Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  There were also attempts on the life of Raymond Sharrieff. On one occasion in October 1971, someone pumped five shotgun rounds into Sharrieff’s Chicago mansion from outside; Sharrieff was wounded by several pellets. In late December 1971 an assailant shot into his downtown office window, just barely missing his secretary. Sharrieff died, peacefully, of natural causes on December 18, 2003.

  Members of Elijah Muhammad’s family also began disappearing from the scene. Elijah’s third son and former manager of Muhammad Ali, Herbert Muhammad, spent years in litigation fighting his younger brother, Wallace, in the 1990s. On August 26, 2008, Herbert died from complications after heart surgery, leaving a wife, Aminah Antonia Muhammad, six sons, and eight daughters. About two weeks later, on September 9, 2008, Wallace Mohammed died. At the time of his death, Muhammad was the spiritual leader of 185 mosques with an estimated fifty thousand congregants. In death he was proclaimed as “America’s imam” by Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

  In the final years of their lives, Ella and Betty were locked even more intensely in conflict. In the early 1990s, when Spike Lee proposed a Hollywood-style biographical film on Malcolm X, Ella was outraged to find out Betty was retained as a paid consultant. “Spike Lee’s after the money, the prestige,” Ella contemptuously complained to a reporter. “He doesn’t know any facts.” Ella protested that Betty “doesn’t know enough about Malcolm to consult on anything pertaining to his life. Her activities [with him] were very limited.” Betty had her revenge by eliminating any references to Ella in Lee’s movie. “I don’t have any respect for the lady,” Betty coolly explained to the Boston Globe. “She was not a good influence on him.” As the renaissance of interest in Malcolm exploded across American popular culture, Ella’s personal situation became much worse. No longer able to maintain the OAAU headquarters in Harlem, she relocated to Boston. Her health soon declined as she fell ill with diabetes; in 1990 she was discovered in her apartment lying in her own waste. One of her legs, swollen with a gangrenous ulcer, was filled with maggots. Both of her legs were soon amputated. Ella painfully passed away on August 6, 1996.

  Following Malcolm’s death, Betty Shabazz appeared to live a successful and rewarding life. In 1972 she enrolled in a doctoral program in education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, receiving her Ph.D. three years later. Subsequently she served as an academic administrator at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, becoming a sort of celebrity among black middle-class and professional groups. But she could never escape Malcolm’s shadow, his terrible death, and the desire to punish those who were responsible. Her animus largely focused on Farrakhan, who she felt had betrayed Malcolm, and she believed he had directly participated in the conspiracy to murder him. Betty’s attacks on Farrakhan probably inspired her daughter Qubilah to attempt to hire a hit man to murder him in 1995. The would-be assassin, Michael Fitzpatrick, was an FBI informer, and Qubilah was quickly arrested and charged in federal court. In an astute move, Farrakhan rallied to Qubilah’s defense, claiming the young woman had been entrapped by the FBI. The government’s case fell apart at trial. Betty was forced to praise Farrakhan publicly for his “kindness in wanting to help my daughter.”

  Tragically, barely a year after Qubilah’s legal ordeal, her disturbed twelve-year-old son, called “Little Malcolm” by the family, set fire one night to his grandmother’s apartment. Betty, sleeping in her bedroom, was horrifically burned. She struggled in the hospital for more than three weeks, with severe burns covering more than 80 percent of her body. Physicians took aggressive action, operating five times to remove layers of charred skin and replacing it with artificial skin. But the damage was too great and Betty Shabazz died on June 23, 1997. President William Jefferson Clinton noted her passing, applauding her for her commitments to “education and to uplifting women and children.” Like Malcolm X, noted District of Columbia representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shabazz “will be remembered not for her death, but for the principled life she lived and the tower of strength she became.” Her public memorial gathering, held at the prestigious Riverside Church in Manhattan, included testimonials by Republican governor George Pataki of New York and New York City’s Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. The mayor, widely unpopular among many working-class and poor black New Yorkers, was roundly booed when he began to address the audience. It was significant that the eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, rushed to the podium in defense of Giuliani, praising the conservative mayor’s gestures of kindness toward her mother and criticizing the mostly black crowd for its rudeness. Her defense of Giuliani may have reflected Betty’s black bourgeois politics, but not those of her father.

  From the beginning of the criminal investigation following Malcolm’s murder, BOSS detective Gerry Fulcher had been troubled by what he considered major mistakes. The problems began at the crime scene. The first priority, Fulcher later recounted, should have been to “protect the whole area. You get rid of everybody who’s not going to be a witness.” Any evidence must be preserved. “You don’t want people finding things. . . .” In Fulcher’s judgment, the NYPD’s treatment of the murder scene was “totally contrary to what should be standard operating procedure. That thing should have been covered all night long.” In high-profile cases, it is not unusual to find “crime scenes stay[ing] locked up for days.” Fulcher expressed his misgivings to his police colleagues at the time of the assassination. Perhaps as a consequence, he found himself shut out of the investigation. Fulcher recalled: I should have been an indispensable part of finding out what went on and so on, because they should have been grilling me. . . . I was flat out told, you know, “Stay out, you’re not involved.” Made me think that they could have been getting their stories straight, so to speak, without the interference of this young guy who didn’t know anything. . . . All they wanted to know is “Did you hear anything on the phone?” To me that was just a show. They knew I wouldn’t hear anything on the phone, because there’d be nobody there [at the Hotel Theresa office]. They knew the schedule. . . . So I think they were playing their roles. I think that was all bullshit. And when I went up and tried to join them, you know—“No, no, this is where we get our stories straight. You’re out, kid.”

  Several months after the assassination, Fulcher was transferred from BOSS headquarters to one of the city’s most dangerous precincts, Fort Apache in the Bronx. He lasted there less than three years, before resigning from the force.

  In early 1978, radical attorney William Kunstler took up the cases of Thomas 15X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler, petitioning to the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court for a new trial. His principal new evidence was a signed affidavit by Talmadge Hayer that identified four other men, “torpedoes from New Jersey,” who had been responsible for the killing of Malcolm X. Kunstler informed the supreme court that “the FBI knew all along that there were four [other] men involved in the killing and that two of the men convicted were innocent.” The FBI refused to release its findings about Malcolm’s assassination to the court. Kunstler also noted rumors, never confirmed, that Reuben Francis had recently resurfaced “around his old haunts spending large sums of money he allegedly received from the FBI.” Another affidavit was also submitted by Benjamin Goodman (then Ben Karim), who affirmed that “at no time did I see the faces of Butler or Johnson whom I knew well, and would have been sure to notice.”

  On November 1, 1978, Justice Harold J. Rothwax of the state supreme court denied the motion to set aside the 1966 convictions of Butler and Johnson. The information in the affidavit might have exonerated those two men while identifying four others who, Hayer said, were guilty. However, the judge deemed the document insufficient to grant a new trial. Throughout 1978 and 1979 civil rights groups took up the Butler-Johnson case, first petitioning the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, requesting an investigation into Malcolm X’s death. The petition charged, “The ‘official version’ has it that Malcolm X was the victim of a Muslim vendetta. Many unanswered quest
ions and unexplained events that predate the assassination . . . do not support the official version’ at all.” Signatories of the petition included Ossie Davis, African Methodist Episcopal bishop H. H. Brookins, California state assemblywoman Maxine Waters, and Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. Despite the campaign’s efforts, no congressional hearings were held.

  Norman Butler was paroled in 1985 and Thomas Johnson received parole in 1987. For decades both men agitated to clear their names. Johnson, who had changed his name to Khalil Islam, died on August 4, 2009. Butler changed his name to Muhammad Abdul Aziz, and in the early 1990s was employed as a supportive services counselor at a Harlem drug rehabilitation clinic. In 1998, Aziz briefly served as security chief for Harlem Mosque No. 7. Beginning in 1990, Hayer was incarcerated part-time at the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Manhattan, where he was confined for a total of twelve hours per week on weekends. After seventeen unsuccessful attempts, Hayer was finally granted full parole in April 2010. Hayer told the parole board, “I’ve had a lot of time . . . to think about [Malcolm X’s murder] . . . I understand a lot better the dynamics of movements . . . and conflicts that can come up, but I have deep regrets about my participation in that.” It was an oddly impersonal mea culpa, an apology without actually articulating the crime he had committed. Hayer’s parole provoked a negative response from the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, which announced at a press conference that Hayer’s crimes were too serious to permit his release.

  Other than Talmadge Hayer, the alleged assassins of Malcolm X, according to Hayer’s affidavit, continued their lives in the Nation of Islam as before. The senior member of the crew, Newark mosque administrator Benjamin Thomas, was killed in 1986, at age forty-eight. Leon Davis lived on in Paterson, New Jersey, employed at an electronics factory there; he continued his affiliation with the Nation and the FOI for decades. Businessman Wilbur McKinley also continued to be associated with the Newark mosque.

  Alleged murderer Willie Bradley went into a life of crime. On April 11, 1968, the Livingston National Bank of Livingston, New Jersey, was robbed by three masked men brandishing three handguns and one sawed-off shotgun. They escaped with over $12,500. The following year Bradley and a second man, James Moore, were charged with the bank robbery and were brought to trial. Bradley, however, received privileged treatment, and he retained his own attorney separate from Moore. The charges against him were ultimately dismissed; meanwhile, after a first trial ending in a hung jury, Moore was convicted in a second trial.

  Bradley’s special treatment by the criminal justice system in 1969-70 raises the question of whether he was an FBI informant, either after the assassination of Malcolm X or very possibly even before. It would perhaps explain why Bradley took a different exit from the murder scene than the two other shooters, shielding him from the crowd’s retaliation. It suggests that Bradley and possibly other Newark mosque members may have actively collaborated on the shooting with local law enforcement and/or the FBI. The existing evidence raises the question of whether the murder of Malcolm X was not the initiative of the Nation of Islam alone. In The Death and Life of Malcolm X, Goldman does not identify Bradley by name but seems to be referring to him when he notes that one of the assassins “was tracked to a New Jersey state prison, where he was serving seven and a half to fifteen years for an unrelated felony.”

  Bradley continued to experience legal problems into the 1980s. In 1983, he was indicted on twelve counts, including robbery, “terroristic threat,” aggravated assault, and possession of a controlled substance. He first pled not guilty to the charges, but was eventually convicted of several of them and was incarcerated. His life was turned around through a romantic relationship with Carolyn F. Kelly. A longtime leader of Newark’s black community, Kelly, a Republican, led the defense for boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in the 1970s, which helped overturn his murder conviction. The owner of First Class Championship Center, a boxing establishment in Newark, Kelly was the first black woman in the state to promote lucrative prize fights. By the 2000s, Bradley could usually be found on Friday afternoons at his wife’s boxing gymnasium. In October 2009, he was inducted into the Newark Athletic Hall of Fame for his baseball achivements in high school.

  In 2010, Bradley even appeared briefly in a campaign video, promoting the reelection of Newark’s charismatic mayor, Cory Booker. Bradley’s metamorphosis from criminality to respectability seemed complete.

  But things began falling apart in May 2010, with the Internet publication of an investigative article on Bradley by journalist Richard Prince. In the article, journalist Abdur-Rahman Muhammad directly accused Bradley of being “the man who fired the first and deadliest shot” killing Malcolm X. Journalist Karl Evanzz, the author of several studies on the Nation of Islam, called for Bradley’s exposure and prosecution “for depriving Malcolm X of his civil rights in the same way that the Klansmen who killed black activists were prosecuted. . . . Bradley killed Malcolm X to stop him from exercising his freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly.” Weeks later, filmmaker Omar Shabazz released a documentary film naming Bradley, Hayer, and the other Newark NOI members as the real killers of Malcolm X. The goal of these critics appears to be Bradley’s indictment by federal or local authorities.

  The chief beneficiary of Malcolm’s assassination was Louis Farrakhan. Indeed, the transition from Minister Louis X of Boston to Louis Farrakhan was made possible only through the leadership model that Malcolm had established years earlier. For a decade Malcolm had spread the salvation message of Elijah Muhammad throughout the United States, and for another decade, 1965 to 1975, Farrakhan assumed the identical role as the Nation of Islam’s national minister. Just as Malcolm predicted, most of those inside the Nation who had criticized him and sought to undermine his influence were equally opposed to Farrakhan. Elijah Muhammad’s family was jealous and fearful of him, because as the patriarch approached death it seemed possible that Farrakhan might usurp the mantle of leadership.

  But he never managed to escape the shadow of speculation and rumor regarding his possible role in Malcolm’s murder. Farrakhan’s vivid description of Malcolm as a man “worthy of death” may have sealed his reputation. In an interview with Mike Wallace decades after the killing, Farrakhan conceded, “In one sense I may have been complicit in the murder of Brother Malcolm in that when Malcolm spoke against the Messenger, I spoke against him, and this helped to create an atmosphere [in which] Malcolm was assassinated.” But that admission has never satisfied latter-day Malcolmites, many of whom continue to demand a reopening of the case. Farrakhan is fully aware that “even now there are some black people calling for a grand jury because there’s no statute of limitations on murder to bring me into a grand jury to question me.”

  Even in his dreams, Farrakhan cannot escape his link to Malcolm. In a 2007 oral history interview, he shared this nocturnal revelation: As God is my witness, I had a vision of Brother Malcolm. He came to me in like a dream vision. . . . And gray is in his hair. You know he had this little hair, that knot sometime, you know, and I saw the gray in his hair. And he comes to me and he said, “Brother Louis, what went wrong?” And I said to him, “Brother, you were slated to sit in [Elijah Muhammad’s] seat. He had to try you, to see what was in you. And you failed the test. It wasn’t that he was against you, but he wanted to see what was really in you.” . . . I am here because my brother died that I might live. It’s very difficult for me not to just beat him down, because I walked in his shoes. And I know what pain is when you love people, and you work for people, and they turn against you and seek to destroy you. I understand that.

  Today, Farrakhan still seeks to demonstrate his continuing filial devotion to Malcolm, despite his central role in advocating his death. His dream, however, places the cause of the murder in Malcolm’s own failures. Farrakhan suggests that Elijah Muhammad intended to make Malcolm his spiritual heir, setting aside the claims of Wallace and his other children. Muhammad was simply testing Malcolm, to d
etermine if he had the leadership qualities necessary to direct the Nation. While it is true that Malcolm, after being silenced, at first desperately attempted to remain inside the Nation of Islam, once the break occurred he was liberated from the restrictions that had been imposed on him. What Farrakhan has difficulty admitting is that it was only when Malcolm accepted the universalism and humanism of orthodox Islam, explicitly rejecting racial separatism, that he could reach a truly global audience. Had he lived, Malcolm could have led an international campaign for human rights for blacks, but he could have accomplished this only by divorcing himself from the Nation of Islam’s sectarian creed.

  Several weeks after the firebombing and destruction of Mosque No. 7 in February 1965, Louis was asked to visit and speak to the Nation’s congregation in New York. It was only months later that Elijah Muhammad telephoned to say that he would be transferred to serve as minister of Mosque No. 7 in Harlem. Under Louis’s supervision, the destroyed mosque would be reconstructed; he would move into Malcolm’s rebuilt home in Elmhurst. In August 1965, Muhammad announced Louis’s appointment before six thousand members in Detroit’s Cobo Center.

  Upon being told about his new position, an overwhelmed Farrakhan jumped into his car and drove to a park on the outskirts of Boston. Years before, as a high school distance runner, it had been a place of solitude, where he would run and exercise. He recounts how he jogged out into the middle of a grassy field, tears streaming down his face, dropped to his knees, looking up into the sky, and confessed to Malcolm: “I didn’t mean to take your mosque—I didn’t mean to take your home!” As Farrakhan relates this story, it is powerful and it may even be plausible. But is it true?