The Assassination of Malcolm X

Malcolm X was shot and killed at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965, at the age of 39, while walking to the podium to address a rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. A staged disturbance drew his bodyguards’ attention; a man came forward and shot him in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun while two others fired pistols from the stage. He died before the ambulance arrived. Two of the three men convicted of the murder spent decades in prison for a crime they almost certainly did not commit. The actual killers have never been charged.

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Who Malcolm X Was, and How He Got There

Malcolm Little was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Earl and Louise Little. His father, a Baptist preacher and Garveyite organizer, died when Malcolm was six — killed, the family believed, by white men whose involvement the insurance companies used as a pretext to deny the life insurance payout. His mother was institutionalized when he was thirteen, and he grew up in foster care in Michigan, excelling in school until a teacher told him a career as a lawyer was not realistic for Black men. He dropped out.^1^

He moved to Boston, then New York, was involved in burglary, and in 1946 was sentenced to eight to ten years in Massachusetts state prison. In prison, he encountered the Nation of Islam and converted, replacing his surname — which he called a slave name — with X. Released in 1952, he became a minister for Elijah Muhammad and quickly the Nation’s most visible and effective spokesperson. By the early 1960s he was nationally known: feared by many white Americans, contested by some civil rights leaders for his advocacy of Black self-defense, celebrated by many Black Americans who found his willingness to name white supremacy directly more honest than the movement’s strategic rhetoric.^2^

Why Malcolm X Left the Nation of Islam

In November 1963, after President Kennedy’s assassination, Malcolm made remarks characterizing the killing as “chickens coming home to roost” — American violence abroad returning domestically. Elijah Muhammad suspended him. The suspension was ostensibly about the Kennedy remarks, but tension had been building for years, partly around Malcolm’s prominence and partly around Malcolm’s discovery that Muhammad had fathered children with young women in the organization.

Malcolm left the Nation of Islam in March 1964, founded the Muslim Mosque Inc., traveled to Mecca, and underwent a significant evolution. The Hajj — which he described in letters home as the first time in his life he had been in a setting with white people who treated him as a full human being — shifted his articulation of race. He no longer described all white people as inherently evil. He maintained his critique of American racism and his advocacy of Black self-determination, but was refining it toward something more internationalist and coalition-based.^3^

In June 1964 he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity on the model of the Organization of African Unity, intending to bring Black American civil rights issues to the United Nations as a human rights matter. He was killed eight months later.

The Wrongful Convictions That Took 56 Years to Correct

Three men were convicted: Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson. Hayer was caught at the scene and admitted to the shooting, but also said repeatedly and in sworn affidavits that Butler and Johnson were not involved — that he had acted with four other men from a New Jersey mosque, none of whom were ever charged.^4^

The murder investigation was, by multiple accounts, inadequate. The NYPD provided only minimal security at the Audubon Ballroom despite Malcolm having reported death threats and despite an undercover NYPD officer being present in the audience. The FBI, which had surveilled Malcolm since 1953 through COINTELPRO, had informants close to him. The extent of federal agency knowledge of or involvement in the assassination has never been fully established.

In November 2021, fifty-six years after the murder, a New York judge vacated the convictions of Butler and Johnson — renamed Khalil Islam and Muhammad Aziz — after a two-year investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the Innocence Project found that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence, including FBI and NYPD files, from the defense. Islam had died in 2009. Aziz, then 83, was present in court. He said: “I have waited 55 years for this day.”^5^

Talmadge Hayer — who had admitted to the crime, served 45 years, and named the other participants in sworn statements that were ignored — was paroled in 2010.

What the Historical Record Actually Shows About Malcolm X

Malcolm X was more feared than loved in 1965. The NAACP did not mourn him. Most mainstream civil rights leaders treated him as an opponent. The white press largely characterized him as a hate preacher. His autobiography, dictated to Alex Haley and published months after his death, began the slow correction of the public record and became one of the most read American memoirs of the twentieth century. Spike Lee’s 1992 film brought another generation into contact with the figure.

The full accounting of who killed him and why, and what government agencies knew, remains incomplete. The files that should answer those questions are still being contested in court and in FOIA requests. What is clear is that an American man of 39 who had spent his adult life trying to document and dismantle American racism was shot on a Sunday afternoon in front of his wife and daughters in a public ballroom in New York City, and the people convicted of killing him may not have been the people who killed him.

Both Malcolm X’s assassination and King’s assassination occurred against the background of systematic federal surveillance that treated Black leadership as a national security threat — a program documented in the COINTELPRO files. Understanding the full pattern of civil rights era violence requires holding both cases together: the government that failed to protect these men had been actively working to destroy them.

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Sources:

1. Malcolm X, and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Grove Press, 1965.
2. Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Viking, 2011.
3. Perry, Bruce. Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. Station Hill Press, 1991.
4. Carson, Clayborne. Malcolm X: The FBI File. Carroll & Graf, 1991.
5. Innocence Project and Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The Vacatur of Malcolm X Murder Convictions. 2021.