The Assassination of Malcolm X

by George Breitman, Baxter Smith, Malik Miah (Editor)

Assassination of Malcolm X [paperback] Breitman, George [Apr 01, 1977]

Genres: History, True Crime, Nonfiction

190 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1984

About the author

George Breitman was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1916. After working in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Works Progress Administration, he joined the Trotskyist movement and became a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1938. He edited The Militant and served in World War II. In the 1960s, Breitman assumed responsibility for the SWP's Pathfinder Press and edited Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1929-1940, and wrote Malcolm X Speaks (1965). The Papers contain biographical items, correspondence, articles, various materials pertaining to his political activities and to the history of U.S. and international Trotskyism.
He also wrote under the name Albert Parker

Reviews

[Thomas Rush · Rating 5 out of 5]

I approached and began this book, I now realize, with a certain subtle, preconceived reluctance, partially because I had pre-judged one of the main authors of it, George Breitman. My prejudice came from knowing that Breitman is a Socialist, and that he was one of the main editors putting out Malcolm speeches and books shortly after Malcolm's death. My inclination was that he would not be fair in rendering this book, because I thought that he would get caught up in Socialist dogma with its “scientific materialism” that sometimes accompanies some of the Socialists that I have read in the past. I've seen some Socialists who come at the race problem from an economic angle, trumping any type of racial analysis, or at best, saying that race is a secondary phenomenon, a position that I do not agree with. Anyways, I bought my own skeptical beliefs to this book from the get-go.
However, it did not take me long to get over my prejudices, mainly because the authors of this book approach the assassination of Malcolm in a strictly logical and factual way, which is the best that I could hope for from any work. I found myself pleasantly surprised at the way in which strictly logical questions were asked about things that should have been.
In looking at things the way that the authors do, they focused on the actions—or lack thereof---of the police, and the professionalism of the press—or lack thereof. Both entities come up lacking.
For some time prior to his assassination, the police had maintained some reasonable presence at Malcolm's speeches and rallies, but the day that Malcolm was killed, it was difficult to find the police anywhere. The police arrived late and were said to have rescued two participants of the assassination from the crowd, on-the-spot, in the midst of the crowd beating the two men severely. This was reported by more than one major news source shortly after the event. But, the next day the second participant disappeared from all accounts forever, with no explanation whatsoever from the press as to why, with no corrections ever presented in any of its later editions. This raises a major question. These are the types of logical issues that the authors raise, asking fair and legitimate questions, such as why there seemed to be such little interest from both the police and the mainstream press to follow-up and look deeply into Malcolm's murder. Malcolm was a huge figure of The Civil Rights era, and his stature deserves some respect as to how questions should have been asked about his killing. I don't think I am being unfair in saying that there was a general indifference that seemed to occupy the space that should have been occupied by professional, diligent, respectful, truth-seeking police work and professional journalistic reporting.
As a person deeply respectful of Malcolm, the police and the press are not the only two entities that I am upset with over what happened. I am also upset with Reverend Albert Cleage and the writer Louis Lomax, both of whom claimed to have been “friends” of Malcolm's during his lifetime. It's clear that Reverend Cleage freeze-frames and boxes in Malcolm, freezing him at his philosophical growth just prior to his departure from the Nation Of Islam. The authors show Reverend Cleage disputing changes from Malcolm that occurred after Malcolm's departure from The Nation. The problem for Reverend Cleage is that the authors use Malcolm's actual words to show the gulf, meaning that there is no contest when Malcolm is quite capable of telling a person his own position. Reverend Cleage really comes off as looking stupid in arguing with Malcolm's words as to what MALCOLM thinks. The same happens with Lomax, and Lomax just comes off supporting some really weird positions that are counter to anything that Malcolm said. What is really happening is that both men, Cleage and Lomax, are really attempting to use the authority and aura of Malcolm X as a battering ram to support their own subjective outlooks, when in fact those things do not jive with the words and being of Malcolm. One just has to read the book to see what I mean.
All-in-all, this is an exceptional work and I would tell any serious student of Malcolm to first start off by reading “Conspiracys: Unravelling The Assassination of Malcolm X” by Baba Zak A. Kondo, then read Karl Evanzz's “The Judas Factor: The Plot To Kill Malcolm X” and then read this current book. The 3 of these books together gives one a comprehensive view of what happened during the assassination and what went on behind it. One cannot go wrong in doing this. I rate this book as a solid and well-thought-out and scholarly work. A great job, this.

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has many shortcomings—They partly flow out of the fact that it wasn’t intended to be a book. In 1976 it was edited and assembled out of material published in ‘The Militant’ newspaper between 1965 and 1973, with a piece by a ‘Militant’ staff writer that originally appeared in ‘The Black Scholar’ magazine in 1974. The different pieces may not mesh together all that well, but they’re still all valuable.

I’m reviewing it now in large part because of the Netflix ‘Who Killed Malcolm X’ documentary. While the documentary contains valuable film footage, and some useful contemporary interviews, I don’t like its scattershot approach; it has almost no structure. It doesn’t start with who Malcolm X was, and why he’s important today, which I think is a more controversial question than the assassination. And I don’t agree with the central figure in the documentary, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, in thinking that justice for Malcolm X will be putting some people in their late 80s in jail, although it is good that the Manhattan District Attorney’s office is considering reopening the case. To me, justice for Malcolm X is fighting for his goals, which were not just anti-racist, but increasingly anti-capitalist as well. The documentary suggests that Malcolm X was becoming more moderate, but I totally reject that view. In my opinion, he was becoming a genuine revolutionary, on a trajectory toward Marxism (see Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power).

For many years, scholars and activists have agreed with what the authors of this book write, that only one of the three men convicted of the assassination was guilty. And while George Breitman was called a “conspiracy theorist” at the time for suggesting that there might have been government involvement, today well-respected historians like David J. Garrow, interviewed in the documentary, accept this as possible. At the very least, the New York police who were present in large numbers at the beginning of his last talk, virtually disappeared once it started. And everyone knew that he wasn't going to live long by that point.

And Abdur-Rahman Muhammad had shared his research with Manning Marable, so the facts and names of the precise assassins were presented in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. While I don’t have a high opinion of Marable’s biography, the reasons for that have nothing to do with what he writes on the assassination.

To me, the most important things to know about Malcolm X are in the speeches of the last year of his life: Malcolm X Speaks, By Any Means Necessary, Malcolm X on Afro-American History, Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, February 1965: The Final Speeches, and my personal favorite, Malcolm X Talks to Young People: Speeches in the United States, Britain, and Africa.

For more on the role of the FBI, see COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom, FBI on Trial: The Victory in the Socialist Workers Party Suit Against Government Spying, and 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US: Washington's Political Police and the American Working Class..

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breitman, et al. do an interesting job of pointing out inconsistencies in the assassination; this is about one third of the book, and while he doesn't claim to provide a definitive answer as to what did happen, he does shoot holes in the idea that it wasn't possible a government agent was involved. Fast forward to exposure of J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program a few years later and Breitman is vindicated in saying these things in 1965-67.
The other two-thirds of the book deal with the Socialist Worker's Party viewpoint that while Malcolm had not openly embraced Marxism he was coming to hold anticapitalist and even arguably prosocialist views the last year of his life. As Breitman was the editor of The Militant for several years, the paper of that party, one may draw their own conclusions as to the veracity of these claims, though Breitman et al. do raise some good points. Overall, I enjoyed the other third of the book a bit more but found the political analysis of his views at least worth a read.