The Assassination of Malcolm X

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the twentieth century civil rights movement — a minister of the Nation of Islam, a Black nationalist, and later, after his break from the Nation and pilgrimage to Mecca, an evolving advocate for a more universalist vision of human rights. On February 21, 1965, just as he began speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, Manhattan, three gunmen rushed the stage and shot him fifteen times. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. Three men were convicted of the murder in 1966 — Talmadge Hayer (who confessed and eventually named two other men as accomplices), Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson. Butler and Johnson maintained their innocence throughout their imprisonment, and Hayer's later statements supported their claims. Investigators and historians long suspected involvement by members of the Nation of Islam, from which Malcolm had split acrimoniously in 1964 under circumstances that had led to threats on his life. In November 2021, after a two-year reinvestigation, a New York judge vacated the convictions of Butler (who had been released as Muhammad Aziz) and Johnson (who had been released as Khalil Islam, and had died in 2009). The reinvestigation revealed that the FBI and NYPD had deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense for over fifty years, including FBI informant reports that pointed to the actual perpetrators. The case thus went from a resolved conviction to a partially reopened wound in American justice within a single announcement. Only Hayer was confirmed as a shooter, and the identities of the other two gunmen remain officially unconfirmed. Malcolm X's assassination, coming just months before his ideas were evolving in significant new directions, cut short one of the most intellectually dynamic voices in American history.