Two frame-up victims exonerated. So who really killed Malcolm X?
https://themilitant.com/2021/11/27/two-frame-up-victims-exonerated-so-who-really-killed-malcolm-x/
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
Vol. 85/No. 45
December 6, 2021
Malcolm X speaks to young people in Selma, Alabama, Feb. 4, 1965, during
bloody battle for right of Blacks to vote. Both U.S. government and
leadership of Nation of Islam feared Malcolm’s revolutionary course and
development as a leader for the whole working class.
AP PHOTO
Malcolm X speaks to young people in Selma, Alabama, Feb. 4, 1965, during
bloody battle for right of Blacks to vote. Both U.S. government and
leadership of Nation of Islam feared Malcolm’s revolutionary course and
development as a leader for the whole working class.
Two of the three men convicted for the assassination of Malcolm X in
1965 were exonerated Nov. 18. The decision reverses a decadeslong
frame-up by the capitalist “justice” system.
The convictions of Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam were overturned by New
York State Supreme Court Judge Ellen Biben following a nearly two-year
investigation by the Innocence Project and the Manhattan District
Attorney’s Office. The third person convicted — Talmadge Hayer —
admitted his guilt but always maintained Aziz and Islam weren’t
involved. They had been convicted anyway. All three were members of the
Nation of Islam.
Malcolm X had broken from the Nation in March 1964, criticizing the
refusal of its leadership to join the growing movement fighting to
overturn Jim Crow segregation.
But a key part of Malcolm’s assassination remains buried. That is, the
full extent of the government cover-up of the role played by the FBI,
New York Red Squad and other cop agencies. They had targeted Malcolm X
because of his political evolution to become a revolutionary leader of
the working class here and worldwide.
Aziz and Islam served about two decades in prison. Aziz was released on
parole in 1985 and Islam two years later. Islam died in 2009.
“We have obtained dozens and dozens of reports from the FBI and the
NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations,” District Attorney
Cyrus Vance told the media Nov. 18. “These records include FBI reports
of witnesses who failed to identify Mr. Islam and who implicated other
suspects.
“And, significantly, we now have reports revealing that, on orders from
Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, the FBI ordered multiple witnesses not
to tell police or prosecutors that they were, in fact, FBI informants,”
he said. “Many of those documents were exculpatory. None of them were
disclosed to the defense.”
In addition to FBI agents being present in the Audubon Ballroom when
Malcolm X was assassinated Feb. 21, 1965, undercover cop Gene Roberts,
who had infiltrated Malcolm’s bodyguards, was also there. Roberts was
assigned by the Bureau of Special Services, the NYPD’s Red Squad, to
penetrate and inform on the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which
Malcolm founded in 1964.
According to highly censored documents released by the FBI in the 1970s,
Hoover wrote to the FBI office in New York in 1964 instructing it to “do
something about Malcolm X.”
During their 1966 trial, Hayer confessed that he had participated in
killing Malcolm. He also testified that neither Islam, then known as
Thomas 15X Johnson, nor Aziz, known as Norman 3X Butler, were involved.
Close associates of Malcolm on the scene at the Audubon Ballroom that
day said neither Johnson nor Butler were there.
Hayer was imprisoned for 45 years, including during the 1971 Attica
uprising in upstate New York, where he repeated to attorney William
Kuntsler that Aziz and Islam were innocent. In 1977 Hayer filed
affidavits with the New York court naming four different members of the
Nation’s mosque in Newark, New Jersey, as his associates in the
assassination. The government refused to reopen the case or grant Aziz
and Islam a new trial.
For years Malcolm had been a prominent spokesperson and leader of the
Nation. “But by the early 1960s he was bumping up against the limits of
the bourgeois nationalism of the Nation of Islam,” SWP National
Secretary Jack Barnes writes in Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the
Road to Workers Power. “Malcolm, to the contrary, was being politically
drawn more and more toward the rising struggles for Black freedom in the
United States and revolutionary battles by the oppressed and exploited
the world over.”
Malcolm X: A revolutionary leader
The political course he was on during the final year of his life was as
a revolutionary internationalist, a proponent of working people breaking
from the Democratic and Republican parties, and a working-class
political leader posing a threat to the capitalist rulers.
Malcolm X meets reporters in New York, Nov. 24, 1964, after his second
trip to Africa. Malcolm said the trip showed him the need to involve all
“true revolutionaries dedicated to overthowing the system of
exploitation that exists on this earth,” like in the Algerian and Cuban
revolutions.
ROBERT PARENT
Malcolm X meets reporters in New York, Nov. 24, 1964, after his second
trip to Africa. Malcolm said the trip showed him the need to involve all
“true revolutionaries dedicated to overthowing the system of
exploitation that exists on this earth,” like in the Algerian and Cuban
revolutions.
Speaking at Oxford University in England in 1964, Malcolm told students
that “the young generation of whites, Blacks, browns, whatever else
there is,” you’re living in “a time of revolution.” And “I for one will
join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you
want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”
When asked by the Village Voice just a few weeks before he was killed
whether his aim was to awaken Blacks to their exploitation, he
immediately replied, “No, to their humanity, to their own worth.”
Malcolm X detested demagogy and thuggery, methods he had personally seen
in the Nation of Islam. Beatings of Malcolm’s supporters and attempts on
his own life escalated in early 1965.
On Feb. 14 Malcolm’s house was firebombed, which could have killed his
daughters and his wife. Malcolm accused Nation of Islam leader Elijah
Muhammad of ordering the attack. But the day before he was assassinated,
Malcolm said he was too hasty in making this statement. “I know what
they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff
recently going on,” Malcolm said.
It was Malcolm’s confidence in the capacities of working people that the
capitalist rulers felt most threatened by. Given the passage of time,
all the facts about his assassination may never be known. But it’s clear
that those in or around the Nation of Islam who assassinated Malcolm
were carrying out what the U.S. capitalist rulers desired.
‘Malcolm was a revolutionary leader of the working class’
Below is an excerpt from a talk by Jack Barnes, national secretary of
the Socialist Workers Party, titled “Malcolm X: Revolutionary Leader of
the Working Class.” It was given at a March 28, 1987, meeting in
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