Black History Month Special: Who Ordered the Killing of Malcolm X?

On Sunday February 21, 1965, at 3:00 p.m., Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom on Broadway and 166th Street in Manhattan while delivering a speech to an audience of about 400 people.

Born Malcolm Little, Malcolm X had converted to Islam while in prison and emerged as a powerful spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI)—which he broke with a year before his death—and the radical wing of the U.S. civil rights movement.[1]

Historian John Henrik Clarke wrote that Malcolm’s assassination “extinguished the brightest light we had produced in the 20th century and our movement was set back a generation.”[2]

When Malcolm began his speech at the Audubon, a man’s voice drowned him out by shouting in the middle of the ballroom, “Nigger, get your hands out of my pocket.” As heads turned to hear what the commotion was all about, an incendiary device was triggered at the back, sending smoke into the air.

With people’s attention distracted, a man stood up in the fourth row with a sawed-off shotgun and fired point blank into Malcolm’s chest.

Two men in the front row further jumped up with pistols in their hands and coolly took aim at Malcolm and shot at him like a firing squad, according to a female eyewitness in the third row. Afterwards, they emptied their revolvers into Malcolm’s prone body before fleeing the scene.[3]

[…]

Hayer was found with a clip of .45-caliber bullets matched the murder weapons found at the scene. In court, he confessed to the crime, though never said who sent him to kill Malcolm, only that he was a foot soldier, a “part of a machine.”[6]

Hayer served 44 years in prison before his release in April 2010, at which time he claimed to have had “deep regrets” about his involvement in Malcolm’s murder.

Wrongful Convictions?

The two other men convicted for Malcolm’s murder, Thomas Johnson (Khalil Islam), 30, and Norman Butler (Muhammad Aziz), 26, each spent about 20 years in prison. In November 2021, the two men were exonerated.

Johnson and Butler were both members of the NOI’s Harlem mosque and lieutenants in the private Muslim army called the Fruit of Islam.

They were out on bail after being charged with shooting Benjamin Brown, a defector from Elijah Muhammad who had opened an independent mosque in Harlem.

At the trial, Hayer told the court that Johnson and Butler had nothing to do with Malcolm’s killing and that he did not even know them. He stated: “I was there. I know what happened. I know the people that did take part in it and they (Butler and Johnson) wasn’t any of the people that had anything to do with it. I want the jury to know.”[7]

In 1977 and 1978, Hayer gave the names of four men who he said were his accomplices as part of an affidavit given to civil rights lawyer William Kunstler in which he laid out a detailed time line of the assassination plot.

[…]

A man named “Willie,” later identified as William Bradley (aka Al-Mustafa Shabazz), 28, a former Green Beret and stick-up man, had a shotgun and was the first to fire on Malcolm X after the diversion.

Hayer asserted that Bradley and a man named “Lee” or “Leon,” later identified as Leon Davis,[9] both armed with pistols, fired on Malcolm X immediately after the shotgun blast. Hayer also said that a man named “Ben,” later identified as Benjamin Thomas,[10] was involved in the conspiracy.

After the assassination, Bradley served time in jail for robbery, aggravated assault and drug possession and then settled in Newark where he ran a boxing gym and even appeared in a political ad for former Newark Mayor and New Jersey Senator Corey Booker in 2010 before passing away in 2018.

[…]

Baba Zak A. Kondo, author of the 1993 book Conspiracys (ies): Unraveling the Assassination of Malcolm X, said that he interviewed a retired Newark police officer who knew Bradley and contended that “a surprising number of people in Newark knew that Bradley was a killer.” The former policeman recalled once sitting in a bar talking to Bradley. Shortly after the assassin left, another brother looked at him and said, “You know, that’s a killer.” Years later, the officer learned that Malcolm had been one of Bradley’s victims.[12]

[…]

Other Suspicious Deaths

Like with the Kennedy assassination, Malcolm’s assassination resulted in other suspicious deaths. One was of Louis Lomax, an African-American journalist who befriended Malcolm X in the late 1950s and claimed to have solved the riddle of the assassination.[65]

On July 31, 1970, Lomax died in an auto accident in New Mexico.[66] At the time, he had a contract from 20th Century Fox to make a movie about Malcolm that would expose the U.S. intelligence community’s role in his assassination.

The brakes on his car failed and Lomax skidded across a highway and died.

Lomax believed that Malcolm X was betrayed by a former friend—thought to be John Ali—who reportedly had ties to the intelligence community. Lomax called the suspect “Judas.”[67]

The second suspicious death was of Leon Ameer, Malcolm’s New England representative and Cassius Clay’s (Muhammad Ali’s) former secretary, who had “vowed to carry on Malcolm’s work” after his assassination.[68]

The former karate teacher was found unconscious in the bathtub at Boston’s Sherry Biltmore Hotel on March 13, 1965, hours after he had appeared at the Socialist Workers meeting in Boston. In a speech there, he said that the government was responsible for Malcolm’s death and that he would shortly produce tapes and documents of Malcolm’s to prove it.

Ameer stated in his speech that he had “facts in my possession as to who really killed Malcolm X,” and that “this is probably the last time you’ll see me alive.”[69] 

The Suffolk County medical examiner stated initially that Ameer, only 31 at the time, died of natural causes and suffered from an overdose of a medical drug called Domadeen which induces sleep.[70]

Later, it was claimed that Ameer died of an epileptic fit or heart attack and had been found with froth in his mouth. But his wife said he had a medical check-up one month before and there was no hint of epilepsy or heart trouble—and he had not had an epileptic fit in the previous 11 years.

On his death, Ameer’s blackened tongue protruded between his lips. In an epileptic seizure severe enough to cause death, the tongue is usually swallowed, causing asphyxiation.[71]

Conclusion

Malcolm’s supporters appear to have had the right intuition in thinking that he was murdered on “orders from the U.S. government.”[72]

Precisely who gave those orders, however, remains unknown.

In November 2021, New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance exonerated Butler and Johnson after a prolonged investigation—though the role of the NYPD and U.S. intelligence agencies has continued to evade scrutiny.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/02/21/black-history-month-special-who-ordered-the-killing-of-malcolm-x/

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