Push to reopen Malcolm X assassination

[J. Raymond Carroll]

The sad part is that no one seems to have jurisdiction over the case except the Manhattan DA's office, which bungled the case from the outset.

[Edit: The sub-caption I posted is misleading. The story is published on page A14, in the New York Region section, suggesting that it is of local interest only]

Biography Revives Push to Reopen Malcolm X Case

By SHAILA DEWAN

The death of Malcolm X, shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom in Upper Manhattan in 1965, never inflamed the public imagination in the same way the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did. But scholars have long believed that a bungled investigation resulted in the imprisonment of the innocent and allowed some of those responsible to go free. Over the decades, efforts to reopen the case have failed.

Now a best-selling biography has helped to renew calls for a full investigation. But this time they may well gain traction because the legal environment has changed: prosecutors in the South have demonstrated that it is possible to pursue and win cases that are decades old and, as a byproduct, they have made the failures of the police in the civil rights era abundantly clear.

At the same time, news has emerged that the man long suspected of having fired the shot that killed Malcolm X but who was never arrested is living in Newark under a different name.

“Time is running out; these guys are very old,” said Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a graduate student at Howard University who first published the identity of the Newark man on his blog and was a source for the biography’s author, Manning Marable. “I wanted justice to be done, and I knew that Dr. Marable wanted justice to be done.”

Dr. Marable, a historian at Columbia University, died days before the publication of the book, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”

The effort to reopen the case has attracted the attention of the nation’s most persistent advocate of civil rights-era justice, Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Sykes was instrumental in the reopening of the investigation into the killing of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 and in persuading Congress to allocate millions of dollars to the investigation of civil rights cold cases. Mr. Sykes has asked both the Justice Department and, this week, the New York State attorney general “to conduct the most comprehensive and credible search by the government for the truth concerning Malcolm X’s assassination.”

The cause has made for strange bedfellows: Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s six daughters, is supporting the call to reopen the case despite her objections to the biography, which paints a bleak picture of her parents’ marriage. Leith Mullings, the author’s widow, is also asking for a new investigation.

But it will be an uphill battle, partly because three men were convicted at the time, meaning the case is potentially a hybrid of two separate areas of criminal law: a civil rights cold case and a wrongful conviction.

Malcolm X, who became a patron saint of the black power movement and, long after his death, an American icon, knew his life was in danger when he took the stage at the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965. He had broken with the Nation of Islam, which had branded him an enemy and a traitor. A week earlier, his house had been firebombed. As he began to speak, a disturbance broke out in the audience, a smoke bomb went off, and gunmen opened fire.

Thomas Hagan, a member of the Nation of Islam from New Jersey who was then 22, was arrested at the ballroom that day. The police investigated the crime scene for four hours before the blood was mopped up and a planned dance began.

The police later picked up two more Nation of Islam members: Muhammad Abdul Aziz, then known as Norman 3X Butler; and Kahlil Islam, then Thomas 15X Johnson. Both of them had attended a mosque in Harlem. In his book, Dr. Marable says that the Nation of Islam would not have used men from Malcolm X’s own mosque to carry out the killing and that the assassins were from New Jersey.

Mr. Hagan confessed, but always maintained that the other two men were not involved. At the trial, he testified there were other conspirators, but refused to name them. All three men were convicted, but the question of how high the conspiracy went in the Nation of Islam hierarchy — who, in fact, ordered the killing — was never answered.

David Garrow, a historian and a King biographer, obtained and reviewed the Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Malcolm X in the 1990s. He said it was probable that reams of wiretaps of the Nation of Islam had never been combed for clues. In 1980, the bureau said it had never investigated the assassination.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Hagan, also known as Talmadge X Hayer, finally identified his accomplices in an affidavit as part of an unsuccessful effort to free Mr. Butler and Mr. Johnson (all three men have since been paroled).

One of the names he gave was Willie X, whom William Kunstler, the civil rights lawyer who represented Mr. Johnson and Mr. Butler, determined was William Bradley. The others are dead or presumed dead. Dr. Marable wrote that Mr. Bradley, using a sawed-off shotgun, fired the fatal shot.

Mr. Bradley, an ex-convict now in his early 70s, is living in Newark under the name Al-Mustafa Shabazz. (Police records list both names for him.) He is married to Carolyn Kelley Shabazz, described by The Star-Ledger of Newark as a community leader and the owner of a boxing gym who gives away turkeys at Thanksgiving.

Mr. Shabazz served time for conspiracy, drug dealing and making “terroristic threats,” according to records at the New Jersey Corrections Department, and was released in 1998. Through his lawyer, J. Edward Waller, Mr. Shabazz has denied any involvement in the assassination.

Mr. Sykes, who cautions that he has yet to personally see proof linking the name Willie X to William Bradley, would like to see a joint investigation between state and federal officials, but it is the Manhattan district attorney who has jurisdiction over the case.

Mr. Sykes said he would rather that other agencies were involved, because the Manhattan district attorney’s office investigated the killing in the first place.

But there are limitations on other agencies’ ability to investigate. For one, it is not clear if the killing could be considered a civil rights crime because both the perpetrators and the victims are black.

Mr. Garrow said the definition of a civil rights crime should not be too narrow. “When a major civil rights leader is assassinated, I’d like the civil rights division to be interested, regardless of the color of the gunman,” he said, referring to the federal unit.

Some experts say the Justice Department’s participation is crucial because the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department had Malcolm X under surveillance at the time of his death, raising questions about whether law enforcement officials had knowledge beforehand of the assassination plot.

Still, the Justice Department may not have any jurisdiction, and the department has only occasionally investigated without it — in 1998, for example, then-Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a limited review of the King assassination after pressure from the family and the public.

The New York attorney general may investigate only if asked by the Manhattan district attorney or the governor. But cases that are decades old are not easy to solve, said Doug Jones, a former United States attorney in Birmingham, Ala., who helped prosecute the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in which four girls died. “A lot of people think witnesses come forward after so many years have passed,” he said, “but they don’t.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/23/nyregion/biography-helps-renew-calls-to-investigate-malcolm-x-assassination.html?hpw=&pagewanted=all

Edited July 23, 2011 by J. Raymond Carroll

[John Dolva]

The sad part is that no one seems to have jurisdiction over the case except the Manhattan DA's office, which bungled the case from the outset.

[Edit: The sub-caption I posted is misleading. The story is published on page A14, in the New York Region section, suggesting that it is of local interest only]

Biography Revives Push to Reopen Malcolm X Case

By SHAILA DEWAN

The death of Malcolm X, shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom in Upper Manhattan in 1965, never inflamed the public imagination in the same way the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did. But scholars have long believed that a bungled investigation resulted in the imprisonment of the innocent and allowed some of those responsible to go free. Over the decades, efforts to reopen the case have failed.

Now a best-selling biography has helped to renew calls for a full investigation. But this time they may well gain traction because the legal environment has changed: prosecutors in the South have demonstrated that it is possible to pursue and win cases that are decades old and, as a byproduct, they have made the failures of the police in the civil rights era abundantly clear.

At the same time, news has emerged that the man long suspected of having fired the shot that killed Malcolm X but who was never arrested is living in Newark under a different name.

“Time is running out; these guys are very old,” said Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a graduate student at Howard University who first published the identity of the Newark man on his blog and was a source for the biography’s author, Manning Marable. “I wanted justice to be done, and I knew that Dr. Marable wanted justice to be done.”

Dr. Marable, a historian at Columbia University, died days before the publication of the book, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”

The effort to reopen the case has attracted the attention of the nation’s most persistent advocate of civil rights-era justice, Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Sykes was instrumental in the reopening of the investigation into the killing of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 and in persuading Congress to allocate millions of dollars to the investigation of civil rights cold cases. Mr. Sykes has asked both the Justice Department and, this week, the New York State attorney general “to conduct the most comprehensive and credible search by the government for the truth concerning Malcolm X’s assassination.”

The cause has made for strange bedfellows: Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s six daughters, is supporting the call to reopen the case despite her objections to the biography, which paints a bleak picture of her parents’ marriage. Leith Mullings, the author’s widow, is also asking for a new investigation.

But it will be an uphill battle, partly because three men were convicted at the time, meaning the case is potentially a hybrid of two separate areas of criminal law: a civil rights cold case and a wrongful conviction.

Malcolm X, who became a patron saint of the black power movement and, long after his death, an American icon, knew his life was in danger when he took the stage at the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965. He had broken with the Nation of Islam, which had branded him an enemy and a traitor. A week earlier, his house had been firebombed. As he began to speak, a disturbance broke out in the audience, a smoke bomb went off, and gunmen opened fire.

Thomas Hagan, a member of the Nation of Islam from New Jersey who was then 22, was arrested at the ballroom that day. The police investigated the crime scene for four hours before the blood was mopped up and a planned dance began.

The police later picked up two more Nation of Islam members: Muhammad Abdul Aziz, then known as Norman 3X Butler; and Kahlil Islam, then Thomas 15X Johnson. Both of them had attended a mosque in Harlem. In his book, Dr. Marable says that the Nation of Islam would not have used men from Malcolm X’s own mosque to carry out the killing and that the assassins were from New Jersey.

Mr. Hagan confessed, but always maintained that the other two men were not involved. At the trial, he testified there were other conspirators, but refused to name them. All three men were convicted, but the question of how high the conspiracy went in the Nation of Islam hierarchy — who, in fact, ordered the killing — was never answered.

David Garrow, a historian and a King biographer, obtained and reviewed the Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Malcolm X in the 1990s. He said it was probable that reams of wiretaps of the Nation of Islam had never been combed for clues. In 1980, the bureau said it had never investigated the assassination.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Hagan, also known as Talmadge X Hayer, finally identified his accomplices in an affidavit as part of an unsuccessful effort to free Mr. Butler and Mr. Johnson (all three men have since been paroled).

One of the names he gave was Willie X, whom William Kunstler, the civil rights lawyer who represented Mr. Johnson and Mr. Butler, determined was William Bradley. The others are dead or presumed dead. Dr. Marable wrote that Mr. Bradley, using a sawed-off shotgun, fired the fatal shot.

Mr. Bradley, an ex-convict now in his early 70s, is living in Newark under the name Al-Mustafa Shabazz. (Police records list both names for him.) He is married to Carolyn Kelley Shabazz, described by The Star-Ledger of Newark as a community leader and the owner of a boxing gym who gives away turkeys at Thanksgiving.

Mr. Shabazz served time for conspiracy, drug dealing and making “terroristic threats,” according to records at the New Jersey Corrections Department, and was released in 1998. Through his lawyer, J. Edward Waller, Mr. Shabazz has denied any involvement in the assassination.

Mr. Sykes, who cautions that he has yet to personally see proof linking the name Willie X to William Bradley, would like to see a joint investigation between state and federal officials, but it is the Manhattan district attorney who has jurisdiction over the case.

Mr. Sykes said he would rather that other agencies were involved, because the Manhattan district attorney’s office investigated the killing in the first place.

But there are limitations on other agencies’ ability to investigate. For one, it is not clear if the killing could be considered a civil rights crime because both the perpetrators and the victims are black.

Mr. Garrow said the definition of a civil rights crime should not be too narrow. “When a major civil rights leader is assassinated, I’d like the civil rights division to be interested, regardless of the color of the gunman,” he said, referring to the federal unit.

Some experts say the Justice Department’s participation is crucial because the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department had Malcolm X under surveillance at the time of his death, raising questions about whether law enforcement officials had knowledge beforehand of the assassination plot.

Still, the Justice Department may not have any jurisdiction, and the department has only occasionally investigated without it — in 1998, for example, then-Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a limited review of the King assassination after pressure from the family and the public.

The New York attorney general may investigate only if asked by the Manhattan district attorney or the governor. But cases that are decades old are not easy to solve, said Doug Jones, a former United States attorney in Birmingham, Ala., who helped prosecute the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in which four girls died. “A lot of people think witnesses come forward after so many years have passed,” he said, “but they don’t.”

http://www.nytimes.c...&pagewanted=all

I think the highlighted portions are an indication that any investigation inevitably will come up against the FBI. It's not for nothing he called his book a reinvented life. It was.

IMHO, I believe a similarly credible case could be made that the assassination of JFK was a hate crime, with perps from the segregation camp, and should be treated as such. and these avenues followed.

[Jim Phelps]

Humm---lets see. "Malcolm-X" (Malcolm Little) of New York decides to go on a Pilgramage to Mecca and he doesn't follow the Company Line or British Intelligence line on Zionism. Tells he learned the truth there, gets lots of new friends, and even an Arabic name: "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz".

Perhaps he was close to telling the "British Triangle Atlantic Slave Trade Route" was run by Jewish owned merchant ships and they were the principal "Blued Eyed White Devils" that stole his name and heritage.

One thing is for sure, the Black Leader he inspirted sure doesn't hold back on that fact. "Louis Farrakhan" (Louis Eugene Walcott), of the Chicago "Nation is Islam", held Malcolm-X as his Idol for inspiration and he knows exactly what factions made money off Slavery, in addition to the Carribean Islands and Southern States.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_X

Malcolm X on Zionism (1964)Taken from the Egyptian Gazette (17 September 1964)

The modern 20th century weapon of neo-imperialism is "dollarism." The Zionists have mastered the science of dollarism: the ability to come posing as a friend and benefactor, bearing gifts and all other forms of economic aid and offers of technical assistance. Thus, the power and influence of Zionist Israel in many of the newly "independent" African nations has fast-become even more unshakeable than that of the 18th century European colonialists... and this new kind of Zionist colonialism differs only in form and method, but never in motive or objective.

Zionist Israel's occupation of Arab Palestine has forced the Arab world to waste billions of precious dollars on armaments, making it impossible for these newly independent Arab nations to concentrate on strengthening the economies of their countries and elevate the living standard of their people.

"They cripple the bird's wing, and then condemn it for not flying as fast as they."

Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the "religious" claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation ... where Spain used to be, as the European zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?...

Edited July 24, 2011 by Jim Phelps

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

IMO, the new bio shortchanged the CIA angle of the case in favor of the safer Hoover angle. I am not saying that the book completely ignores the CIA angle. There are numerous instances where the author peers down it like an out-of-towner contemplating a long and busy avenue. It is enticing. We are told that Malcolm X, himself, mentioned the CIA threat, and are never told that he said anything about the FBI. Yet, these avenues are not nearly as thoroughly explored as the safer FBI streets. One wonders it the CIA angle is simply out of bounds for a US academic in 2011.

Generally, I was slightly disappointed in the book. The historical context was often thin. Yes Malcolm X's story is enough for a really fat book by itself. But in a book of such importance, context is everything. When one reads, for example, Roger Morris' biography of Nixon, one walks away with a sense of the DNA of mid-century america, a period that basically determines our present continuation of the permanent war economy. Whether you care a darn about Nixon or not, the book matters in so many other ways. Malcolm X deserved a richly contextualized treatment like that, but, IMO, he did not get it in Marable's book. Not saying its bad, just could have been much better. For more on the CIA angle I would recommend a book called Conspiracies by a guy named Kondo. This book is not without serious problems too. For example, its summary of the CIA's Executive Action programs, while necessary context, is seriously dated in its analysis and lacks multiple perspectives. The reason I mention it, is because it explores the more dangerous CIA angles better than Marable's book does.

Together they provide a very worthwhile overview.

Edited July 24, 2011 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[Michael Hogan]

From cityroom.blog.nytimes.com

Justice Department Declines to Reopen Malcolm X Case

by Shaila Dewan

July 23, 2011

Excerpts:

The Justice Department has declined a request to reinvestigate the Malcolm X assassination, saying that the statute of limitations has expired on any federal laws that

might apply, like the National Firearms Act of 1934, according to a statement released Saturday.

.....“Although the Justice Department recognizes that the murder of Malcolm X was a tragedy, both for his family and for the community he served, we have determined

that at this time, the matter does not implicate federal interests sufficient to necessitate the use of scarce federal investigative resources into a matter for which there

can be no federal criminal prosecution,” the department said.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/23/justice-department-declines-to-reopen-malcolm-x-case/

[Jim Phelps]

Right insighful "CTKA" write up on Malcom-X.

Has all the usual suspects hiding in the shadows, "expecially" the corrupt Hoover suspects.

New York and Malcom-X appeared to be very upsetting for Hoover and his banking buddies.

Edited July 24, 2011 by Jim Phelps

[John Dolva]

Joe Green on Marable's book:

http://www.ctka.net/...lm_X_Green.html

Green on BOR:

http://www.blackopra...chives2011.html

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/48635 on the book

'Malcolm X: Live like him! Dare to struggle, dare to win!'

Sunday, August 28, 2011 By Barry Healy

Malcolm X strode through the US political landscape of the late 1950s and early '60s, towering over his times with his burning righteousness and intelligence. “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing,” African American revolutionary Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965 at the age of 39, once said in a comment on the capitalist media that might be describing contemporary reporting on English riots or refugees.

Malcolm, who increasingly saw the link between capitalism and racial oppression in the last years of his life, commented that “you can't have capitalism without racism”.

“You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker,” said the man once described as the only Black man who “could stop a race riot … or start one”.

Malcolm X strode through the US political landscape of the late 1950s and early '60s, towering over his times with his burning righteousness and intelligence.

Malcolm was a hugely influential figure and inspiration for the radical movement for Black liberation that grew in the late 60s.

“His aura was too bright,” Manning Marable, author of an important new biography of the African American revolutionary, quotes the poet Maya Angelou on her meeting with Malcolm.

“A hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut.”

Malcolm had that effect on people; in the case of white America it generated violent hatred and official conspiracies that played a part in his assassination.

In the Black community, his withering polemics against racism converted masses to the Nation of Islam (NOI) religious sect — and later attracted a new generation of activists who wanted to follow him towards a radical vision for a United States' revolution.

The NOI preached Black pride, but combined it with an appeal to separation from white America. This meant their fierce defence of NOI members (not the entire Black community) was joined with a passive political approach that offered no way forward.

Mixed with a violently toxic internal discipline, the NOI was an arena in which someone of Malcolm’s acumen could only grow for a while.

But it inevitably prove constricting as the civil rights movement surged forward in the early '60s.

The power of Malcolm's developing militant thinking was such that a New York Police Department (NYPD) officer assigned to listen to the countless microphones that bugged every aspect of Malcolm’s life found himself, against his will, convinced that he was talking the truth about US and offered a way forward.

That story and more tumble out of this meticulous examination of Malcolm’s life from his impoverished childhood, through his hustling years of petty crime, conversion to the NOI during his 1946-'52 stint in prison, his rise as a radical preacher in Harlem and his final frantic period of trying to map out an alternative path for Afro-American liberation allied to the rising African revolutionary wave.

This, for Marable, was Malcolm’s “life of reinvention”.

The story has been told before in Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But Marable has harnessed the resources of Columbia University’s Malcolm X Project to dig into nearly every moment of Malcolm’s life to produce what will become the standard reference.

Nearly all paragraphs are buttressed with an entire matrix of sources to verify Marable’s claims, and some remarkable assertions are made.

Important details differ from Haley’s narrative — which was based on conversations with Malcolm and published after Malcolm's assassination in 1965.

Haley explains Malcolm’s rupture with the NOI in '63-64 as caused by the hypocritical womanising of Elijah Muhammad, which certainly did play a role.

But Marable raises Malcolm's growing discussions with, and attempts to find a way to relate to, the growing civil rights movement.

Malcolm was concerned with ways to fight racism, not simply denounce it.

One example Marable gives relates to the 1962 attack by Los Angeles police on an NOI mosque, murdering one man and paralysing another.

In all, seven Black Muslims were shot.

The survivors were framed up on serious charges.

Malcolm seriously attempted to organise a squad that would assassinate members of the Los Angeles Police Department in retaliation.

Elijah Muhammad vetoed this operation.

Malcolm saw the limitations of the NOI framework, leading to the conflict that drove him out of the NOI.

After officially leaving the NOI in March 1964, Malcolm began the two great travels that changed the nature of his religious and political thinking.

He travelled twice to Africa and the Middle East, including a Hajj to Mecca, converting to orthodox Sunni Islam in the process.

He also travelled downtown in New York City and met with the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party.

In Africa, Malcolm saw the growth of pan-African, anti-colonial radicalism and he conceived a plan to generate an equivalent in the US.

With the Trotskyists, he discussed the possibilities of revolutionary action in the US, welcomed their paper sellers at his meetings and addressed their public forums.

He also reached out to other radicals in the States.

All the while, he had to live on the run.

The NOI wanted him dead because his example threatened to overshadow that of Elijah Muhammad.

Marable’s narrative becomes a little scattered at this point because Malcolm was sleeping in different places and keeping low.

However, fascinating snippets emerge.

Shortly before his death, Malcolm had a private meeting with legendary Argentinean-born revolutionary Che Guevara, a central leader of the Cuban Revolution.

If we are lucky, perhaps a record of the meeting is kept on file in Havana.

Another detail is one of Malcolm’s body guards recalling that towards the end, he was hungrily devouring German philosopher Hegel’s account of the master and the slave in Phenomenology of Spirit.

It is a philosophical explanation of the creation of the slave mentality, something that had always formed a centrepiece of Malcolm’s rhetoric.

But Malcolm was fated to not bring that broader philosophical tradition to his audience (as Afro-Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fannon did with Black Skin, White Masks).

Some of the new details revealed by Marable are of a personal nature.

Marable reveals that Malcolm included some homosexual hustling in his petty crime days — something that never appeared in Haley’s book.

The Malcolm that emerges in Marable’s account is more human and stark than the saint of the Autobiography. Yet he is all the more inspiring for it.

Ordinary humans, with all their failings and faults, can walk in the footsteps of this Malcolm.

Marable reveals Malcolm’s misogyny, for example.

Malcolm had a disrupted relationship he had with his parents.

His father was murdered by racists and his mother driven insane by the pressures of raising a raft of children single-handed while constantly harassed by racist officials.

Malcolm was left with a sense of abandonment and an inability to trust women, which resulted in his tendency to disregard them.

Among the behaviours this produced in the adult Malcolm was his habit of leaving home for extended political journeys immediately after his wife, Betty Shabazz, gave birth to each of their children.

In the final year of his life Malcolm started to develop his thinking. After his visit to Africa and the Middle East in 1964, Malcolm said: “In every country you go to, usually the degree of progress can never be separated from the [position of the] woman...

“I am frankly proud of the contributions that our women have made in the struggle for freedom and I’m one person who’s for giving them all the leeway possible because they’ve made a greater contribution than many of us men.”

Malcolm's developing views led him to appoint a woman to head the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the secular political movement he set his hopes on.

At the time of his assassination, Malcolm was having an affair with an 18-year-old woman, and there is a strong inference that she was complicit in the murder.

Marable details the entire NOI conspiracy to kill Malcolm in February 1965. But he also exposes, in detail, the evidence that points to the NYPD and FBI as being equally responsible.

The brutality of the murder, recounted with forensic precision, is sickening.

Equally repulsive is the brazenness of the NYPD refusal to properly investigate it.

In fact, one of the hit men who pumped bullets into Malcolm could very easily have been a cop.

The NYPD and the FBI refused Marable access to their files.

Malcolm X’s monument is the revolutionary struggle of the Black masses, in the US and Africa.

In the US, I once heard a chant at a demonstration that is amplified through this book: “Malcolm X, live like him! Dare to struggle, dare to win!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ&feature=player_embedded

Malcolm X gives a speech at Oxford University in 1964: ‎'We are living in a time of revolution, a time when there has got to be a change. The people in power have misused it, and now a better world must be built ... And I, for one, will join in with anyone, I don't care what colour you are, as long as you want a change to the miserable conditions that exist on this Earth.

From GLW issue 893