CHAPTER 16
The shattered remains of Malcolm Little were in the hands of Dr. Milton Helpern on the morning of Monday, February 22, 1965. A veteran medical examiner, Helpern had previously directed more than twelve thousand autopsies and had participated in fifty thousand others. As stenographer Frank Smith transcribed Helpern’s forensic remarks, the autopsy examination proceeded: “The body is that of an adult colored male, six foot three inches tall, scale weight 178 lbs. There is slight frontal baldness. There is a wide mustache brown in color, also a goatee of brown hair with a few gray hairs.” Physically, Malcolm had been in good condition: slender, but muscular. “The hands are well developed. The fingernails are neatly trimmed.” Examining the head, Helpern determined that there were no hemorrhages to the scalp. Malcolm’s brain was “heavy, weighs 1700 grams.” A brain section was taken, which revealed “no abnormalities.”
Helpern surveyed the evidence provided from the multiple gunshot wounds. Much of the damage had been caused by the initial shotgun blast, including two wounds on the right forearm, two more in the right hand. The full force of the blast perforated the chest, cutting into “the thoracic cavity, the left lung, pericardium, heart, aorta, right lung.” Handgun bullet wounds pockmarked the rest of the body: several in the left leg, a slug shattering the left index and middle fingers, a slug fragment embedded into the right side of his chin, a “bullet wound of [the] left thigh” that extended “through the innominate bone into the peritoneal cavity, penetrating the intestines and the mesentery and aorta.” Helpern methodically counted twenty-one separate wounds, ten of which had been from the initial blast. The forensic evidence indicated that three different guns had been used—a sawed-off shotgun, a 9mm automatic, and a .45 caliber handgun, probably a Luger. Helpern set aside a number of slugs and bullets for further testing by the NYPD’s ballistics bureau.
The NYPD’s narrative about Malcolm’s murder was simple. The slaying was the culmination of an almost yearlong feud between two black hate groups. The NYPD had two priorities in conducting its investigation: first, to protect the identities of its undercover police officers and informants, like Gene Roberts; and second, to make successful cases against NOI members with histories of violence. Its hasty and haphazard treatment of forensic evidence at the crime scene suggested that it had little interest in solving the actual homicide.
From the outset, the NYPD focused its attention on Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, the two NOI lieutenants they believed had participated in the shooting of Benjamin Brown in the Bronx. The department’s hypothesis in the Malcolm killing was that Butler was the second gunman along with Hayer. Johnson was supposedly the shotgun shooter, despite that he was about four inches taller and fairer complexioned than the very dark, stocky Willie Bradley. Still, the police’s suspicions were not entirely without merit. Several OAAU and MMI members placed either Butler or Johnson in the Audubon on the day of the shooting. George Matthews, a member of both groups, informed an NYPD detective that “Butler looks like one of the men who had been engaged in the argument but that he would not swear to this.” An “unspecified number” of other eyewitnesses viewed Butler in lineups, and two claimed that he had been inside the Grand Ballroom on the day of the shooting.
Yet the most intriguing piece of evidence against Butler came from Sharon 6X Poole, the eighteen-year-old OAAU secretary with whom Malcolm had been secretly involved in the previous weeks. Only minutes after the shooting, she told a news interviewer that one of the assassins was definitely a member of Harlem Mosque No. 7. Sharon had been sitting in the first row when the shooting began, and had fallen to the floor like nearly everyone else. She was still able to identify one of the assassins, she claimed, as a man wearing a brown suit who was an NOI member from Harlem.
On February 26 police arrested Butler at his home and drove him to a station house to be questioned, prompting the Times and newspapers across the country to assert that the NYPD was solving the case. The next day, without being contacted by the police first, Sharon 6X phoned the NYPD and presented what appeared to be a convincing story. Again, she explained that she had been seated in the front row when the shooting started. She “observed Malcolm get shot, place his hands across his chest, and then fall backwards.” One of the shooters who sprinted past her with a gun in his hand looked like “the pictures of Norman Butler” she had seen in newspapers. She described Butler as “thirty-five years, five foot eleven inches, or six foot, medium build, 170 pounds, brown skin. . . . [The] subject was firing his gun in all directions in an attempt to get out of the premises.” Sharon 6X also told the police that MMI “guards were all ordered not to have any guns, that is all except Reuben Francis.”
Her statements focused attention on Harlem Mosque No. 7, yet police never examined Sharon’s possible connections with Newark mosque members. After entering the Grand Ballroom on the afternoon of the assassination, Sharon 6X had sat in the front row next to Linwood X Cathcart, an NOI member from New Jersey whose presence perturbed the MMI members who recognized him. The seating arrangement may have been a coincidence, but subsequent evidence concerning Sharon and Cathcart makes this hard to believe. More than forty years after the assassination, Cathcart and Sharon 6X Poole Shabazz live together in the same New Jersey residence, and Shabazz has maintained absolute silence about her relationships with both Malcolm X and Cathcart.
A grand jury was impaneled on March 1, and the New York district attorney’s office vigorously presented its theory that only three men—Hayer, Johnson, and Butler—had committed the murder. Johnson was arrested on March 3. He, too, was placed in the Audubon by eyewitnesses. Photojournalist Earl Grant divulged important details to the NYPD about the murder that had been confided in him by a fellow MMI member, Charles X Blackwell, one of the rostrum guards during the assassination. On March 8, Grant told police that Blackwell observed one assassin “fleeing from the chair area to the ladies room located on the east side of the ballroom.” Blackwell “feels that this person [Thomas Johnson] was arrested for this crime—he knows Johnson from previous meetings.” Blackwell also identified “another person who he knows as Benjamin from Paterson or Newark seated about the third row on the left side.” Although the police were pleased that Johnson was placed at the crime scene, the fact that Blackwell had identified Ben X Thomas of the Newark mosque, one of the actual assassins, was not further investigated. On March 10 the grand jury ruled that Hayer, Butler, and Johnson had “willfully, feloniously and of malice aforethought” killed Malcolm X.
The police were well aware that New Jersey Muslims might have been involved in the murder. MMI guards had mentioned the presence of Linwood Cathcart in the Grand Ballroom, and he was interviewed by the NYPD on March 25, 1965; Robert 16X Gray, a member of the Newark mosque, had already been interviewed three days earlier. However, the police did not systematically investigate Hayer’s ties to the Newark mosque, or endeavor to explain how he might have hooked up with Butler and Johnson, two Harlem-based NOI officers more senior than himself. They apparently did not consider that NOI protocol would never have allowed enforcers from the Harlem mosque to murder Malcolm in broad daylight, because such men almost certainly would have been recognized by many in the crowd. The NYPD file for Joseph Gravitt is empty, indicating perhaps that any evidence obtained from the Mosque No. 7 captain had been destroyed years ago.
Within Malcolm’s organizations, suspicion quickly rose over the truth of the NYPD’s assertion, and murmurs could be heard about the possibility of an inside job. Since the day of the murder, some inside the MMI had started to revise their estimation of Reuben X Francis as the day’s hero, for shooting Talmadge Hayer. If the NYPD had been asked to relocate their detail outside the Audubon to a location several blocks away, there were only two individuals, other than Malcolm, who had the authority to negotiate a pullback: James 67X and Reuben. In addition, many began to wonder why Charles X Blackwell and Robert 35X Smith had been assigned to guard Malcolm that day when neither man had much experience in a forward defensive position, and when a usual rostrum guard, William 64X George, was present but assigned to guard the door. Reuben’s position as Malcolm’s head of security, responsible for both communicating with the police and arranging Malcolm’s guard detail, had some brothers believing that he might have been involved in the killing.
Gerry Fulcher was convinced that Reuben Francis “was the guy. He organized it. And he wanted to get out of Dodge when he knew things were going to get hot. It would come back to him.” The key question for Fulcher was whether Francis was an informant for either the FBI or the NYPD. If Francis had been involved, Fulcher believes, “he had to have contacts within the agency [FBI], or with our office.” But Francis’s role remains uncertain; even the police records are unclear because BOSS and the FBI rarely shared important information about undercover operatives. “The last thing the FBI would ever tell BOSS,” Fulcher said, “is that Francis was an informant.”
Francis began telling others that things were too hot to stay in New York. Released for bail of $10,000, he began expressing fears that New York district attorneys intended to prosecute him for the Hayer shooting, so he decided to flee the country. Anas Luqman, who had also been dragged in by police and then released, thought this made sense, and the two men hatched a plot to drive to the Mexican border and hide out in the desert. Francis recruited three other men with NOI connections who, for different reasons, also wanted to leave the United States. Luqman insisted that one of them, a seventeen-year-old boy, be left behind. “So we started driving,” Luqman recalled more than forty years later, and after several days on the road the group crossed the border.
Whether or not Malcolm’s own men played a role in his death, nearly all Malcolmites were convinced that law enforcement and the U.S. government were extensively involved in the murder. Peter Bailey, for example, charged in a 1968 interview that the NYPD and the FBI “knew that brother Malcolm’s destiny was assigned for assassination.” Bailey believed that both Thomas Johnson and Norman Butler were innocent. Although he himself did not witness the shooting—he was waiting downstairs for the arrival of Reverend Galamison—he developed a strong theory on how the assassination had occurred. “I think that brother Malcolm was killed by trained killers,” he said, not “amateurs.” Bailey doubted that “the Muslims were capable of doing it.” Consequently, most OAAU and MMI members decided not to be cooperative with the police. What they failed to understand was that there was intense competition and mistrust between the NYPD and the FBI. Even within the NYPD itself, BOSS operated largely above the law, shielding its own operatives and paid informants from the rest of the police force. Consequently there was no unified law enforcement strategy in place to suppress the investigation of Malcolm’s death. In the end, cooperation with police detectives might have increased the likelihood that Malcolm’s real killers would have been brought to justice.
Ultimately, the police’s version of events gained credibility from the media’s sensationalizing of Malcolm’s antiwhite image. A New York Times news article, for example, was headlined “Malcolm X Lived in Two Worlds, White and Black, Both Bitter.” In its editorial, the Times described Malcolm as “an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose. . . . Malcolm X had the ingredients for leadership, but his ruthless and fanatical belief in violence not only set him apart from the responsible leaders of the civil rights movement and the overwhelming majority of Negroes. It also marked him for notoriety, and for a violent end.” The editorial implied that Malcolm’s break from the NOI was due to jealousy rather than political or ethical differences. It also suggested that black nationalist extremists, whether in the Nation or in some other group, had been responsible for the murder. “The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark,” the editorial concluded. “But he made it darker still with his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of that darkness that he spawned, and killed him.”
Several days later, Time magazine left no doubt regarding its interpretation : “Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred.” The magazine also concurred with the NYPD’s theory of the assassination. “Malcolm’s murder [was] almost certainly at the hands of the Black Muslims from whom he had defected.” But it was not enough just to condemn Malcolm on ideological grounds; Time went on to invent a story to ridicule his character. The Sunday afternoon program at the Audubon had started late, the magazine declared, because “characteristically [Malcolm] had kept his followers waiting for nearly an hour while he lingered over tea and a banana split at a nearby Harlem restaurant.”
Other publications expressed similar sentiments. The Saturday Evening Post’s obituary was more sensitive than most, but expressed frustration and confusion over the murdered black leader. “The ugly killing of Malcolm X prompted many people to attempt an assessment of this violent and baffling young demagogue. Was his death an inevitable part of the struggle for Negro equality?” the obituary asked. “His death resembled a martyrdom less than a gangland execution. But Americans have had too much of assassination, too much of the settlement of conflict by violence.”
The New York Herald Tribune’s initial headline story on Malcolm, printed that Sunday evening but dated as the first edition of February 22, read “Malcolm X Slain by Gunmen as 400 in Ballroom Watch: Police Rescue Two Suspects.” An accompanying article stated that Hayer had been “taken to the Bellevue Prison Ward and was sealed off by a dozen policemen. The other suspect was taken to the Wadsworth Avenue precinct, where the city’s top policemen immediately converged.” Several hours later, in the Herald Tribune’s late edition, the subhead of the article was changed: “Police Rescue One Suspect.” References to a second suspect being taken to the Wadsworth Avenue police precinct were deleted. Black nationalists and Trotskyists would subsequently charge that the NYPD “covered up” its own involvement in the assassination by suppressing evidence and witnesses, including the capture of one assailant who may have been a BOSS operative. The NYPD and mainstream journalists such as Peter Goldman ridiculed such speculations. Goldman attributed the confusion to the fact that reporters debriefed Officer Thomas Hoy “at the scene and Aronoff at the station house,” not realizing they “were talking about the same man. . . . [T]he confusion lasted long enough to create a whole folklore around the ‘arrest’ of a mysterious second suspect—a mythology that endures to this day.” However, Herman Ferguson’s 2004 account of a second man who had been shot being taken away by the police lends some credence to the “second suspect” theory. If an informant or undercover operative of the FBI or BOSS had been shot, or was part of the assassination team, the police almost certainly never would have permitted his role to become public. Another possibility was the presence of more than one assassination team in the Grand Ballroom that Sunday. Although Ferguson and many eyewitnesses saw three shooters, some observers, including FBI informants, claimed that there were four or even five.
Within twenty-four hours of the assassination, nearly every national civil rights organization had distanced itself from both Malcolm and the bloody events at the Audubon. To Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, Malcolm’s assassination “revealed that our society is still sick enough to express dissent through murder. We have not learned to disagree without being violently disagreeable.” The NAACP leader Roy Wilkins deplored Malcolm’s “gunning down” as a “shocking and ghastly demonstration of the futility of resorting to violence as a means of settling differences.” Speaking on behalf of SNCC, the young desegregation activist Julian Bond informed the New York Times, “I don’t think Malcolm’s death or any man’s death could influence our deep-seated belief in nonviolence.”
From London, James Baldwin responded by linking the crime to the involvement of the U.S. government. “Whoever did it,” he speculated, “was formed in the crucible of the Western world, of the American Republic.” Much more explicit was CORE’s James Farmer, who was well aware of Malcolm’s metamorphosis and had expressed doubts that the leader’s murder was the product of a feud with the Nation of Islam. “I believe that his killing was a political killing,” he declared. It was hardly “accidental that his death came at a time when his views were changing [toward] the mainstream of the civil rights movement.” Farmer’s demand for a “federal inquiry into the murder,” however, found virtually no support. To the public, the Nation of Islam was evidently responsible for the shooting.
Malcolm’s death set off a chain reaction of violence and intimidation that kept his supporters in fear and left his organizations crumbling. On the night of the murder, a fire ignited in Muhammad Ali’s Chicago apartment, but the fire was later determined to have been accidental. Ali informed the press that Malcolm had been his friend “as long as he was a member of [the Nation of] Islam. Now I don’t want to talk about him.” Perhaps still suspicious about his apartment fire, Ali protested, “All of us were shocked at the way [Malcolm] was killed.” Ali denied that Elijah Muhammad, or others in the NOI, had any involvement in the murder.
Two days later, early in the morning on February 23, unknown parties ascended to the roof of a building next door to Mosque No. 7 and tossed Molotov cocktails into the mosque’s fourth floor, igniting a fire that soon raged out of control, with flames soaring as high as thirty feet. The fire quickly spread next door to the Gethsemane Church of God in Christ, and soon seventy-five firemen were working frantically to put it out. As a section of the mosque’s wall collapsed, five firefighters and a civilian were injured. Within an hour the entire building was gutted. The Fruit of Islam was mustered, and soon about three hundred people were watching the fire blaze away. As the crowd grew and emotions surged, the police became worried and called in reinforcements. In the frigid night air, Larry 4X Prescott huddled next to Captain Joseph, who had begun to weep. Larry was shocked to see the almost stoic, deeply private Joseph now overwhelmed with grief.
The destruction of the mosque greatly increased public perceptions that an open gang war was imminent. The NYPD policed the Nation’s Brooklyn mosque and the ten businesses it owned in the surrounding neighborhood; the mosque in Queens was similarly protected. In Chicago, squads stood an around-the-clock vigil to protect the life of Muhammad, still cloistered in his Hyde Park mansion. Captain Joseph characterized the Harlem firebombing as “a vicious sneak attack. . . . The worst thing a man can do is tamper with your religious sanctuary.”
The Nation would exact its revenge not in Harlem’s streets, but in Chicago at the Saviour’s Day convention. In preparation, administrators worked closely with the Chicago police to carry out extraordinary security measures around the convention hall. A police bomb squad thoroughly checked the facility; attendees were processed through police barricades before entering. Elijah Muhammad himself “will not make a move unless accompanied by at least six members of his security force, the Fruit of Islam brigade,” reported the Chicago Tribune. Twenty-five hundred members were present as the convention began on February 26. The event was orchestrated as a triumph of the victors. “Malcolm was a hypocrite who got what he was preaching,” Elijah Muhammad proclaimed. “Just weeks ago he came to this city to blast away with his hate and mudslinging. He didn’t stop here, either, but then went around the country trying to slander me.”
The audience was treated to the spectacle of Wallace Muhammad and Malcolm’s brothers, Wilfred X and Philbert X, walking out onstage to ask forgiveness and to pledge fidelity to the Messenger. Wallace claimed that he had been confused, that it had been wrong to leave the Nation and his father. In tears, he announced that “only God was in a position to judge a figure so exalted” as Elijah Muhammad. Reading texts that had been prepared for them, both Wilfred and Philbert denounced their dead brother for “his mistakes” and made it clear they would not attend his funeral. Wilfred declared to the convention, “We must not let our natural enemy, the white man, come between us [to] get us to kill each other. I was shocked to hear the news of my brother’s death but from my heart I ask Allah to strengthen me as a follower of Elijah Muhammad.”
Back in New York, there were by now serious questions about how Malcolm was to be buried. By Islamic standards, the autopsy itself had represented a desecration of his body. Muslim tradition also requires the prompt burial of the deceased, and on the opening day of the Saviour’s Day convention Malcolm’s corpse was lying in state for the fourth day at Harlem’s Unity Funeral Home, dressed in a Western-style business suit. Since Tuesday, about thirty thousand people had come to pay their respects. During the week Betty and others close to her had contacted more than a dozen Harlem churches, including Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist, to host Malcolm’s last rites; all declined, fearing Nation of Islam retaliation. Finally, the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ, on Amsterdam Avenue in West Harlem, agreed to make its auditorium available. Within hours, the church received a series of bomb threats, but the ceremony went forward without incident. Just before the funeral, Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun prepared and wrapped Malcolm’s body in a kafan, a traditional Muslim burial sheet.
More than a thousand people packed the Faith Temple Church on Saturday, February 27, to bear witness to Malcolm’s funeral. There were a small number of movement leaders—Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Dick Gregory, and SNCC’s John Lewis and James Forman—but the majority stayed away, probably fearing violence. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was not present, nor were most of Harlem’s civic leaders. Betty had asked Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee to preside over the program, and the two read out dozens of notes of condolence from a range of dignitaries, including King, Whitney Young, and Kwame Nkrumah. But it was Davis’s soliloquy on the meaning of Malcolm’s life to the black people of Harlem that captured the public’s imagination, and in subsequent decades would dwarf everything else that occurred that day. Using notes scribbled at his kitchen table, Davis spoke these words:
Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial, and bold young captain—and we will smile. . . . And we will answer and say unto them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? . . . And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood! . . . And we will know him then for what he was and is—a prince—our own black shining prince—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.
Following Davis’s eulogy, Betty walked to the coffin to view her husband a final time. Accompanied by two plainclothes police officers, she bent down and kissed the glass cover that had been placed over his body. She then collapsed in tears. The funeral cortege, which included three family cars, twelve police vehicles, and eighteen mourners’ cars, headed north to Westchester County. About twenty-five thousand people braved the freezing weather along the route to the cemetery. Only two hundred people, including media representatives, were allowed at the gravesite. After the last prayers, the coffin was lowered into the grave. There was still time for a final moment of controversy, one that in many respects illustrates the dilemma Malcolm faced at the end of his life. Several MMI and OAAU brothers noticed that the cemetery workers waiting to bury the coffin were all white. No white men, they complained, should be allowed to throw dirt on Malcolm’s body. The workers were persuaded to surrender their shovels, and under a drizzling rain the brothers proceeded to bury Malcolm themselves.
During the weeks after the mosque firebombing and the funeral, Malcolm loyalists feared for their lives. The Nation was convinced that die-hard Malcolmites were responsible for the fire, and that their actions merited fierce retribution. On March 12, Leon 4X Ameer, mostly recovered from the savage beating he had suffered at the hands of Clarence Gill and his men back in December, spoke to a meeting of Boston Trotskyists, claiming he had evidence that the U.S. government was involved in Malcolm’s death. The next day his body was found in his room at the Sherry Biltmore hotel. A medical examiner ruled that Ameer’s death was caused by a coma from a sleeping pill overdose. Another victim was Robert 35X Smith, one of Malcolm’s rostrum guards at the assassination. “Karate Bob,” as he was called, died when he either jumped or was pushed in front of a speeding subway car. When questioned years later about the death, Larry 4X Prescott curtly explained, “He got killed in the subway. They claimed that we pushed him off the subway [platform] or something, which I don’t believe.”
Neither the OAAU nor MMI had cultivated procedures of collective decision making, and without Malcolm, the weak bonds that had held the groups together came apart. Leaders worked on a volunteer basis out of personal devotion to Malcolm, and his death did more than deny them his physical presence: it froze their universe. He had become the cutting edge for rethinking black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and their own homegrown version of Islam, and often his devotees stumbled behind him—even at times suppressing his letters because his shifts in ideology were too disturbing. Without the architecture of his expanding social vision, they found it almost impossible to build upon his legacy. Trust soon evaporated between most members, as people renounced their ties.
In retrospect, Max Stanford said, “the OAAU was trying to put [itself] together too fast.” Collective leadership was the desired goal, but in reality “most people were mesmerized by Malcolm.” Even when Stanford expressed disagreements with Malcolm, he admitted, “Malcolm would mesmerize me. He was further developed” politically and intellectually than nearly all his followers. Consequently, when Malcolm became “a mass spokesman who’s world-acclaimed,” there was no one after the assassination prepared to assume his leadership mantle. At first, James 67X thought he might be up to the task. Several days after the assassination, he met with Revolutionary Action Movement members Max Stanford and Larry Neal. According to Stanford, James said that “Malcolm had formed a RAM cell somewhere in Muslim Mosque, Inc. and had said that if anything happened to him, I would know what to do.” RAM’s representatives agreed to work with James and other MMI activists. “The agreement was for [James] to continue to go internationally and around the country like Malcolm,” Stanford recalled, “because he could sound like Malcolm.” Yet James soon had his hands full simply trying to keep both groups alive. Because of the long-troublesome divisions between the MMI and the OAAU, there was no one in either group who could inspire the trust and confidence of members in the other group. The secular-oriented activists, moreover, had little interest in the MMI’s Islamic spiritual agenda. Given the absence of administrative resources or even a permanent office, neither organization could be sustained.
As the core of Malcolm’s supporters disappeared or fell away, James alone was left to deal with Betty Shabazz. Even within hours of Malcolm’s murder, her relationship with the MMI and the OAAU had become confrontational. She blamed Malcolm’s supporters for his death; in her bitterness and anger, she instructed several OAAU members to dump into the garbage many of her husband’s important papers, all of which had been moved for safety to the Wallaces’ home. She demanded that James forward to her all MMI correspondence unopened, including letters addressed to Malcolm, allowing her to review everything first. James refused. “She was a grieving widow, a hero’s widow,” he explained, but one who had at best a limited comprehension of the MMI and OAAU’s work.
The care and security of Betty and the children were largely assumed by Ruby Dee, Juanita Poitier, and other female friends, most of them celebrities. These women established the Committee of Concerned Mothers to provide support. Percy Sutton, James Baldwin, and John Oliver Killens also became actively involved. Within several weeks, over six thousand dollars was raised, including a five-hundred-dollar contribution from Shirley Graham Du Bois. In August, the committee organized a benefit concert that attracted a thousand people and generated another five thousand dollars for the purchase of a home. Malcolm’s core constituency, the black poor and working class, never abandoned Betty. She received many envelopes with small amounts of cash, sent either to the Hotel Theresa or to the MMI’s post office box. James 67X wrote to many of Malcolm’s international contacts requesting funds. Advertisements were placed on New York radio stations. Several aggressive MMI brothers even visited Harlem merchants and demanded cash and merchandise “contributions” for Betty and the children. Yet some Malcolm loyalists found Betty’s behavior at this time disturbing. To them, she seemed to be rejecting her husband’s poor and working-class black constituency, favoring instead overtures to the black bourgeoisie. Ferguson put Betty’s elitist politics in the context of Malcolm’s “Message to the Grassroots” speech: “She moved from the field slaves to the house slaves.”
As James 67X’s most trusted allies dissipated, and the difficulties of working with Betty grew more apparent, he recalled his promise to Malcolm to work for him for twelve months. Mid-March 1965 marked the end of that obligation, and he now began considering other options. He was exhausted, and Charles Kenyatta’s scurrilous rumors also had a poisonous effect; some MMI members wondered why James had left the Audubon for nearly an hour following the shooting, and questioned his cordial relations with the Marxists in RAM. So when Ella Collins contacted James, demanding the right to take over the MMI and OAAU based on her blood tie with Malcolm, he at first resisted, but soon agreed to resign his post. Ella was also given the incorporation papers for Muslim Mosque, Inc., becoming the effective leader of both groups.
On March 15, Ella held a press conference at OAAU and MMI headquarters. Described in the New York Times as “an ample figure in black skirt and large-buttoned blouse,” Collins was “terse and cryptic in speech,” a far cry from her charismatic brother. Collins’s claim to leadership was based on her questionable assertion that she had been executive director of Boston’s OAAU chapter since June 1964. She also asserted that Malcolm himself had appointed her as “his successor” on February 20, 1965. Collins generally expressed conservative views. She said that she had “no desire to fight against” Muhammad or the Nation of Islam; she attributed the firebombing of Malcolm’s Queens home to forces “much bigger than the Black Muslims”; and when asked whether the OAAU would reject “leftist or communist” support, Collins responded, “I believe so.” Within days, Collins’s reactionary politics—when compared to Malcolm’s—and her belligerent behavior drove out the few remaining veteran activists. Soon after, James 67X informed RAM that he planned to abandon all future political activity. At perhaps their final meeting, James announced mysteriously “that he was going to disappear, and that the initial cadre that was with Malcolm were going to go under[ground].” When RAM representatives suggested that youth organizing might offer new possibilities, James laughed, saying that they “were crazy” and “the youth were crazy.” And then, recalled Max Stanford, “he disappeared.”
James had decided to go underground because both the OAAU and MMI quickly fell apart without Malcolm. The best—and worst—example was Charles Kenyatta. Within days of the assassination, he insinuated to the press that the killing was an inside job, carried out by Marxists and the Revolutionary Action Movement. He talked extensively with the NYPD, and on March 15 was interviewed by the FBI. He pointed out that it was “very odd that Malcolm X’s bodyguards were not beside him on the stage.” Nor had he recognized any of Malcolm’s bodyguards in the rear of the hall. He further claimed that he and Malcolm “were very close friends” and that they had frequently discussed “certain matters pertaining to the NOI and the MMI.” Kenyatta then proceeded to trash Malcolm’s most faithful supporters. Although the FBI report is redacted, it is clear that he told the FBI that James 67X was “not a Negro nationalist but a Marxist Communist,” and that Malcolm had deliberately lied in claiming that scholarships would be made available for MMI members to study in Cairo; this was “only stated by Malcolm to make him look important.” In summary, Kenyatta warned FBI agents he “may be next in line to be assassinated.”
The trial of Hayer, Butler, and Johnson began the following winter, on January 12, 1966. The district attorney’s office was represented by veteran prosecutor Vincent J. Dermody. The judge was seventy-one-year-old Charles Marks, a law-and-order jurist who was personally responsible for sentencing one-fourth of all the prisoners on New York State’s death row. The case against Hayer was open and shut, because he had been shot attempting to flee the murder scene; in his pocket had been found an ammunition clip that matched the .45 caliber bullets taken from Malcolm’s body. In the cases of Butler and Johnson, however, there was of course no physical evidence connecting them with the murder. Both men had alibis for that Sunday afternoon, and there was no tangible connection between them and Hayer, beyond their NOI membership. There was also the problem of the chain of command: the police had no clue who had actually given the order to kill.
The prosecution’s star witness was Cary 2X Thomas (also known as Abdul Malik). Born in New York City in 1930, by his mid-twenties he had become a heroin addict and narcotics dealer. For years he was in and out of jail on drug charges, and in early 1963 was assigned to Bellevue Hospital after a nervous breakdown. In December of that year he joined Mosque No. 7, but soon left, siding with Malcolm in the split. Thomas’s extremely short tenure in the Nation meant that he knew relatively little about the organization, or the reasons for Malcolm’s separation. After detectives interviewed him, the district attorney’s office decided to arrest him as a material witness. For almost a year he was held in protective custody. On one occasion, highly disturbed, he set fire to his jail mattress.
In his original testimony to the grand jury, Thomas was one of the few OAAU members who claimed to have seen all three men—Hayer, Butler, and Johnson—at the murder. He explained that Butler and Johnson were the two who had tussled with each other while Hayer attacked Malcolm with the sawed-off shotgun. Since Hayer bore absolutely no physical resemblance to the shooter, the prosecutors and police persuaded Thomas to revise his testimony. At the 1966 trial, he was better prepared, insisting that Johnson, not Hayer, had wielded the shotgun; Hayer and Butler were the two handgun attackers. But he continued to make minor mistakes that undermined his testimony, for example, identifying Hayer as a member of Mosque No. 7; he also admitted to the jury that he had not actually seen guns in the hands of Butler or Hayer.
Butler struggled to understand how the assassination had actually occurred, and why he ended up being tried for the murder. He didn’t know Hayer, indeed had never met him. After his arrest, Butler sadly discovered that the Nation’s promises to him were empty. “Nobody took care of my children, nobody looked after my wife,” he complained. “I think that the people—the city, the state, the feds, whoever—they wanted this case closed, and they got somebody to say I was there and that I did it.” Butler, now out of prison, having served his sentence, insists “everybody know[s] there was four or five people involved. They didn’t go look for nobody else.”
As Johnson and Butler listened to the prosecution’s weak case being presented, they were brimming with confidence. There was no way, they believed, that the jury would convict them. Indeed, as the trial progressed, Hayer informed the court that Johnson and Butler were not involved in the assassination; he and three other men had committed the crime. Hayer even provided some accurate details. But Johnson correctly feared that these last-minute confessions would be used against him and Butler. Dermody effectively argued that Hayer was merely under orders by NOI bosses to sacrifice himself, in order to free his coassassins. Johnson’s attorneys also made things worse by putting up Charles Kenyatta as a defense witness. Johnson had extreme misgivings: “When they wanted to put Kenyatta on the stand to testify for me, I was against it. I never trusted Kenyatta—never.” Kenyatta had agreed to tell the jury that it would have been impossible for Butler and Johnson to enter the Grand Ballroom that afternoon, because both were well known as militant NOI members. Kenyatta also wanted to get into the public record his belief that an “internal left plot” was possibly responsible for Malcolm’s murder. However, under Dermody’s cross-examination, he also identified both Johnson and Butler as members of an NOI “hundred-man enforcing squad.”
Any chance for Johnson and Butler to be acquitted disintegrated with the appearance of Betty Shabazz. Betty had only briefly witnessed the actual shooting, so her testimony added only limited information. She described the chaos: “Everyone had fallen to the floor, chairs were on the floor, people were crawling around . . .” She’d pushed all her children under a bench and covered it with her body until things appeared to have settled down. A few minutes later she found Malcolm on his back on the stage. Dermody asked only a few questions, and the defense attorneys passed on cross-examining her. But as she walked slowly away from the witness stand, anger overwhelmed her and she clenched her fists in rage. Standing near the defense table, Betty cried out, “They killed my husband! They killed him!” As two court attendants quickly escorted the widow out, she continued murmuring her charges. Defense attorneys demanded a mistrial, but Judge Marks blandly instructed the jury to disregard Betty’s off-stand statements. As Johnson remembered the scene, Betty halted in front of the defense table “and started screaming and pointing at me: ‘They killed my husband!’ And that’s when the jury convicted me.”
Johnson was right. Hayer, Butler, and Johnson were all convicted of first-degree murder. On April 14, Judge Marks told each man that he would be incarcerated in a New York state prison for the remainder of his natural life. Peter L. F. Sabbatino, one of the defense attorneys, responded prophetically, “I don’t think that you have a solution here that history will support.”
The initial remaking of Malcolm’s posthumous image began, interestingly enough, with jazz musicians. John Coltrane, the most influential saxophone artist of the 1960s, was deeply influenced by Malcolm’s style of rhetoric and by his political philosophy of black nationalism. The new breed of musicians, emerging a generation after bebop, rejected political moderation and nonviolence; the anger and militancy identified with Malcolm captured their mood. For musician Archie Shepp, Malcolm inspired “innovations” in African-American music, making jazz an “extension of the black nationalist movement.” Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), recognizing the connections between black art and political protest, described Coltrane as the “Malcolm in the New Super Bop Fire.” Malcolm’s effective public presentations, his use of timing and the cadence of his speaking voice, were strikingly like jazz. As John Oliver Killens explained, “I have always thought of Malcolm X as an artist . . . but an artist of the spoken word.”
Malcolm’s popularity among millions of white Americans, however, began only with the publication, in late 1965, of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. After Doubleday’s cancellation of the book, Paul Reynolds had shopped the manuscript to other publishers, eventually securing a contract for Haley with the radical house Grove Press. The reviews of the narrative of Malcolm’s life were overwhelmingly positive. Eliot Fremont-Smith of the New York Times praised the Autobiography as a “brilliant, painful, important book. . . . As a document for our time, its insights may be crucial; its relevance cannot be doubted.” In the Nation, Truman Nelson declared, “its dead-level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose, even its manifold unsolved ambiguities will make it stand as a monument to the most painful of truths.” But the most insightful commentary on Malcolm’s memoir was written by his former debating partner, Bayard Rustin. In the Washington Post, Rustin powerfully characterized the book as “the odyssey of an American Negro in search of his identity and place in society.” Rustin sharply disputed the notion that Malcolm was simply the product of the “Harlem ghetto”; the book’s initial chapters on Malcolm’s Midwestern childhood “are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the plight of the American Negro.” There was much to criticize in Malcolm’s politics, and Rustin did not mince words. The black nationalism of groups like the Nation of Islam, he said, offers “an arena for struggle, for power and status-denied lower-class Negroes in the outside world.” It was here that Malcolm brought his intelligence and “his burning ambition to succeed.”
Rustin remained sharply critical of Malcolm’s “anti-Semitic comments” and former black nationalist views, but acknowledged that he was attempting to “turn a corner,” to assimilate into the civil rights mainstream. Had he been successful, Rustin observed, “he would have made an enormous contribution to the struggle for equal rights. As it was, his contribution was substantial. He brought hope and a measure of dignity to thousands of despairing ghetto Negroes.” Rustin, like Alex Haley, discounted the effectiveness of black nationalism as a potential force in challenging racial inequality. Both men misinterpreted Malcolm’s last frenetic year as an effort to gain respectability as an integrationist and liberal reformer, which was not an accurate or complete reading of him. Rustin’s characterization of Malcolm was designed to deny the militancy and radical potential of “field Negroes,” the black ghetto masses. Rustin wanted to make the point that Malcolm would have inevitably turned his back to the ghetto. “Malcolm’s life was tragic on a heroic scale. He had choices, but never took the easy or comfortable ones,” Rustin observed. Malcolm could have been “a successful lawyer, sipping cocktails with other members of the black bourgeoisie.” Rustin’s image of a transformed Malcolm was that of a pragmatic liberal, not a revolutionary. It was a vision that Haley shared, which is why the Autobiography does not read like a manifesto for black insurrection, but much more in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. This may help to explain the enormous popularity of the Autobiography and its adoption into the curricula in hundreds of colleges and thousands of high schools. Between 1965 and 1977, the number of copies of the Autobiography sold worldwide exceeded six million.
During the next few years, the FBI would continue its surveillance of Charles Kenyatta, believing him to be a security risk. BOSS and the NYPD, however, considered him a reliable informant and developed a close working relationship with him. By late April 1965, Kenyatta was observed giving rambling speeches along 125th Street. And by early 1966 he had rejoined the Nation of Islam, probably to provide inside information about the sect to the police. In the late 1960s he started his own organization in Harlem, which proclaimed identification with Kenya’s Mau Mau revolt and the necessity to bring that level of black revolution to the United States. Simultaneously, Kenyatta continued to work closely and cordially as a BOSS informant. In fact, Kenyatta was so highly prized by the police that the NYPD urged the FBI to back off from its continuing surveillance of him. Kenyatta’s strength was in manipulating his own image as Malcolm’s right-hand man while collecting damaging information about other black groups. His true role as a disrupter became evident only with the availability of his FBI file in 2007. Financially, he also cashed in on his political kinship with Malcolm X for decades.
Benjamin 2X Goodman’s response to the assassination was, oddly, to blame the largely secular black audience for panicking, so allowing the killers to escape. “A Muslim audience,” he believed, “would not have panicked. It would have responded to the situation with military discipline, not like a herd of cattle in a thunderstorm.” He was convinced that, without the “stampede,” the “Muslim brothers . . . [would] probably have taken all five assassins.” He decided to retreat from political life, getting work with children’s educational programs through HARYOU, the Harlem-based federally funded advocacy program. Agreeing to meet with FBI agents on April 22, 1966, Goodman indicated that “on many occasions individuals [in NOI Mosque No. 7] have invited [him] to return to the faith as a teacher.” Benjamin admitted that he “truthfully has given it much consideration.” Rewriting history, he denied that Muslim Mosque, Inc., had ever opposed “the basic aims and objectives” of the Nation of Islam. During the interview, he promised naively that he would always be “a brother” to one FBI agent, but that he would not exchange information for money. New York’s FBI special agent in charge, reporting to Hoover, observed, “This indicates that Goodman, if properly and delicately handled, can be influenced to return to the NOI, assuming his Assistant Ministership and possibly move up to the minister capacity and be of extremely valuable assistance to the Bureau.” Unfortunately for the FBI, Benjamin never rejoined the Nation, and he eventually, like Malcolm, embraced orthodox Islam.
It did not take many days of hiding out in the Mexican desert for Reuben Francis and Anas Luqman to become intensely suspicious of the two ex-NOI members with whom they had gone south to escape police attention after the assassination. Yet Luqman was deliberately vague about what actually happened next, when tensions spiraled out of control and violence flared. Luqman admitted only that when the group decided to split up, things fell apart. There was an altercation and the dead body of an ex-NOI member was left in the desert. One ex-NOI member named John, according to Luqman, “went off, got broke, and couldn’t handle it.” Luqman said he subsequently purchased a fishing boat, and he and Reuben managed to live for a time from the proceeds from their catches. Eventually they parted company; Luqman believes Reuben eventually went back to New York City. The story is a strange one from the start, as Francis’s denunciations of James 67X were well known, and Luqman was James’s best friend and roommate. Was Francis the man who was murdered in the Mexican desert? Since 1965, rumors of his appearance have popped up occasionally, but no credible evidence placing him in the United States—or anywhere else—has emerged.
Ella Collins purchased an attractive Harlem town house that would become the OAAU’s headquarters. Peter Goldman, who visited Collins in the early 1970s, observed that “the OAAU’s active membership had dwindled to a handful, and its most visible activities in Harlem were the annual commemorations of Malcolm’s birth and death.”
Meanwhile, James 67X simply slipped into obscurity. From 1976 until 1988 he lived in Guyana. When he came back to the United States, he became a nurse; in his sixties he remarried and started a new family. His earlier life as Malcolm’s chief aide became as remote as another world.
Muhammad Ali once again met Sonny Liston, in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, for their second heavyweight championship bout. Although Ali quickly knocked out Liston, the fight was secondary to the swirl of police activity surrounding the event. Prompted by bomb threats, two hundred Maine police were stationed in the arena. FBI agents and state troopers were also present. The mood was so tense that the event’s singer, entertainer Robert Goulet, forgot the words to the national anthem.
Over the next two years Ali achieved a spectacular boxing record. In November 1965, he humiliated former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. Several months later Ali was reclassified by his draft board as 1-A, and was soon notified that he would be inducted into the U.S. military. Ali’s response in opposition to the Vietnam War—“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong”—placed the Black Muslim, paradoxically, in the identical political posture as Malcolm X. When Ali refused to be inducted, his championship was stripped from him and he was barred from fighting for more than three years. He became a hero to the antiwar generation that rejected both the war and the military-industrial complex. To millions of Muslims throughout the world, Ali became a symbol of resistance to American imperialism. There would be many more twists and ironic turns in the magnificent but flawed journey of Ali, from his 1974 recapturing of the heavyweight championship by defeating George Foreman in Zaire to his 1996 surprise appearance at the Atlanta Olympics, holding a torch in his hands to mark the opening event. Like Malcolm before him, Ali also evolved in his beliefs from the Nation of Islam to orthodox Islam. Despite his physical infirmities, he has found peace within his life.
It would be left to Wallace Muhammad to complete Malcolm’s posthumous rehabilitation. His 1965 capitulation to his father was so transparently contrived that his ouster from the sect several years later was predictable. However, by 1974 he was back in the Nation, preaching orthodox Islam and challenging prominent ministers like Farrakhan. When Elijah Muhammad died, on February 25, 1975, Wallace quickly outmaneuvered his siblings to seize control of nearly all the Nation’s operations. Within a year, he had carried out an orthodox Islamic revolution within the sect. Farrakhan was stripped of his Harlem ministry and sentenced to serve at a minor mosque in the Chicago suburbs. Yacub’s History, the demonization of whites, the advocacy of strict racial separatism—these were all discarded. In June 1975, the Nation of Islam announced that it would accept white followers, and a few whites actually joined. The organization’s archival heritage—its thousands of publications and newspapers, audiotaped recordings, internal records, and photographs—were largely destroyed, and a new memory, branded by orthodoxy, was imposed. Wallace later changed his name to W. Deen Mohammed, to distinguish himself from his father.
As the group’s new imam, W. Deen Mohammed opened the financial records of the Nation for the first time to its members. Its fish import enterprises alone grossed $22 million in income annually. The Nation employed more than a thousand people and owned over $6 million worth of farmland—yet it also carried a $4.5 million debt, due in part to financial mismanagement. But Imam Mohammed’s most shocking move for diehards was the restoration of Malcolm X. On February 2, 1976, Mohammed announced that Harlem Mosque No. 7 was to be renamed in honor of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and praised Malcolm as “the greatest minister the Nation of Islam ever had, except for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” As the name Nation of Islam was jettisoned in favor of World Community of Al-Islam in the West, Farrakhan had enough, and began to reconstitute the old Nation of Islam around himself. Imam Mohammed’s response, in 1977, was to excommunicate him. Fidelity to Elijah Muhammad’s teachings now meant being expelled from the Islamic faith community.
And even years after the Messenger’s death, embarrassing episodes generated by his sexual infidelities continued to surface. In 1981, for example, three individuals claiming to be Muhammad’s illegitimate children filed a $5 million lawsuit charging that Muhammad’s children, relatives, and two banks had converted millions of dollars of Muhammad’s assets for themselves. The children suing were the son and daughter of June Muhammad—Abdulla Yasin Muhammad (born December 30, 1960) and Ayesha Muhammad (born September 4, 1962), and the daughter of Evelyn Williams, Marie Muhammad (born March 30, 1960).
Larry 4X Prescott at first supported Wallace’s efforts to reform the Nation of Islam. However, when Farrakhan broke with Wallace to reestablish the old NOI, Prescott joined him. Now, as Akbar Muhammad, looking back four decades, he identifies errors of judgment that he believes were made on both sides. After the firebombing of Malcolm’s home, for instance, James 3X Shabazz was among those who had accused Malcolm of burning his own house. “And Malcolm responded, ‘Do you think that I would burn a house down with my babies in there?’ . . . And it made us look like we were really out to lunch.” But Shabazz’s rhetoric had the effect of intensifying anti-Malcolm sentiment among “the brothers in the mosque, the bean soup eaters and the black coffee drinkers, they start to say, ‘Yeah, he went so far as to burn his own house down.’ That’s the way it started going.” Prescott suggested that the MMI was too small to represent “a challenge to the Nation.” What truly motivated Malcolm, he believed, was “wanting to get in the front of the civil rights movement.” His blanket repudiations of the Nation of Islam and the revelations of Elijah Muhammad’s infidelities all advanced Malcolm’s objectives. A last-minute rapprochement between the factions was never going to be possible.
Some of those who had a hand in Malcolm’s murder began disappearing from the scene as early as the 1970s. The body of James 3X Shabazz, fifty-two and the boss of the Newark mosque, was discovered on September 4, 1973, next to his Cadillac, which was parked in his driveway. In a mob-style hit reminiscent of that of Bugsy Siegel, James had been shot just above his left eye, with another bullet wound through the forehead into his brain. He left behind a wife and thirteen children. Apparently, James 3X’s death was not in belated retribution for Malcolm X, but the result of a war between the corrupt Newark mosque and a local criminal gang, the New World of Islam, for control of extortion and murders for hire. Three thousand people attended Shabazz’s funeral, including Newark mayor Kenneth Gibson and Farrakhan. The Newark murders continued. On September 18, 1973, two Muslims were shot to death, their bodies found in an automobile near an auto plant. A copy of Muhammad Speaks was spread out over the dead men’s faces. One month later, the heads of Newark mosque members Michael X Huff and Warren X Marcello were found in a lot near James 3X Shabazz’s home. Their bodies were subsequently found four miles distant.
There were also attempts on the life of Raymond Sharrieff. On one occasion in October 1971, someone pumped five shotgun rounds into Sharrieff’s Chicago mansion from outside; Sharrieff was wounded by several pellets. In late December 1971 an assailant shot into his downtown office window, just barely missing his secretary. Sharrieff died, peacefully, of natural causes on December 18, 2003.
Members of Elijah Muhammad’s family also began disappearing from the scene. Elijah’s third son and former manager of Muhammad Ali, Herbert Muhammad, spent years in litigation fighting his younger brother, Wallace, in the 1990s. On August 26, 2008, Herbert died from complications after heart surgery, leaving a wife, Aminah Antonia Muhammad, six sons, and eight daughters. About two weeks later, on September 9, 2008, Wallace Mohammed died. At the time of his death, Muhammad was the spiritual leader of 185 mosques with an estimated fifty thousand congregants. In death he was proclaimed as “America’s imam” by Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
In the final years of their lives, Ella and Betty were locked even more intensely in conflict. In the early 1990s, when Spike Lee proposed a Hollywood-style biographical film on Malcolm X, Ella was outraged to find out Betty was retained as a paid consultant. “Spike Lee’s after the money, the prestige,” Ella contemptuously complained to a reporter. “He doesn’t know any facts.” Ella protested that Betty “doesn’t know enough about Malcolm to consult on anything pertaining to his life. Her activities [with him] were very limited.” Betty had her revenge by eliminating any references to Ella in Lee’s movie. “I don’t have any respect for the lady,” Betty coolly explained to the Boston Globe. “She was not a good influence on him.” As the renaissance of interest in Malcolm exploded across American popular culture, Ella’s personal situation became much worse. No longer able to maintain the OAAU headquarters in Harlem, she relocated to Boston. Her health soon declined as she fell ill with diabetes; in 1990 she was discovered in her apartment lying in her own waste. One of her legs, swollen with a gangrenous ulcer, was filled with maggots. Both of her legs were soon amputated. Ella painfully passed away on August 6, 1996.
Following Malcolm’s death, Betty Shabazz appeared to live a successful and rewarding life. In 1972 she enrolled in a doctoral program in education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, receiving her Ph.D. three years later. Subsequently she served as an academic administrator at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, becoming a sort of celebrity among black middle-class and professional groups. But she could never escape Malcolm’s shadow, his terrible death, and the desire to punish those who were responsible. Her animus largely focused on Farrakhan, who she felt had betrayed Malcolm, and she believed he had directly participated in the conspiracy to murder him. Betty’s attacks on Farrakhan probably inspired her daughter Qubilah to attempt to hire a hit man to murder him in 1995. The would-be assassin, Michael Fitzpatrick, was an FBI informer, and Qubilah was quickly arrested and charged in federal court. In an astute move, Farrakhan rallied to Qubilah’s defense, claiming the young woman had been entrapped by the FBI. The government’s case fell apart at trial. Betty was forced to praise Farrakhan publicly for his “kindness in wanting to help my daughter.”
Tragically, barely a year after Qubilah’s legal ordeal, her disturbed twelve-year-old son, called “Little Malcolm” by the family, set fire one night to his grandmother’s apartment. Betty, sleeping in her bedroom, was horrifically burned. She struggled in the hospital for more than three weeks, with severe burns covering more than 80 percent of her body. Physicians took aggressive action, operating five times to remove layers of charred skin and replacing it with artificial skin. But the damage was too great and Betty Shabazz died on June 23, 1997. President William Jefferson Clinton noted her passing, applauding her for her commitments to “education and to uplifting women and children.” Like Malcolm X, noted District of Columbia representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shabazz “will be remembered not for her death, but for the principled life she lived and the tower of strength she became.” Her public memorial gathering, held at the prestigious Riverside Church in Manhattan, included testimonials by Republican governor George Pataki of New York and New York City’s Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. The mayor, widely unpopular among many working-class and poor black New Yorkers, was roundly booed when he began to address the audience. It was significant that the eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, rushed to the podium in defense of Giuliani, praising the conservative mayor’s gestures of kindness toward her mother and criticizing the mostly black crowd for its rudeness. Her defense of Giuliani may have reflected Betty’s black bourgeois politics, but not those of her father.
From the beginning of the criminal investigation following Malcolm’s murder, BOSS detective Gerry Fulcher had been troubled by what he considered major mistakes. The problems began at the crime scene. The first priority, Fulcher later recounted, should have been to “protect the whole area. You get rid of everybody who’s not going to be a witness.” Any evidence must be preserved. “You don’t want people finding things. . . .” In Fulcher’s judgment, the NYPD’s treatment of the murder scene was “totally contrary to what should be standard operating procedure. That thing should have been covered all night long.” In high-profile cases, it is not unusual to find “crime scenes stay[ing] locked up for days.” Fulcher expressed his misgivings to his police colleagues at the time of the assassination. Perhaps as a consequence, he found himself shut out of the investigation. Fulcher recalled:
I should have been an indispensable part of finding out what went on and so on, because they should have been grilling me. . . . I was flat out told, you know, “Stay out, you’re not involved.” Made me think that they could have been getting their stories straight, so to speak, without the interference of this young guy who didn’t know anything. . . . All they wanted to know is “Did you hear anything on the phone?” To me that was just a show. They knew I wouldn’t hear anything on the phone, because there’d be nobody there [at the Hotel Theresa office]. They knew the schedule. . . . So I think they were playing their roles. I think that was all bullshit. And when I went up and tried to join them, you know—“No, no, this is where we get our stories straight. You’re out, kid.”
Several months after the assassination, Fulcher was transferred from BOSS headquarters to one of the city’s most dangerous precincts, Fort Apache in the Bronx. He lasted there less than three years, before resigning from the force.
In early 1978, radical attorney William Kunstler took up the cases of Thomas 15X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler, petitioning to the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court for a new trial. His principal new evidence was a signed affidavit by Talmadge Hayer that identified four other men, “torpedoes from New Jersey,” who had been responsible for the killing of Malcolm X. Kunstler informed the supreme court that “the FBI knew all along that there were four [other] men involved in the killing and that two of the men convicted were innocent.” The FBI refused to release its findings about Malcolm’s assassination to the court. Kunstler also noted rumors, never confirmed, that Reuben Francis had recently resurfaced “around his old haunts spending large sums of money he allegedly received from the FBI.” Another affidavit was also submitted by Benjamin Goodman (then Ben Karim), who affirmed that “at no time did I see the faces of Butler or Johnson whom I knew well, and would have been sure to notice.”
On November 1, 1978, Justice Harold J. Rothwax of the state supreme court denied the motion to set aside the 1966 convictions of Butler and Johnson. The information in the affidavit might have exonerated those two men while identifying four others who, Hayer said, were guilty. However, the judge deemed the document insufficient to grant a new trial. Throughout 1978 and 1979 civil rights groups took up the Butler-Johnson case, first petitioning the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, requesting an investigation into Malcolm X’s death. The petition charged, “The ‘official version’ has it that Malcolm X was the victim of a Muslim vendetta. Many unanswered questions and unexplained events that predate the assassination . . . do not support the official version’ at all.” Signatories of the petition included Ossie Davis, African Methodist Episcopal bishop H. H. Brookins, California state assemblywoman Maxine Waters, and Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. Despite the campaign’s efforts, no congressional hearings were held.
Norman Butler was paroled in 1985 and Thomas Johnson received parole in 1987. For decades both men agitated to clear their names. Johnson, who had changed his name to Khalil Islam, died on August 4, 2009. Butler changed his name to Muhammad Abdul Aziz, and in the early 1990s was employed as a supportive services counselor at a Harlem drug rehabilitation clinic. In 1998, Aziz briefly served as security chief for Harlem Mosque No. 7. Beginning in 1990, Hayer was incarcerated part-time at the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Manhattan, where he was confined for a total of twelve hours per week on weekends. After seventeen unsuccessful attempts, Hayer was finally granted full parole in April 2010. Hayer told the parole board, “I’ve had a lot of time . . . to think about [Malcolm X’s murder] . . . I understand a lot better the dynamics of movements . . . and conflicts that can come up, but I have deep regrets about my participation in that.” It was an oddly impersonal mea culpa, an apology without actually articulating the crime he had committed. Hayer’s parole provoked a negative response from the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, which announced at a press conference that Hayer’s crimes were too serious to permit his release.
Other than Talmadge Hayer, the alleged assassins of Malcolm X, according to Hayer’s affidavit, continued their lives in the Nation of Islam as before. The senior member of the crew, Newark mosque administrator Benjamin Thomas, was killed in 1986, at age forty-eight. Leon Davis lived on in Paterson, New Jersey, employed at an electronics factory there; he continued his affiliation with the Nation and the FOI for decades. Businessman Wilbur McKinley also continued to be associated with the Newark mosque.
Alleged murderer Willie Bradley went into a life of crime. On April 11, 1968, the Livingston National Bank of Livingston, New Jersey, was robbed by three masked men brandishing three handguns and one sawed-off shotgun. They escaped with over $12,500. The following year Bradley and a second man, James Moore, were charged with the bank robbery and were brought to trial. Bradley, however, received privileged treatment, and he retained his own attorney separate from Moore. The charges against him were ultimately dismissed; meanwhile, after a first trial ending in a hung jury, Moore was convicted in a second trial.
Bradley’s special treatment by the criminal justice system in 1969-70 raises the question of whether he was an FBI informant, either after the assassination of Malcolm X or very possibly even before. It would perhaps explain why Bradley took a different exit from the murder scene than the two other shooters, shielding him from the crowd’s retaliation. It suggests that Bradley and possibly other Newark mosque members may have actively collaborated on the shooting with local law enforcement and/or the FBI. The existing evidence raises the question of whether the murder of Malcolm X was not the initiative of the Nation of Islam alone. In The Death and Life of Malcolm X, Goldman does not identify Bradley by name but seems to be referring to him when he notes that one of the assassins “was tracked to a New Jersey state prison, where he was serving seven and a half to fifteen years for an unrelated felony.”
Bradley continued to experience legal problems into the 1980s. In 1983, he was indicted on twelve counts, including robbery, “terroristic threat,” aggravated assault, and possession of a controlled substance. He first pled not guilty to the charges, but was eventually convicted of several of them and was incarcerated. His life was turned around through a romantic relationship with Carolyn F. Kelly. A longtime leader of Newark’s black community, Kelly, a Republican, led the defense for boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in the 1970s, which helped overturn his murder conviction. The owner of First Class Championship Center, a boxing establishment in Newark, Kelly was the first black woman in the state to promote lucrative prize fights. By the 2000s, Bradley could usually be found on Friday afternoons at his wife’s boxing gymnasium. In October 2009, he was inducted into the Newark Athletic Hall of Fame for his baseball achivements in high school.
In 2010, Bradley even appeared briefly in a campaign video, promoting the reelection of Newark’s charismatic mayor, Cory Booker. Bradley’s metamorphosis from criminality to respectability seemed complete.
But things began falling apart in May 2010, with the Internet publication of an investigative article on Bradley by journalist Richard Prince. In the article, journalist Abdur-Rahman Muhammad directly accused Bradley of being “the man who fired the first and deadliest shot” killing Malcolm X. Journalist Karl Evanzz, the author of several studies on the Nation of Islam, called for Bradley’s exposure and prosecution “for depriving Malcolm X of his civil rights in the same way that the Klansmen who killed black activists were prosecuted. . . . Bradley killed Malcolm X to stop him from exercising his freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly.” Weeks later, filmmaker Omar Shabazz released a documentary film naming Bradley, Hayer, and the other Newark NOI members as the real killers of Malcolm X. The goal of these critics appears to be Bradley’s indictment by federal or local authorities.
The chief beneficiary of Malcolm’s assassination was Louis Farrakhan. Indeed, the transition from Minister Louis X of Boston to Louis Farrakhan was made possible only through the leadership model that Malcolm had established years earlier. For a decade Malcolm had spread the salvation message of Elijah Muhammad throughout the United States, and for another decade, 1965 to 1975, Farrakhan assumed the identical role as the Nation of Islam’s national minister. Just as Malcolm predicted, most of those inside the Nation who had criticized him and sought to undermine his influence were equally opposed to Farrakhan. Elijah Muhammad’s family was jealous and fearful of him, because as the patriarch approached death it seemed possible that Farrakhan might usurp the mantle of leadership.
But he never managed to escape the shadow of speculation and rumor regarding his possible role in Malcolm’s murder. Farrakhan’s vivid description of Malcolm as a man “worthy of death” may have sealed his reputation. In an interview with Mike Wallace decades after the killing, Farrakhan conceded, “In one sense I may have been complicit in the murder of Brother Malcolm in that when Malcolm spoke against the Messenger, I spoke against him, and this helped to create an atmosphere [in which] Malcolm was assassinated.” But that admission has never satisfied latter-day Malcolmites, many of whom continue to demand a reopening of the case. Farrakhan is fully aware that “even now there are some black people calling for a grand jury because there’s no statute of limitations on murder to bring me into a grand jury to question me.”
Even in his dreams, Farrakhan cannot escape his link to Malcolm. In a 2007 oral history interview, he shared this nocturnal revelation:
As God is my witness, I had a vision of Brother Malcolm. He came to me in like a dream vision. . . . And gray is in his hair. You know he had this little hair, that knot sometime, you know, and I saw the gray in his hair. And he comes to me and he said, “Brother Louis, what went wrong?” And I said to him, “Brother, you were slated to sit in [Elijah Muhammad’s] seat. He had to try you, to see what was in you. And you failed the test. It wasn’t that he was against you, but he wanted to see what was really in you.” . . . I am here because my brother died that I might live. It’s very difficult for me not to just beat him down, because I walked in his shoes. And I know what pain is when you love people, and you work for people, and they turn against you and seek to destroy you. I understand that.
Today, Farrakhan still seeks to demonstrate his continuing filial devotion to Malcolm, despite his central role in advocating his death. His dream, however, places the cause of the murder in Malcolm’s own failures. Farrakhan suggests that Elijah Muhammad intended to make Malcolm his spiritual heir, setting aside the claims of Wallace and his other children. Muhammad was simply testing Malcolm, to determine if he had the leadership qualities necessary to direct the Nation. While it is true that Malcolm, after being silenced, at first desperately attempted to remain inside the Nation of Islam, once the break occurred he was liberated from the restrictions that had been imposed on him. What Farrakhan has difficulty admitting is that it was only when Malcolm accepted the universalism and humanism of orthodox Islam, explicitly rejecting racial separatism, that he could reach a truly global audience. Had he lived, Malcolm could have led an international campaign for human rights for blacks, but he could have accomplished this only by divorcing himself from the Nation of Islam’s sectarian creed.
Several weeks after the firebombing and destruction of Mosque No. 7 in February 1965, Louis was asked to visit and speak to the Nation’s congregation in New York. It was only months later that Elijah Muhammad telephoned to say that he would be transferred to serve as minister of Mosque No. 7 in Harlem. Under Louis’s supervision, the destroyed mosque would be reconstructed; he would move into Malcolm’s rebuilt home in Elmhurst. In August 1965, Muhammad announced Louis’s appointment before six thousand members in Detroit’s Cobo Center.
Upon being told about his new position, an overwhelmed Farrakhan jumped into his car and drove to a park on the outskirts of Boston. Years before, as a high school distance runner, it had been a place of solitude, where he would run and exercise. He recounts how he jogged out into the middle of a grassy field, tears streaming down his face, dropped to his knees, looking up into the sky, and confessed to Malcolm: “I didn’t mean to take your mosque—I didn’t mean to take your home!” As Farrakhan relates this story, it is powerful and it may even be plausible. But is it true?
Only three hours after the assassination of Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan delivered the guest sermon at Newark Mosque No. 25—the very mosque where the assassins had been recruited and organized. Was his presence in Newark on that fateful day simply coincidence, or something more?
Years from now, when thousands of pages of FBI and BOSS surveillance are finally accessible, more definitive judgments will be made about the connections between Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, and various law enforcement agencies. It would not be entirely surprising if an FBI transcript surfaced documenting a telephone call from Elijah Muhammad to a subordinate, authorizing Malcolm’s murder. At present, the evidence suggests that Farrakhan, for one, was not personally involved and had no prior knowledge of the plot; however, he surely understood the consequences of his fiery condemnation of Malcolm, as well as of the forces within the Nation of Islam that would rid Elijah Muhammad of the turbulent priest. He may have suspected that his order to speak at the Newark mosque that February 21, 1965, was not a wholly innocent pursuit. It was ambition, not direct involvement in the crime, that blinded Farrakhan to what was going on around him.