New Revelations On 60th Anniv of Malcolm X Assassination
This Friday marks the 60th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination in the Audubon Ballroom in Upper Manhattan. The mystery around X’s murder has been with us for just as long, even as the veil of secrecy has begun to unravel in recent years. His biographers now widely agree that the assassins came from a Nation of Islam mosque in Newark, New Jersey. At the same time, there were other, far more powerful entities — starting with the FBI and the CIA — that saw Malcolm’s attempts to forge unity between the Black population in the United States and the newly decolonized people of Africa as a grave national security threat. What role did they play?
While we still don’t know who ordered the hit, Theodore Hamm writes that “archival records recently reviewed by The Indy shed insight regarding the surveillance of Malcolm X during his final six months by both the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and top officials at the CIA.”
For more about what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms and others were up to, see the article below.
If you would like a second slice of Hamm, check out his latest on the Maria Hernandez murder case. Hernandez was a neighborhood anti-drug activist in Bushwick whose 1989 murder shocked the city. In their haste to score a win, did the prosecutors play fast and loose with the facts and convict an innocent man who still languishes behind bars 35 years later? And if you would like to support The Indypendent and all the bold, original reporting we do, please visit our donate page or become a paid subscriber to this newsletter.
On the 60th Anniversary of Malcolm X’s Assassination, New Revelations Shed Light on U.S. Government Surveillance in His Final Months
By Theodore Hamm
Sixty years ago this week, a team of gunmen murdered Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in upper Manhattan. Although most X biographers now agree that the assassins came from the Nation of Islam’s Newark mosque, many key questions linger.
Six decades later, we still do not know who ordered the hit — and why several of the culprits were never prosecuted. As The Indypendent previously discussed, in the late ’60s through the early ’70s, many of Malcolm’s allies believed the CIA was involved. Since then, suspicion has primarily surrounded both the FBI and the NYPD.
Archival records recently reviewed by The Indy shed insight regarding the surveillance of Malcolm X during his final six months by both the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and top officials at the CIA.
In early 1964, Malcolm left the Nation of Islam and soon after founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which sought to increase ties between Black people in the United States and African nations. Hoover quickly deemed the OAAU to be a national security threat.
According to JFK historian Jefferson Morley, in the early ’60s CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms oversaw most of the agency’s main operations. In 1964, Helms provided false testimony to the Warren Commission, denying that the CIA had been closely tracking Lee Harvey Oswald ever since his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959.
Later in 1964, Helms kept an eye on Malcolm X’s travels abroad, authoring at least three memos sent to Hoover’s team that November and December. According to Helms, X had been toning down his attacks on mainstream Black leadership in order “to achieve greater unity among Negros.” Even though Malcolm had been strengthening his ties to African heads of state including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Helms nonetheless maintained that X “might best be described as an anarchist.”
Nine days before X’s assassination, Hoover sent a memo to Helms and other influential federal law enforcement leaders regarding Malcolm’s itinerary. FBI sources informed Hoover that in the wake of France’s refusal in early February 1965 to allow the Black nationalist leader to enter the country, X and his supporters planned to protest outside the French consulate in New York City.
Hoover’s memo is significant because it clearly demonstrates that Malcolm X was on many radars at the time of his death. In addition to Helms, Hoover looped in CIA Director John McCone, the Department of Justice’s John Doar (who oversaw the civil rights division), and Thomas Hughes, the State Department’s director of intelligence.
Less than ten days later, X was gunned down. In the Netflix series Who Killed Malcolm X? (2020), retired FBI agent Arthur Fulton stated that he supervised a team of nine undercover agents inside the Audubon Ballroom that Sunday afternoon. The NYPD had at least a half-dozen more undercovers at the event, including Gene Roberts, a member of Malcolm’s security detail.
Two days after X’s murder, Helms sent a memo to Hoover, explaining that one of the agency’s sources reported Malcolm had been concerned about a recent loss in OAAU funding from the Egyptian government, then controlled by the nationalist Nasser regime. The identity of Helms’ source is redacted, but the fact that such a figure existed suggests that the CIA also had access to X’s inner circle.
In the wake of the Netflix series, outgoing Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance exonerated Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, two of the three men the DA’s office convicted for X’s murder in early 1966. Spurred by independent scholar Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, X biographers Manning Marable and Les and Tamara Payne have concluded that a band of assassins from Newark, led by William Bradley, handled the hit. Bradley appears to have had ties to the FBI.
In late 2023, Aziz’s legal team, led by David Shanies, initiated a federal lawsuit that named Hoover and other FBI officials, as well as various NYPD personnel. This past November, high-profile attorneys Ben Crump, Flint Taylor and Jonathan Moore filed a federal suit on behalf of X’s family that named Hoover and many of the same NYPD figures — and added the CIA’s Richard Helms.
Federal Judge Dale Ho is handling both cases. Ho has also been overseeing the Eric Adams saga, rejecting several motions by Adams’ team to toss out the case. Ho recently rejected the government’s effort to dismiss the Aziz suit, allowing for it to move to the discovery phase. Crump’s case is still in its early stages.
While President Trump’s executive order declassifying the remaining JFK files was fully expected, the additions of the government’s records regarding the assassinations of MLK and RFK surprised many observers. It seems improbable that Malcolm X will join that list, but the fingerprints of top federal government officials remain all over the case.
