Vol. 73/No. 29      August 3, 2009

BY HERMAN PORTER  
New York, February 8—During thirteen days of testimony in the Malcolm X murder trial, nine eyewitnesses to the assassination of Malcolm X have taken the stand and been cross-examined at length. But little progress has been made toward discovering the truth about what happened on February 21, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was shot, and the motive behind the assassination.

A complicating factor in the trial is the crucial role in the proceedings played by the police and district attorney’s office. Though they are the ones who represent “the people,” they can hardly be considered impartial, and some people suspect agents of the police were implicated in the murder.

The most powerful people who run this country had a motive for having Malcolm X murdered at least as strong as that of the hierarchy of the Black Muslims. And they were in a much better position to get away with it. Right-wing and racist groups had motives as well.

In the last speech he delivered, at the Audubon Ballroom on Monday, February 15, the day after his house had been bombed, Malcolm X accused Elijah Muhammad of ordering the bombing of his home, but he went on to say that a situation had been created in which anyone could murder him and the Black Muslims would be blamed.

Alex Haley reports in the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X that Malcolm told him in a phone conversation on February 20 that he was going to state he had been hasty to accuse the Black Muslims of bombing his home. “Things have happened since that are bigger than what they can do. I know what they can do. Things have gone beyond that,” Haley quotes Malcolm.

More than any other individual, Malcolm X was a threat to those who wish to maintain the status quo in this country. Peter Sabbatino, one of the defense attorneys for Talmadge Hayer, asked George Whitney, one of Malcolm’s followers, during the cross-examination, whether he ever heard Malcolm say that people interested in narcotics might gun him down. “He said that people who were interested in keeping the status quo might gun him down,” Whitney responded.

Malcolm X made an enormous impression in Africa during the last year of his life. Once he split from the Muslims, only eleven months before his death, the goal he set was to link the struggle of Afro-Americans to the freedom struggles of the nonwhite peoples all over the world. His immediate aim was to get the U.S. government condemned as racist in the United Nations, just as South Africa had been condemned.

He spent five of those eleven months traveling in Africa and the Middle East, meeting heads of state and high government officials and speaking before student groups. A “truth squad” from the U.S. Information Agency accompanied him wherever he went—slandering him and trying to undo what he was accomplishing. But they didn’t succeed. John Lewis and Donald Harris, leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, toured several African countries just after Malcolm had visited them and reported: “Malcolm’s impact on Africa was just fantastic. In every country he was known and served as the main criteria for categorizing other Afro-Americans and their political views.”

Malcolm X was poisoned while he was in Cairo. His stomach was pumped very soon after he awoke one night in enormous pain. No one else who ate with him was poisoned. He mentioned the incident, during the question period at one of the public meetings of the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom, in an off-hand way. He was probably embarrassed to speak of his own problems, especially when he was so widely accused by the press of being just a publicity hound.

Just twelve days before his assassination, Malcolm X was barred from France. He was to address a meeting of Afro-Americans and Africans in Paris and flew there, but was kept from leaving the airport and forced to fly directly back to Britain by French officials. The reason for this highly unusual act by the French government was never stated, but one rumor was that they feared they would be embarrassed by having him assassinated on French soil.

One other rumor that should be taken note of in another connection was spread among some New York policemen: that Malcolm X’s group had become an organized criminal gang. I don’t know who started to spread this lie or how long before the assassination it was told to police, but it certainly must have “justified” any attacks on Malcolm or his followers to those police who believed the story.

For all of these reasons, there are grounds for suspicion that some agency of the government was involved in one way or another in the assassination, and that those charged with finding the killers may indeed be covering up for them.

The police must have interviewed a great many of the estimated 400 people who were at the Audubon when Malcolm was shot. Did they select the witnesses who could be fitted into the prosecution’s story? Some had seen a small part of what happened and couldn’t contradict the rest of the prosecution’s version. Were others subjected to pressure by the police, to learn to remember what the police wanted? Other witnesses were confused but open to suggestion by the authorities.  
 
 
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