I remember the mass media, reflecting their class hatred of Malcolm X, gloating and cheering his assassination. I remember the response to his death by the tens of thousands in Harlem, who for several days went to view his casket. I remember the eulogy by Ossie Davis that silenced the hyenas of the press when he said "He [Malcolm X] was our prince, our Black shining prince." In spite of all of the attacks by the mass media, Malcolm X has grown more and more popular as a martyred leader of his people and an uncompromising advocate of human rights and freedom.
In 1991, at the time Spike Lee's documentary movie on Malcolm X was due to be released, several books were written that attempted to camouflage Malcolm's political evolution during his last year. Two such books were Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, by Bruce Perry and Malcolm X: The Assassination, by Michael Friedly. In my opinion, these books are a second assassination of Malcolm X.
Both books were written in order to reaffirm the government's position to put sole blame on the Nation of Islam (NOI) for the assassination. Both deny the evolution of his thinking, reflecting his revolutionary development in the last year of his life, and discounted any possibility of government complicity or motive in the assassination. Both were also polemics against two excellent books written by George Breitman: The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary and The Assassination of Malcolm X.
Breitman wrote The Last Year of Malcolm X to cover the period of Malcolm's life that is absent from the autobiography co-authored with Alex Haley. He also hoped to clear up any misconceptions that Haley, who disagreed with Malcolm's ideas as they were developing, had put into the epilogue of the autobiography. Breitman's book was based on Malcolm's speeches and statements during his last year and his collaboration with the Socialist Workers Party. If one reads Malcolm X's speeches, one will clearly understand that Breitman's book is a very accurate statement of Malcolm X's political development and evolution.
Unfortunately, Spike Lee's documentary movie Malcolm X also downplayed Malcolm's thinking and accomplishments during his last year. This allows those who oppose what Malcolm had become in his last year to maintain that he had not become a threat to the capitalist establishment. This has been consciously done to make it appear that the NOI alone had a motive to kill Malcolm X and to exonerate the role of the government in the assassination.
The Government's Motive To Neutralize Malcolm X
In his last year, Malcolm X came to the conclusion that it was impossible for African Americans to be integrated into this system because racism was profitable and an integral part of capitalism. His words on the world-wide oppression of non-whites by white Europeans were very similar to what Karl Marx wrote about how the original capitalist fortunes were obtained. In Capital, Volume One, Part VIII, Chapter 31, [the] Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist Marx wrote:
"...The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production... If money... comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
Malcolm X was the first mass leader in the United States to oppose the war in Vietnam and to identify the oppression of African Americans in this country with the struggles of the oppressed throughout the world. In all probability, Malcolm X would have spoken at the first mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965. His powerful oratory alone, as well as his standing among inner-city Blacks, would have given the Vietnam Antiwar Movement a far different character and the history of that period in the United States and the world would have been greatly changed.
I had the opportunity to hear Malcolm X speak at meetings in Harlem at the Audubon Ballroom and elsewhere. His power as an orator was his ability to make complex ideas simple and clear. He was not a demagogue. His speeches were always an appeal to reason.
One example of the power of his oratory was when he spoke at an organizing rally for Hospital Workers Local 1199 in New York City 1962. The following is a famous quote from that speech: "The hospital strikers have demonstrated that you don't get a job done unless you show the Man you're not afraid... If you're not willing to pay that price, then you don't deserve the rewards or benefits that go along with it."
He gave the best speech at the rally, and when he finished speaking, all of the workers - Black, white, and Puerto Rican - cheered wildly. The response was the same whether he spoke in Harlem or at Oxford University in England.
Malcolm X viewed the struggle of African Americans as an economic and social struggle for human rights and not limited to just a struggle for civil fights. He identified with the Colonial Revolution at that time in Africa and throughout the world, including the struggle of the Vietnamese people and the Cuban revolution; in direct opposition to the policies of the United States government both then and now. He had met with Che Guevara and the Cuban delegation to the United Nations in December 1964 and a firm bond was established between them. Contrary to Friedly and Perry's assertions, Malcolm had become a very real threat to the very foundations of capitalism in the United States, The truth is that the United States government had a very good motive for the assassination.
Prior to his assassination Malcolm X told Clifton DeBerry, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party in 1964, and myself that he hoped to live long enough to build a viable organization based on his current ideas - so that he would be more dangerous to the system dead than alive. Unfortunately, he did not have time to build the new organization that he had envisioned.
In his book, The Assassination of Malcolm X, George Breitman points out that the first accounts of the assassination, in the New York City newspapers, reported that two people were caught by the crowd and saved by the police. But later, the press and the police reported that only one person, Talmadge Hayer, had been caught by the crowd. No explanation has ever been given for the change in the story.
There is no doubt that the police had plainclothes officials in the audience. As a witness to the assassination, I was questioned at the Harlem police headquarters. I recognized a man there - obviously a cop, with free run of the office - whom I had seen sitting in the first row at the Audubon Ballroom where Hayer said his accomplices were sitting. Perry's book basically supports the official police version of the assassination. It ignores strong evidence that it would have been virtually impossible for only three people to have carried out the assassination.
Perry also ignores Hayer's affidavit that the two other people convicted with him, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson-who were both members of the NOI- were not even present at the meeting when Malcolm was killed. (When I was called before the Grand Jury on the assassination of Malcolm X, James Shabazz, Malcolm's primary assistant, also told me that that Butler and Johnson were well known and confirmed that they were not at the meeting nor would they have been allowed to enter the meeting.)
Friedly's book is a more sophisticated cover up. The book puts the blame solely on the NOI while, at the same time, criticizing the police investigation. It is based on Hayer's confessions at the trial and at a later parole hearing. Friedly's and Hayer's version is that five members of the NOI carried out the assassination-three people doing the shooting up front and two people creating a diversion prior to the shooting, setting off a smoke bomb in the back of the room.
Hayer's version of the logistics corresponds with my own impressions at the scene. Contrary to Friedly's contention, however, the confession by Hayer only reinforces the probable existence of a second man caught by the crowd. Hayer explains that at the time that he was shot and caught by the crowd he could see one of his accomplices running ahead of him. I was told by Malcolm's guards when I got outside the Audubon Ballroom, that two people were caught by the crowd at the same time and that one was taken to the hospital by the police and the other taken into police custody. Hayer was taken to the hospital and then booked. It is likely that the second man caught was the one running ahead of Hayer and was quite possibly an agent.
There is one glaring error in Hayer's statement. He stated that the five assassins cased one of Malcolm's meetings at the Audubon Ballroom in the winter of 1964-65 and concluded that they would have a good chance to escape. This is far from probable. There were normally 30 to 50 cops, in their blue uniforms, both inside and outside the building stationed at all the exits. Escape would not have been easy.
However, at the meeting when Malcolm was assassinated, the police were nowhere to be found-even though they knew that an assassination attempt was imminent. In order to plan Malcolm X's death, the conspirators would have needed to know and be confident that the cops were not going to be there on that day. Perry and Friedly assert that the police agreed to Malcolm's request not to have police protection. However, when the police first spoke of their agreement, Malcolm's wife, Betty Shabazz, stated that it was a lie that Malcolm had made the request.
Both Perry and Friedly discount any possible disruption operations by the FBI, the New York City police, or the CIA. But in a documentary aired in 1992 on Malcolm X and narrated by Dan Rather on CBS television, the FBI is shown to have acted as agent provocateurs. For example, the FBI sent provocative letters to the NOI and forged Malcolm's signature to the letters. Rather revealed that the CBS television crew had not been allowed access to over 45,000 pages of documents on Malcolm X that remain in the files of the CIA and FBI.
"The Judas Factor"
In dramatic contrast to Perry's and Friedly's conclusions about Malcolm X's assassination, is a book by Washington Post staff writer Karl Evanzz titled, The Judas Factor (Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 1992. 389 pp., $22.95).
In this book, Evanzz documents how the intelligence community-the CIA, the FBI, and the New York Police Bureau of Special Services (BOSSI) - using agents provocateurs and infiltrators - set the stage for the assassination of Malcolm X. It outlines the motives for their actions. Evanzz spent 15 years researching over 300,000 pages of declassified FBI and CIA documents. From Page 214 of The Judas Factor:
A few days after Malcolm X's press conference announcing his split from the NOI, "William C. Sullivan (FBI) contacted the directors of BOSSI and asked them to recruit several African Americans to infiltrate Malcolm X's new organization. Among the directors at the time were two men who later would play key roles in the scandal that led to Richard Nixon's resignation: Anthony Ulasewicz, the infamous bagman of Watergate, and Nixon advisor John J. Caulfield.
"Ulasewicz was all too happy to comply with Sullivan's request. Malcolm X had been a thorn in the New York Police Department's side for more than a decade. He told Sullivan that he would have officers ready to infiltrate Malcolm X's new organizations within thirty days.
"While Sullivan was coordinating the domestic counterintelligence program against Malcolm X with BOSSI, the CIA initiated a similar program to determine the extent of Malcolm X's influence with Third World leaders. 'What do we have on Malcolm X?' a CIA official wrote in an inter-office memo dated March 10. The request for information had come from the U.S. State Department. The official ordered a clerk to run a thorough check in the CIA's database to determine which Third World countries seemed receptive to Malcolm X. . ."
In the introduction to the book, Evanzz writes: "After analyzing these resources, I am convinced that Louis E. Lomax, an industrious African-American journalist who befriended Malcolm X in the late 1950's, had practically solved the riddle of his assassination. Lomax, who died in a mysterious automobile accident while shooting a film in Los Angeles about the assassination, believed that Malcolm X was betrayed by a former friend who reportedly had ties to the intelligence community ... In 1968, Lomax called the suspect ‘Judas'. This, then, is the story of The Judas Factor."
There are two major themes in the book: One is the "Judas Factor" and the other is the concern of the FBI and the CIA over Malcolm X's success in linking the struggle of African Americans with the national liberation struggles in Africa and throughout the Third World.
Evanzz documents that Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian Revolution, had invited Malcolm X - along with Che Guevara and other leaders of independence movements-to a special conference in Bandung scheduled to begin on March 3, 1965. Malcolm X had also been able to get Ethiopia and Liberia to include human rights violations against African Americans with their petition on South African human rights violations before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The petition was scheduled to be heard on March 12, 1965.
Part of the Judas Factor was the FBI's attempts to neutralize Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Elijah Muhammad. Evanzz provides concrete evidence that Martin Luther King was going to support Malcolm X in his project to bring the struggle of human rights before the United Nations and had begun to also identify with the struggles for human rights in Africa.
In light of the CIA's policies to neutralize opponents of the U.S. government's political and covert activities in Africa, Evanzz explains that it was necessary to neutralize Malcolm X prior to the Bandung conference. Malcolm X was assassinated on February, 21, 1965, a week and a half before the conference was to take place. Soon after the assassination, several African government officials who had been working with Malcolm X were also assassinated and the Ben Bella government in Algeria was overthrown in June 1965.
From his research into FBI files, Evanzz was able to prove that the FBI had a high-level informant in the NOI. Thus, the FBI was clearly in a position to carry out a campaign to fan the flames of discontent among rising leaders of the Nation and to disrupt the organization's activities. FBI memos indicate that they maneuvered within the NOI to keep their informant in the best possible leadership position to carry out their covert activities. From the very day that Malcolm X split from the NOI, the FBI worked on a day-to-day basis with BOSSI and the CIA to infiltrate and disrupt his activities. William Sullivan (subsequently of Watergate fame) was the FBI agent in overall charge of both the infiltration of the NOI and Malcolm's organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).
It is clear from the book that a coordinated effort was carried out between all government spy agencies to widen the split between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, to increase tensions between their organizations, and to undermine their support among African Americans. It is also safe to assume that agents, informants, and provocateurs from these different agencies were sent into the NOI and Malcolm X's organizations and that these agents were also present at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated. One of police informants, who later informed on the Black Panthers, told me as I was going to take my normal front row seat that "you are not going to sit there today," and he had me sit in the front row on the left side of the Ballroom. (The assassins then sat in the area where I normally sat to hear Malcolm X speak.)
Some of Evanzz's research was based on books about the NOI by Louis Lomax. Evanzz found in the FBI files a script for a movie on the assassination of Malcolm X, which Lomax was working on at the time of his death. (He died in a car accident caused by brake failure.) Evanzz provides circumstantial evidence that John Ali, a former friend of Malcolm X who became a national secretary of the NOI, was more than likely an FBI agent/informer and hence the Judas Factor. In fact, Evanzz provides quotes from Malcolm X to Lomax indicating that Malcolm X blamed John Ali for his expulsion from the Nation.
The most important aspect, however, is not whether Ali was the high-level agent, but the fact that the FBI did indeed have a high-level person in the Nation in their employ. Overall, the main value of the book is that all of the spy agencies in the United States were deeply involved as infiltrators and agent provocateurs (Judas Factors) to set the stage for Malcolm X's assassination.
The evidence provided by the book is irrefutable proof that the government had the motive to assassinate Malcolm X and the ability, through its COINTELPRO spy operations, to orchestrate his assassination. It is now time to open up all the files of the CIA and the FBI, as well as the thousands of pages of files of the New York City Police Department, so that the truth about the assassination of Malcolm X can be exposed.
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Roland Sheppard is a retired Business Representative of Painters District Council #8 in San Francisco. He has been a life long social activist and socialist. He regularly attended Malcolm X's meetings in Harlem and was present at the meeting when Malcolm X was assassinated. He was in charge of defense whenever Malcolm X spoke at the Militant Labor Forum in New York City from 1964-1965.
He has written several articles, spoken to various groups, and been interviewed widely about Malcolm X.
This essay is an update of a paper that was accepted by City College of New York's (CCNY) Black Studies Program for The Third Symposium of Institution Building in Harlem: The Malcom X Legacy: A Global Perspective, held on Friday, May 20, 2005 at CCNY.
It was first written as the February, 2001 Monthly Feature for the Holt Labor Library website. (http://www.hll.org)
It is based on his presentation at a forum in Boston in 2000, on the same subject. The other speaker at the forum was Minister Don Muhammad of the Boston Nation of Islam.
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The question is who actually assassinated Malcolm X?Answer : I don't know. You tell me.
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