In Detroit, at Nation of Islam Mosque No. 1, Malcolm’s oldest brother, Wilfred X Little, was conducting a service that Sunday afternoon when he received word of the murder. The news shook him terribly, but he went on with the service. At its conclusion, he solemnly announced to the congregation that Malcolm had been assassinated. Some in the audience had known his brother many years earlier, when he was their energetic assistant minister. “No sense in getting emotional,” Minister Wilfred cautioned his flock. “This is the kind of times we are living in. Once you are dead your troubles are over. It’s those living that’re in trouble.”
And in northern California that Sunday afternoon, Maya Angelou was chatting on the telephone with her girlfriend Ivonne. Angelou recalled that there “was no cheer in [Ivonne’s] voice” when she said, “These Negroes are crazy here. I mean, really crazy. Otherwise why would they have just killed that man in New York?” In disbelief, Angelou managed to place the phone receiver down on a table. She walked into a bedroom and locked the door behind her. “I didn’t have to ask,” she remembered. “I knew ‘that man in New York’ was Malcolm X and that someone had just killed him.” The next morning in bed, her first thought was that she “had returned from Africa to give my energies and wit to the OAAU, and Malcolm was dead.”
CHAPTER 16
Life After Death
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 Ballroo
m, 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 th
e 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.
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