On the afternoon of 21 February 1965, Malcolm X stepped to the podium of the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan to address a few hundred followers of his newly founded Organization of Afro-American Unity. He had barely begun to speak when a disturbance broke out in the crowd, and in the confusion gunmen rushed the stage and opened fire, striking him more than a dozen times. He was pronounced dead within the hour; he was thirty-nine years old, and his pregnant wife and children were in the room. The men who killed him were members of the Nation of Islam, the movement he had once served as its most electrifying voice and had, in the last year of his life, publicly broken with. That much has never been in serious doubt. But the case that followed was a travesty: of the three men convicted of the murder, two were almost certainly innocent, wrongly imprisoned for a crime they did not commit, while some of the real killers were never charged. It would take more than half a century — until November 2021 — for the state of New York to admit the injustice, exonerate the two surviving wrongly convicted men, and confront the evidence that the FBI and the police had concealed. This is the story of the assassination of Malcolm X, of the wrong men who paid for it, and of the long, unfinished wait for the truth.
State & Intelligence Operations
1965
