black leader would be struck down by the very violence he had promoted. Most police officers generally treated his murder case not as a significant political assassination, but as a neighborhood shooting in the dark ghetto, a casualty from two rival black gangs feuding against each other.
Shortly before four p.m., James 67X returned to the Audubon, where police officers demanded to know where he had been. He replied, “I was going up . . .” Then James asked himself, “How do they know that I left? . . . They must have photographed this whole thing.” Days later the police showed him “a seating plan . . . where everybody was seated in the Audubon Ballroom.” The police demanded that both James and Reuben X accompany them to the 34th Precinct, where they were driven by a detective named Kitchman. Apparently, either Reuben or James left some ammunition in the rear seat of Kitchman’s car, for the following day the detective found five .32 caliber bullets there. Reuben was charged with felonious assault and possession of a deadly weapon in the shooting of Hayer. At 8:20 p.m., New York County assistant district attorney Herbert Stern and police detective William Confrey began James’s interview, which yielded little. At 8:32 p.m., the police report noted, “Mr. Warden stopped talking.” James was released, going immediately to the Hotel Theresa, where he met with some MMI and OAAU members.
Two hours later, Stern interrogated Reuben X; police detectives John J. Keeley and William Confrey witnessed this interview. Reuben’s story was only slightly less obscure than James’s. He asserted that he had “arrived at the ballroom before Malcolm, and stood in the rear of the hall.” After the gunfire had stopped, he said, he “saw two men running back towards the exit.” He “ran after them and saw that one had been captured by the police.” Reuben claimed that he then had just “returned to the ballroom” and that “he could offer nothing of any further value.” Several days later, Reuben was released on bail. “Brother Reuben” was immediately hailed as a “hero” by MMI and OAAU members and other black activists as the sole bodyguard who had displayed the courage to return fire at Malcolm’s killers.
Meanwhile, back at the Audubon, the NYPD photo unit was well into its forensic work. The detectives caucused informally to evaluate the evidence they had obtained so far, concluding that the open hostilities between two “black hate groups” could spark a riot throughout Harlem—and the possibility of having to quell such a major uprising was something they feared far more than the public slaying of a single black man. To forestall any act of vengeance by Malcolm’s followers, officers promptly ordered the Nation’s Harlem restaurant to close.
For the detectives working the case, too many facts didn’t make sense. The request from Malcolm’s team that the usual police detail be pulled back several blocks from the Audubon seemed strange, as did the police’s agreement to do so in light of the recent firebombing. The detectives were also suspicious when they learned that nearly all of the MMI and OAAU security personnel had been unarmed and that none of the audience had been checked for weapons. Yet time would not be on the side of justice. As the forensic team continued its work, the Audubon’s management asked that the police vacate the building as quickly as possible. A dance sponsored by a local black church had been scheduled for later that evening. Remarkably, the police never completed a full forensic analysis of the crime scene: the back wall of the stage was literally pockmarked with bullet holes of different calibers; Malcolm’s blood still covered part of the shattered stage—yet the officers agreed to leave. By six p.m. three women workers were mopping up Malcolm’s blood, moving chairs, and cleaning the ballroom floor. The festive George Washington Birthday Party dance was held at the Audubon Ballroom, as advertised, at seven p.m., only four hours after the assassination.
Meanwhile, the FBI was trying to piece together its own interpretation of what had happened. At least five undercover informants had been in the ballroom at the time of the shooting. One of them reported that the first assailant had been a man standing near or at the front row. He “put his left hand in his left pocket of his jacket and removed something. He then extended his arm toward Malcolm X.” According to this informant, Malcolm “said, excitedly, ʹDonʹt do it,’ and stepped further to his left.” This first gunman then fired four or five shots.
Another informant, Jasper Davis, placed the initial disturbance in the seventh or eighth row back from the stage. Others seated around the two quarreling men also stood up “and added to the confusion.” Only then, reported Davis, did he hear “a shot coming from the front of the room.” A third informant estimated that four to five individuals had been involved in the shooting. Two of the gunmen ran “past him,” and two others ran “out [through] the ballroom.” An FBI memo dated February 22 describes Reuben X Francis as having “shot one of the quote decoys unquote,” which suggests that the FBI believed Hayer was one of the two men involved in the initial altercation, just before the first shot. The same memorandum reports that four other individuals had also been hit. Several hours after the shootings, one informant reported, “trusted members of the MMI met at the Hotel Theresa,” where James 67X “stated that he had never headed an organization but would do all he could to preserve the idea and keep the program alive. He stated that a lesson had been learned by the group in that now they must tighten up the security of both members and leaders, and stated, ‘We are at war.’ ”
Other important FBI evidence was connected with OAAU member and FBI informant Ronald Timberlake. Several hours after the shooting, Timberlake telephoned the Bureau’s New York office to report that he had picked up one of the murder weapons. He specified that he would turn over the gun only to the FBI, not to the NYPD. The next day, however, February 22, he gave an account of the murder to the NYPD, specifying that he had arrived at the Audubon at approximately 2:10 the previous afternoon, where he had “hung out at the rear of the hall.” When the audience disruption began, Malcolm had instructed the audience to “keep your seats.” Shots were fired at Malcolm from four or five assailants, who then attempted to flee. Timberlake claimed that he had thrown a “body block” at the gunman closest to him. His general description of the man he had attempted to block was detailed: black, six feet in height, wearing a dark gray tweed coat and blue pants. Timberlake had tripped him and both of them had tumbled to the floor. A second assailant, whom Timberlake described as also black, approximately twenty years old and five feet, seven inches tall, wearing a dark brown three-quarter-length jacket, jumped over them and fled down the central stairway and out the main door. Seconds later, as the stairway was clogged with people, Timberlake pulled out his gun but found it impossible to locate the other shooters, or even to exit the front door. He put his handgun back in his pocket and returned to the ballroom to look for his coat. After waiting a few minutes, he simply returned home. Timberlake subsequently identified “Tommy Hagen [Hayer]” as one of the two shooters he had seen.
The news of Malcolm’s murder was broadcast by the media within minutes, nationally and internationally. At the Nation of Islam Chicago headquarters, Elijah Muhammad was stunned, according to an account provided by a grandson. “Oh my God! . . . Um, um, um!” Muhammad reportedly murmured. The emotional split with his “lost-found” disciple had finally come to a tragic end. “You know, I really want to go home now,” Muhammad told his grandson and other NOI subordinates. It was a wise decision. Undoubtedly, Muhammad’s dedicated security force, the Fruit of Islam, realized that Malcolm’s murder would almost certainly trigger an act of retaliatory violence against their leader. The Chicago office, while protected by a corps of highly trained men, could still be difficult to defend from a frontal assault, but Muhammad’s Hyde Park mansion had been carefully constructed to be virtually impregnable. Several family members and other devoted followers owned residences adjacent to Muhammad’s mansion, and NOI security men routinely prowled the sidewalks surrounding the property. Muhammad and his advisers retreated to his fortress and waited.
The terrible news of Malcolm’s murder quickly reached Alex Haley at his home in upstate New York. Less than two hours later, his grief was pushed aside by practical concerns. Haley typed a letter to Paul Reynolds, fearing their lucrative deal might now be in jeopardy. “None of us would have had it be this way,” Haley wrote, “but since this book represent’s [sic] Malcolm’s sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters . . . I’m just glad that it’s ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all.” He also advised Reynolds that Doubleday should be alerted to a potential financial problem:
I am almost certain that within the next two or three days Malcolm’s widow, Sister Betty, will contact me asking for some advance money from Doubleday or some other would be possible for her, to tide her through the immediate weeks. She hasn’t a home since last week they moved in the middle of the night, just ahead of the next day’s legal eviction to return the home to the Muslims. And Malcolm, talking with me yesterday, said that he had “two or three hundred dollars ” which would be the total extent of Sister Betty’s funds.
A few days later, Haley had another thought. Again writing to Reynolds, he suggested, “Maybe some magazine might wish to pay well enough for a probing interview of Elijah Muhammad. I could accomplish this.” Haley proposed something along the lines of his earlier personal interviews with Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Jr., featured in Playboy. Haley assured Reynolds that he would not be at any personal risk from such an assignment. “I know there would be no danger from the Muhammad faction side of the fence; they would want me to do it. They associate me with major publicity done with dignity, which they desperately want.” Some of Malcolm’s friends might “feel nettled that I was in Chicago with Muhammad,” but they could be handled. Get the contract first, Haley advised; he would then “contact Sister Betty and also a couple of Malcolm’s close lieutenants and tell them that I had the order, which is a professional job.” Another benefit for Haley would be to maintain his line of communications with the Nation’s leadership. “It would give me a chance to say to Muhammad some things I’d like to regarding the book—that he isn’t attacked as he might think, that he actually is praised by Malcolm.” Haley insisted that “some other writers might presently have bigger ‘names’ (Baldwin, Lomax, Lincoln) . . . [but] actually I have the very best inside track to the Muslims’ confidence.” Nothing came of these overtures, and Haley and Reynolds’s fears were fully justified. Within two weeks, in a terribly shortsighted move, Doubleday’s owner, Nelson Doubleday, abruptly canceled the contract.
On the day of the assassination, NOI enforcer Norman Butler was still out on bail for the Benjamin Brown killing. That morning he’d visited a doctor to obtain treatment for leg injuries, which had come from his violent beating by the police during his recent arrest. Butler had spent most of Sunday watching television at home. When he saw the news reports about Malcolm’s murder, he phoned Mosque No. 7 and finally reached Captain Joseph, who strongly advised him to get himself seen by others as soon as possible—to walk to the corner store and “buy a quart of milk,” to speak to several neighbors in his building, and so on. Butler decided not to follow Joseph’s advice; after all, he had not attended the event at the Audubon. He slumped back in his chair and continued watching television. That decision would cost him two decades of his life.
Thomas 15X Johnson, like Butler, had not known that Malcolm “was going to get hit that Sunday.” At the time, he lived in a top-floor apartment across from the Bronx Zoo. A neighbor called up to Johnson and yelled, “Turn your TV on . . . Big Red just got hit!” Since the Benjamin Brown shooting and Johnson’s arrest, Captain Joseph had forbidden Johnson from attending Mosque No. 7 functions. For weeks Joseph had met with him privately, giving him orders. Johnson was not at all surprised by Malcolm’s murder: “I already knew—John Ali made it known.” He found himself pleased that Malcolm was finally dead.
In Detroit, at Nation of Islam Mosque No. 1, Malcolm’s oldest brother, Wilfred X Little, was conducting a service that Sunday afternoon when he received word of the murder. The news shook him terribly, but he went on with the service. At its conclusion, he solemnly announced to the congregation that Malcolm had been assassinated. Some in the audience had known his brother many years earlier, when he was their energetic assistant minister. “No sense in getting emotional,” Minister Wilfred cautioned his flock. “This is the kind of times we are living in. Once you are dead your troubles are over. It’s those living that’re in trouble.”
And in northern California that Sunday afternoon, Maya Angelou was chatting on the telephone with her girlfriend Ivonne. Angelou recalled that there “was no cheer in [Ivonne’s] voice” when she said, “These Negroes are crazy here. I mean, really crazy. Otherwise why would they have just killed that man in New York?” In disbelief, Angelou managed to place the phone receiver down on a table. She walked into a bedroom and locked the door behind her. “I didn’t have to ask,” she remembered. “I knew ‘that man in New York’ was Malcolm X and that someone had just killed him.” The next morning in bed, her first thought was that she “had returned from Africa to give my energies and wit to the OAAU, and Malcolm was dead.”