It’s been almost six decades since U.S. civil rights and black nationalist leader Malcolm X was assassinated just before he was to deliver a speech at New York City’s Audubon Ballroom. On the 59th anniversary of Malcolm’s Feb. 21, 1965 death, nationally known civil rights leader Ben Crump announced he had two new witnesses in the investigation, who were tasked with providing security for Malcolm X the day of his murder, but were detained by police one week earlier in what they charge was a conspiracy by the NYPD and FBI to ensure Malcolm’s planned assassination would be successful.
In 2022, a $40 million lawsuit was filed on behalf of Muhammad Aziz, who was wrongfully convicted in the assassination of Malcolm X and exonerated in 2021. The lawsuit against the federal government charges that the FBI concealed evidence that would have proved his innocence at the time of the
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Theodore Hamm, associate professor and chair of journalism and new media Studies at St. Joseph’s University in New York. Here he discusses his December 2023 Indypendent article,”Who Killed Malcom X? New Lawsuit Points to Untapped Sources of Information” and recent developments in the case.
THEODORE HAMM: Your listeners may have heard of the other lawsuit that’s in motion that was filed on behalf of Malcolm X’s daughters, his four living daughters — Ilyasah Shabazz is the most prominent spokesperson of the family. And that’s filed by Ben Crump, the high-profile attorney from Manhattan. But that’s a separate suit, a separate case. So that is on behalf of the family. And we’ll see where that goes, whether the statute of limitations — that’s an issue, because it’s a wrongful death suit.
In any case, the exoneration suit for Mohammed Aziz and Khalil Islam, the two men who were exonerated — Khalil Islam has since passed away. So anyway, so it’s a $40 million suit, as you said. It’s a wrongful prosecution, wrongful imprisonment.
The catalyst was the Manhattan DA’s office under Cyrus Vance on his way out in 2021, had opted not to run again. And, you know, Cyrus Vance wasn’t known to be radical name. He was more known for not prosecuting Donald Trump than anything else. But it’s kind of caught people by surprise when he all of a sudden, six weeks after leaving office, he exonerates Aziz and Islam for their convictions in the 1965 murder.
And this is something that’s been widely viewed as a miscarriage of justice ever since, including by the third person convicted at the time who was telling prosecutors, etc., that no, these two guys had nothing to do with it. But that wasn’t good enough.
And so what Vance exposed was that the FBI was withholding significant amounts of information about the investigation. And it went up all the way to J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered multiple witnesses not to tell police or prosecutors that they were, in fact, FBI informants. And a number that’s come out is that it’s nine informants in the Audubon Ballroom on the day of the assassination.
And what Vance revealed was that Hoover was telling his agents not to inform the FBI also of the lead shooter, William Bradley. Everyone pretty much agrees at this point that he was the lead shooter, not convicted, and he was protected by Hoover. And so that’s a key component of this lawsuit.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Hamm, investigators and researchers have long suspected the involvement of both the FBI and CIA in Malcolm X’s assassination. Tell us about those suspicions and the role of the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO counterintelligence program that targeted the civil rights and indigenous rights, as well as the anti-Vietnam War movements.
THEODORE HAMM: In their lawsuit raises it’s trying to establish a pattern of COINTELPRO operations. So COINTELPRO was infiltrating various radical movements. FBI operatives were either informants or they were agent provocateurs —clearly had their tentacles spread far and wide and they were present in a lot of the radical movements of the late ’60s.
But it wasn’t revealed until the early ’70s. There’s the famous moment of the break-in that occurred on the night of one of the Ali-Frazier fights in suburban Philadelphia, where anti-war activists raided an FBI office and removed a lot of documents. And a reporter named Betty Medsger for the Washington Post found one of the documents to have had the name of something about COINTELPRO, and it wasn’t clear what it was.
As it came out throughout the ’70s, it was a very extensive network of FBI infiltration. There’s a lot of legal fights and countless hours have gone into these cases to try to uncover and expose the reality of what the federal government was doing in trying to undermine these various radical movements during this period.
SCOTT HARRIS: Why is it important to expose those who orchestrated or carried out the murder of Malcolm X today in 2024?
THEODORE HAMM: Obviously Hoover, you want to know what his role was. Another person that I hadn’t mentioned was Mark Felt, who was a higher up with Hoover, who became the key player in Watergate, leaks in Watergate.
That’s all important to know who did what. But I think it’s more about the agency accountability, right, so that we know that this is what the FBI was doing at that point in our history.
I mean, obviously, it raises questions about what they’ve been doing since. But we’ve got to look at each period in its own light. Certainly, it left a lasting legacy in terms of curtailing the radical movements of the period. But clearly, the Aziz case is already in motion and is the type of case that commonly does get adjudicated in a federal court.
There’s many different scenarios that could play out. But the ideal scenario, of course, would be that we get transparency about what the FBI did and who they were collaborating with. Was the CIA part of that? What were the exact discussions between the FBI, the NYPD and so on? You know, it would be great from a historian’s perspective, something that would be a revelation to us all to get full disclosure of what happened.
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