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Forty-five years ago last month, Malcolm X was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Moments after he was introduced to speak, someone yelled, “Nigger, get your hand outta my pocket!” Malcolm stepped forward to quell the altercation, then a smoke bomb went off and five assassins opened fire with pistols and a shotgun. The murder was brazen and highly coordinated; witnesses likened it to “a firing squad.”

The Audubon was crowded with several hundred people that afternoon, but no uniformed police, and by the time the NYPD arrived at the scene, most of the killers had fled. Three men were arrested, and eventually served time for the crime, but only one has ever admitted taking part, and he has exonerated the other two. Other shooters—including a mysterious Cuban and a man seized by the Audubon crowd and beaten until he was rescued by the police—have never been identified.

Police escorting Malcolm's body out of the Audubon, February 21, 1965.

There were undercover cops at the scene, but the nearest uniformed police—who might well have discouraged any violence simply by being visible—were stationed at the hospital across the street. The failure of the NYPD to have a uniformed police presence at the speech is hard to explain. Malcolm’s house had been firebombed just a week earlier, and it was widely known that he was a marked man. (Malcolm knew this best of all; he had even wired the US State Department, asking for protection. He didn’t get any.) Malcolm’s peril was certainly common knowledge inside the law enforcement and intelligence community, which had the leader under intense surveillance for the last year of his life. Not only were his phones bugged, at least one of his bodyguards, Gene Roberts, was an FBI informant. And so, it was later to be discovered, was his primary adversary within the Nation of Islam, John Ali. These are the agents we know about; it’s likely there were many more.

Why was the US government so worried about Malcolm X? Hadn’t he left the Nation of Islam, and stopped spouting their “white devil” vitriol? As anyone who’s seen Spike Lee’s biopic will remember, the year before Malcolm’s death was a period of profound personal and political growth for him, and that growth was of the most dangerous kind. He modulated his views on race relations, and was reaching out to more mainstream black leaders like Martin Luther King. Malcolm also began to cultivate contacts with African leaders, culminating to a trip to Cairo to attend a conference of the Organization of African Unity, where he urged African nations to go before the United Nations and condemn the United States for its treatment of American blacks.

In the context of the Cold War, internationalizing the plight of American blacks—connecting their struggle for civil rights with the struggle against colonialism and oppression outside the US—was a dangerous thing to do. As obvious as the linkage was, as common-sensical, it echoed what Soviet-bloc countries had been saying for years; and while African-Americans had shown themselves profoundly resistant to Communist agitation, the same ideas coming from a charismatic home-grown leader might form itself into a real movement. This was Washington’s worst nightmare.

Suddenly, Malcolm X was an issue of national security. As Alex Haley said after Malcolm’s death, “In Washington DC and New York City, powerful civic, private, and governmental agencies and individuals were keenly interested in what Malcolm was saying abroad, and were speculating on what he would say, and possibly do, after returning to New York.” Haley goes on to describe a meeting he had with Burke Marshall, the head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Marshall was interested in just how Malcolm was financing his activities. (Any donors with connections to unsavory groups could be used to smear Malcolm himself.)

Malcolm was tailed throughout his travels in Africa in 1964-65. He eventually got so fed up he confronted one of his tormentors in a restaurant, and described the exchange in a letter:

“I just got up from my breakfast one morning and walked over to where he was and told him I knew he was following me, and if he wanted to know anything, why didn’t he ask me? I was, to hear him tell it, anti-American, un-American, seditious, subversive and probably Communist. I told him that what he said only proved how little he understood about me. I told him that the only thing the FBI, the CIA, or anybody else could ever find me guilty of, was being open-minded. I said that I was seeking for the truth, and I was trying to weigh—objectively—everything on its own merit. I said that what I was against was strait-jacketed thinking, and strait-jacketed societies.”

Eventually surveillance turned into attempts on his life. “By whom” is the question. Though the conventional wisdom fingers Malcolm’s enemies in the Nation of Islam, people at the time felt differently. James Farmer, the head of CORE, pointed to Malcolm’s plea for government protection: “Malcolm was no fool. If this was a simple thing with the Muslims, he wouldn’t have wired the State Department.” As far as Malcolm’s sister was concerned, it was the CIA, and his wife felt much the same. Malcolm X told Betty Shabazz that America’s rulers would kill him and that afterwards she would need to remember Lot’s wife, not to look back. Why was Malcolm X so sure he would be killed? Here’s a quote from a speech he gave in 1964:

“What the US is doing in South Vietnam is criminal. But the people of South Vietnam… have been successful in fighting off the agents of imperialism…Little rice farmers, peasants, with a rifle, up against all the highly mechanized weapons of warfare, jets, napalm, battleships, everything else. And America can’t put those rice farmers back where they want them. Somebody’s waking up.”

Malcolm X in Africa, 1964

In the eyes of the CIA and FBI, those revolutions against colonialism throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa went by the name of communism. In the heart of the Cold War, supporting a worldwide revolution of oppressed peoples, and seeking to extend that revolution to an oppressed group in the United States, was tantamount to declaring oneself a communist and enemy of the United States. The only thing comparable today would be joining Al Qaeda and trying to convince others to join too. How long would such a person last? And if he died violently, who would you suspect made it happen? Said a woman at the time, “I don’t care if [Malcolm] was shot by Negroes. This was planned, directed, and carried out by orders from the white power structure.”

It was Malcolm X’s effort to lead American blacks into a worldwide struggle that ensured his death. He felt that the CIA had tried to kill him in Cairo, and he expected it to happen again. An excellent article with information on the poisoning in Cairo, his assassination, and its aftermath can be found in the February 1967 issue of The Realist. [Some damn good reporting for "a journal of freethought and satire!--MG]

 Two days after the firebombing of his home and five days before his death, Malcolm X  explained why the firebombing on his house hadn’t taken the police by surprise, and why his assassination would not take them by surprise.

“The police know the criminal operation of the Black Muslim movement because they have thoroughly infiltrated it. There is no conversation that takes place in the Black Muslim movement that the city police don’t know about, because they have policemen in there. They don’t let Black people form anything without some policemen in there. And while I was in the Black Muslim movement, over the Black Muslim movement, many of the police who were sent to infiltrate us — they’re Black — would tell me, “Look, I’m a cop, but I have to come.” They would tell me. I knew the Muslim movement was full of police. So don’t you think anything is going down that they don’t know about. The only thing that goes down is what they want to go down, and what they don’t want to go down they don’t let it go down.”

Malcolm X learned that lesson from long personal experience, and what was true in his time is still true in ours. The intelligence agencies have not had to change how they operate, and they still operate under a veil of secrecy.  Black nationalists and communists are not the public enemy of the day, but the terrorist groups of the present, whether Islamofascists or homegrown right-wing militias, are just as infiltrated by our intelligence agencies as the Nation of Islam ever was.  Perhaps more.

“The only thing that goes down is what they want to go down, and what they don’t want to go down they don’t let it go down.” 

Those are words to remember.

Contributor Ovid is a writer living near Washington, DC.

Further reading/viewing:
In addition to The Realist article linked above, there is an interesting six-part documentary called “A Decade of Struggle” which deals with the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and the black liberation movements of the sixties. Part 2 deals specifically with Malcolm X’s assassination.
Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4 • Part 5 • Part 6
The interview with the “mole” is particularly revealing, and helps get across an essential point—this isn’t James Bond, but business as usual. It happens on an individual level, and isn’t much different from having to work for a company whose goals you might find personally distasteful but, you know, it’s a job. At one point, the interviewer asks informant Darthard Perry if he thinks that “FBI surveillance and infiltration continues to this day (1980)”:

Perry; Oh yes.
Interviewer: On the dimension that you experienced?
Perry: Probably much larger by now.
Interviewer: Larger?
Perry: Oh yeah. Lemme put it to you like this. Each year everything gradually escalated more and more. So I figure, when I left…it didn’t stop escalating.”

Worth watching.—MG