He arrived back in New York on February 15, and spent part of the day checking on damage to the house and conducting interviews. The OAAU had planned to unveil its program that evening, but the firebombing had changed the agenda, bringing out a large crowd of seven hundred to hear what Malcolm had to say about it. Benjamin 2X opened up the evening meeting with a short talk. Malcolm’s speech, “There’s a Worldwide Revolution Going On,” was not his final public lecture, but it was certainly the most significant of those he gave in the last two weeks of his life. He began by mentioning the firebombing, and how stunned he was to see the Nation “using the same tactic that’s used by the Ku Klux Klan.” After bouncing through a few other topics, he circled back to offer his interpretation about how the Nation of Islam had lost its way. Before 1960, he explained, “there was not a better organization among black people in this country than the Muslim movement. It was militant. It made the whole strength of the black man in this country pick up momentum.” But after Muhammad’s return from Mecca in early 1960, things changed. Muhammad began to be “more interested in wealth. And, yes, more interested in girls.” The audience erupted with laughter. According to Malcolm, a conspiracy existed to “suppress news that would open the eyes” of NOI members about their leader. As long as Elijah Muhammad ran the Nation of Islam, “it will not do anything in the struggle that the black man is confronted with in this country.” One proof of this was the Nation’s failure to challenge the terrorist activities of the Ku Klux Klan. “They know how to do it. Only to another brother.” As the audience applauded, Malcolm added soberly, “I am well aware of what I’m setting into motion. . . . But I have never said or done anything in my life that I wasn’t prepared to suffer the consequences for.”
After a one-night trip to Rochester to deliver a speech, he returned to New York City to face the ugly business of emptying his ruined home. The court order to evict the Shabazz household was to be enforced on the morning of February 18, so just after one a.m. he and about fifteen MMI and OAAU members drove out to the house in advance of the city marshal’s arrival. In four hours they cleared the building of all items—furniture, clothing, files, desks, photographs, correspondence—and placed everything in a small moving van and three station wagons. When the marshal pulled up a few hours later along with several assistants, they discovered the house completely vacant.
For a second day, Malcolm was working without sleep, compelled forward through a whirlwind of activity by nerves and sheer will. Several weeks earlier, he had planned to travel to Jackson on February 19, to address a rally of Hamer's Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The firebombing forced him to reschedule, and instead of traveling, he gave more interviews. That morning he spoke with the New York Times, telling the paper that he lived “like a man who’s already dead.” The remarks he had been making for months about his own demise took on new gravity in light of the firebombing. “This thing with me,” he said plainly, “will be resolved by death and violence.”
Later that morning he was interviewed by an ABC camera crew. In the afternoon, Malcolm delivered his final public address, before fifteen hundred students at the Barnard College gymnasium, explaining that the black revolt in the United States “is part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era.” His speech cast a wide net and suggested a breadth of reading in its echoes of Du Bois and even Lenin. “We are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor,” he declared, “the exploited against the exploiter.” Malcolm condemned Western industrialized nations for “deliberately subjugating the Negro for economic reasons. These international criminals raped the African continent to feed their factories, and are themselves responsible for the low standards of living prevalent throughout Africa.”
The day then took him to the home of his friend Gordon Parks, the great photographer and writer whom he had first met and come to trust in 1963 when Life magazine assigned Parks to cover the Nation of Islam. For the last year, Malcolm had been sending Parks postcards from abroad, and Parks, intrigued by his friend’s evolving beliefs, had asked Malcolm to sit for an interview. Their tone was friendly, the discussion serious. “Brother, nobody can protect you from a Muslim but a Muslim—or someone trained in Muslim tactics,” Malcolm explained when Parks asked how he was keeping safe. “I know. I invented many of those tactics.” As the interview progressed, Malcolm seemed almost wistful, and his words brimmed with regret for what he perceived as the damage done by the racial intolerance in his past. “Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn’t a ghost of a chance and she went away crying?” Parks nodded. Malcolm continued, “I’ve lived to regret that incident.” He had seen many white students working to assist people throughout Africa. “I did many things as a Muslim that I’m sorry for now.”
During this same week, about sixty MMI and OAAU members met to discuss the firebombing and its security implications. “We said that from that day forward every person that came to one of our rallies was going to be searched,” recalled Peter Bailey, “and this [is] where we made a crucial error—[Malcolm] overruled this because he wanted to break away from this image of searching people before they came to rallies.” Malcolm insisted not only that no one should be searched, but that all MMI security personnel should be unarmed at the event coming up that Sunday, February 21. The sole exception to this rule would be Malcolm’s bodyguard and security chief, Reuben X Francis. Nearly everyone argued against Malcolm’s position, but there was no tradition or practice of democratic decision making inside the MMI and OAAU. When Malcolm demanded something, he received it.
The fact that his guards would be unarmed was surely communicated to the NYPD through its MMI and OAAU informants and undercover police officers. The most important police operative inside the MMI and OAAU was Gene Roberts. A four-year veteran of the U.S. Navy, Roberts was admitted to the NYPD academy, and after induction as an officer was transferred to BOSS as a detective. His first assignment was to infiltrate the newly formed MMI; his NYPD code name was “Adam.” BOSS supervisors took steps to ensure Roberts’s safety and anonymity, even from fellow officers. Along with other undercover cops, his ID photo was kept separately in BOSS headquarters. Roberts was given a cover job as a clothing salesman in the Bronx. By late 1964 Roberts had become an integral member of the MMI security team, standing guard at public events as one of Malcolm’s bodyguards. Throughout his assignment Roberts feared he would be revealed as a cop. Roberts and his wife, Joan, even sent their daughter away to Joan’s parents’ home in Virginia for her safety. Through Roberts, all of MMI's and OAAU's major decisions and plans would be promptly revealed to the NYPD.
On Saturday, February 20, Malcolm and Betty went looking for a new place to live. A real estate agent escorted them to look at a property in a predominantly Jewish but racially integrated community on Long Island. The house was attractive and to their liking, but the three-thousand-dollar down payment was well beyond their reach. The estimated moving cost for their furniture, clothing, and other personal items was one thousand dollars. Once again, Malcolm looked to Ella to solve his financial problems. Either before or just after the firebombing, when it became clear that Malcolm would have to find a new place to live, he had spoken to her and she agreed to purchase a new home for him under her name; after a short period of time, the title would be transferred to either Betty or Attallah (then age six). All agreed that Malcolm’s name was so controversial that it would have been impossible for him to purchase a home in an integrated neighborhood.
That afternoon, Malcolm called Alex Haley to check in on the state of the manuscript. In a strange and timely coincidence, Haley told him that the completed autobiography would be mailed off to Doubleday by the end of the following week. As night fell, Malcolm dropped Betty off at the home of Tom Wallace, where he stayed and talked for several hours before leaving to chec
k in to the midtown New York Hilton, paying eighteen dollars for a single room on the twelfth floor. He ate dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, the Old Bourbon Steak House, and returned to his room, remaining there until the next day. That evening, Sharon 6X may have joined him in his hotel room.
Later that night, several African-American men entered the Hilton lobby asking for Malcolm’s room number. Someone contacted the hotel’s head of security, who confronted the men. They promptly left.
The plans to murder Malcolm X had been discussed within the Nation of Islam for nearly a year before the morning of February 21, 1965. The delay in carrying out the crime had occurred for several reasons. First, up to the final days prior to the assassination Elijah Muhammad had not given an explicit order that his former national spokesman be killed, and for as much anger as had been stirred up against Malcolm in the preceding months, no one would actually take action without clear orders from on high. Second, although Malcolm was being pilloried as a heretic, he retained the respect and even love of a significant minority of NOI members. Some still recognized the contributions he had made to the sect, despite his errors. The best proof of his lasting legacy was the fierce jihad his enemies waged against him in every NOI mosque, month after month. Third, Malcolm made himself an elusive and difficult target by being out of the United States for twenty-four weeks from April to November 1964. An assassination attempt in an Islamic or African nation would have been unthinkable, even for the Nation of Islam. As long as he was abroad, he was safe.
From where the Nation stood in late 1964, the benefits of killing Malcolm outweighed the potentially significant costs. His involvement in publicizing the individual paternity cases of Evelyn Williams and Lucille Rosary, and his success in establishing MMI's connections with international Islamic organizations, had created a new and threatening situation. Some NOI officials fretted that the very legitimacy of the sect might be called into question; the defections of Wallace and Akbar Muhammad only reinforced these fears. They were now convinced that only Malcolm’s death would void the inroads he had made and allow them to once again grow membership and continue business unmolested.
Still, Elijah Muhammad knew that if Malcolm were to suffer a violent death, the Nation of Islam would immediately become the primary suspect. Killing him would almost certainly bring a local and perhaps even federal investigation down on the group, so the assassination’s architects within the Nation would need to devise a plan that could deflect attention from national headquarters such that it might plausibly deny any involvement. From this perspective, the year spent ginning up anger with the membership carried an added benefit: it would be easier to cast the killing as rogue members taking matters into their own hands.
They were helped in creating distance by the punishment structure that had developed within the organization, which had grown into a well-oiled machine as the Nation of Islam came to be dominated by fear and violence in the months after Malcolm’s departure. Most NOI members knew that disciplinary units and hit crews almost never carried out extreme actions in the cities where their mosques were located. In other words, Captain Joseph might authorize Harlem crews to attack Malcolm’s people, or to harass him, but not to commit homicide. Such extreme measures would first have to be authorized by Chicago officials, then carried out by a crew from Newark, Boston, or Philadelphia. The Newark group would have been deployed against Malcolm in New York City, but only on the direct orders of Captain Joseph, Raymond Sharrieff, and John Ali. Other assassination crews may have been organized on both the West and East Coasts.
Finally, the convergence of interests between law enforcement, national security institutions, and the Nation of Islam undoubtedly made Malcolm’s murder easier to carry out. Both the FBI and BOSS placed informants inside the OAAU, MMI, and NOI, making all three organizations virtual rats’ nests of conflicting loyalties. John Ali was named by several parties as an FBI informant, and there is good reason to believe that both James Shabazz of Newark and Captain Joseph fed information to their local police departments as well as the FBI; BOSS carried out extensive wiretapping and/or surveillance against all three organizations, while the CIA had kept up surveillance of Malcolm throughout his Middle Eastern and African travels. Yet while the channels of information remained open among various organizations interested in Malcolm’s silencing, it remains difficult to determine what the FBI and the police authorized—whether, for instance, either subtly suggested certain crimes could be committed by their nonpolice operatives. Circumstantial evidence that they may have done so is both BOSS's and the FBI's refusal nearly a half century after Malcolm’s murder to make available thousands of pages of evidence connected with the crime.
What has been established is that around the time Malcolm returned from Africa in May 1964, two members of the Newark mosque began planning how to carry out his murder, almost certainly at the direct order of minister James Shabazz, whose control of the mosque necessitated his involvement. The older of the two members was mosque assistant secretary Benjamin X Thomas, a twenty-nine-year-old father of four employed at a Hackensack envelope manufacturing company. His younger partner was electronics plant employee Leon X Davis, of Paterson, New Jersey, about twenty years of age. Both men were active in the Fruit of Islam. Probably while driving Ben’s black Chrysler, the two men spotted young Talmadge Hayer, another Newark mosque member in his early twenties, on a street in downtown Paterson. They invited Hayer into the car, and drove around for a while. Ben and Leon fished for Hayer's attitudes about Malcolm and his split from the NOI. Within weeks Hayer became the third member committed to participating in the murder. “I had a bit of love and admiration for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” he later wrote, “and I just felt that like this is something that I have to stand up for.”
In short order, two more NOI members joined the Newark conspiracy. Willie X Bradley was twenty-six years old, tall, dark in complexion, and heavyset, with a history of violence. Wilbur X McKinley, by contrast, was over thirty-five years old, thin, and like three other men in the conspiracy, only about five feet, nine inches tall. The proprietor of a small construction business, Wilbur X had worked at the Newark mosque.
While beatings like the one carried out against Leon Ameer in Boston had become disturbingly common for the Nation, executions of members or dissidents remained extremely rare. Yet as the Nation seemed to flounder in the wake of Malcolm’s defection, brutal disciplinary measures were taken with greater frequency. In the Bronx in late 1964, for example, NOI member Benjamin Brown started his own “Universal Peace” mosque, which featured a large photograph of Muhammad in its storefront window. Since Brown had not requested the prior approval of Mosque No. 7 or the Chicago headquarters, his actions were judged insurrectionary. In the early evening of January 6, 1965, three Muslims dropped by Brown’s mosque, complained about the display of Muhammad’s portrait, and departed. Several hours later, as Brown left the mosque, he was killed by a shot in the back by a .22 caliber rifle. The NYPD investigated the death and arrested three men, all NOI members, two of them Mosque No. 7 lieutenants: Thomas 15X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler. The police found a .22 caliber Winchester repeating rifle in Johnson’s home. It had been fired once, then jammed. Butler and Johnson were subsequently bailed out of jail, but police were convinced that both men were involved in Brown’s shooting, because they were well-known “enforcers.”
Thomas 15X presented a curious case in the Nation’s crusade to poison its members’ opinions. Malcolm’s driver for years, Johnson had abandoned his boss during the schism with the Nation. However, at first, he had not shared the obsession to destroy Malcolm that had infected other FOI members. When in December 1963 Malcolm had been silenced, Johnson stated that like all mosque members he was surprised, but had assumed that the minister soon would be reinstated. Yet after Malcolm established the MMI and OAAU, Johnson firmly sided with the Nation against him. Thomas 15X's hardening of purpose began with the Queens court hearing over the disputed ownership of the
Shabazz home. “Malcolm wasn’t just a minister; he was top minister,” Johnson stated, going on to explain that, because of his status, NOI members had agreed to purchase a house for him and his family. “But if you leave, you can’t have that house. We bought you a brand-new car and everything. . . . As long as you are correct, you’ve got that.”
Johnson claimed that the order to assassinate Malcolm came directly from national secretary John Ali, who while visiting New York City gathered Mosque No. 7’s lieutenants separately from Captain Joseph and gave a series of reasons why Malcolm had to die. In the more than four decades that have passed, however, nothing has emerged that could definitively prove or disprove Johnson’s claim of Ali’s involvement. Johnson had great difficulty accepting some of the national secretary’s reasoning, and noted that “the other lieutenants didn’t [buy Ali’s arguments] either.” Several weeks later new instructions came down from Chicago: “Elijah Muhammad sent specific orders. He said, ‘Don’t touch [Malcolm].’” Consequently Johnson and his crew beat up and harassed Malcolm’s people, but no active plan was set in motion to murder him. Johnson claimed, “I used to see Malcolm every day in the Theresa Hotel.” Malcolm would walk over and say, “How you doing?” That his intended victim maintained a degree of civility impressed Johnson.
By the fall of 1964, though, as the rage against Malcolm infected every part of the Nation, Johnson was finally persuaded that Malcolm had to be killed. He received instructions with four other lieutenants “that we had to go to Philly. He was speaking over there . . . and we were supposed to hit him then.” The crew drove to Malcolm’s lecture site (probably on December 26), but Malcolm had anticipated such an assault. “He sent a brother out that sort of favored him.” The would-be assassins chased after the decoy, and Malcolm escaped. Johnson may have also participated in at least one other failed attempt to assassinate Malcolm in Philadelphia. Had he been present at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, Thomas would have eagerly participated in the assassination. The fact that he was absent that afternoon, but was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime, raises profound questions about both U.S. law enforcement and the courts.
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