By: John Perazzo
(Continued from last week)
Blaming the FBI & the NYPD
The Netflix documentary suggests that the FBI and the NYPD played a major role in Malcolm’s murder. As David Garrow tells us in the film: “The FBI was listening to Elijah Muhammad and his top aides 24 hours a day prior to the killing. My belief is that the FBI should have known that the Nation of Islam was going to kill Malcolm” – the implication being that the Bureau should have intervened in some way to protect him.
The documentary also shows historian Zak A. Kondo stating, similarly, that the FBI, knowing “the mentality of the men of the Fruit of Islam in particular,” purposely employed “various counterintelligence techniques” designed “to facilitate the Nation doing for the FBI what the FBI couldn’t do for itself.” “They thought, you know, if we keep pushing this thing, the Nation will take out Malcolm X,” says Kondo.
Further, the Netflix series shows yet another commenter saying that the NOI members who killed Malcolm X were “willing tools” and “puppets” of white law-enforcement personnel who were, in turn, the “puppeteers … in charge of that whole situation.”
Noting that “in those final weeks it was clear that Malcolm was in dire need of protection,” Abdur-Rahman Muhammad laments that “it was also clear that he wasn’t getting it” from the “authorities” who “had a responsibility … to protect his life at all cost.” On the afternoon of the murder, adds Mr. Muhammad, there was “an absence of any kind of police force in and around the Audubon…. This was very strange, especially given the recent threats that were made on his life.”
In a similar vein, the documentary claims that the policemen who arrived at the Audubon Ballroom immediately after the shooting of Malcolm X appeared to be largely unconcerned about what had just occurred. As Abdur-Rahman Muhammad puts it, the officers had “no sense of urgency,” “almost as if they knew this was going to happen, almost as if they wanted it to happen.” Because of either “negligence or complicity by law enforcement,” says Mr. Muhammad, the real killer was able to get away. This, he claims, amounts to evidence of the “NYPD’s involvement in Malcolm’s assassination.”
But while Mr. Muhammad condemns law-enforcement for failing to adequately protect Malcolm, he articulates his belief that “Malcolm and his family had plenty of reasons not to trust the NYPD” – suggesting that police protection, even if it had been provided, would have been undependable at best. And indeed, the documentary begrudgingly notes that the Police Department did actually offer to provide Malcolm with round-the-clock personal security – which would have come at great cost to taxpayers – but that Malcolm rejected the offer. The film contends that the NYPD’s offer was insincere because the Department already knew in advance that Malcolm would turn it down.
It would have been “crazy,” says Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, for Malcolm to turn to the police for protection. Moreover, the documentary shows a clip of Malcolm X himself making that very same point: “So the policemen in this country are the ones who are responsible for the brutality, the policemen themselves have become guilty of violating the rights of the people. So what are the people to do? Call on the same ones who are victimizing them, to protect them? No. They [the people] have to protect themselves.”
The bottom line, as far as the documentary is concerned, is that the police were damned if did (provide security for Malcolm), and damned if they didn’t. Or, as one commenter shown in the film puts it, Malcolm’s death was largely a manifestation of “the complex tragedy” of “being black in America.”
Hayer Reveals the Killers’ Names in 1977
For 12 years after the murder of Malcolm X, Hayer did not reveal the identities of the four men he said were his accomplices. Then, in 1977 — two years after NOI leader Elijah Muhammad had died — Hayer drew up an affidavit for civil rights lawyer William Kunstler in which he named the four guilty parties: (1) “Ben” (later identified as Benjamin Thomas); (2) “Lee” or “Leon” (later identified as Leon Davis); (3) “Wilbur” or “Kinly” (later identified as Wilbur McKinley); and (4) “Willie X” (later identified as William X Bradley). All four were, like Hayer, members of NOI Mosque #25 in Newark, which, as Abdur-Rahman Muhammad notes in his Netflix documentary, “was known as a very radical, militant, fanatical even type of mosque, and they prided themselves on that.” In the film, Kunstler contends that the four conspirators “got away with it” specifically because they were all from Newark and thus “they were people nobody [in New York] knew.”
Most notable among the four alleged accomplices was William X Bradley, who would later adopt the Muslim name Almustafa Shabazz. Bradley was a longtime violent criminal who, by Hayer’s telling, had actually fired the gunshots that killed Malcolm. In the Netflix documentary, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad says that in video footage of the mayhem that engulfed the area just outside the Audubon Ballroom on the day of Malcolm’s murder, was one particular man “who looks a lot like William Bradley,” and “he’s feigning like he’s part of the brawl, and in that kind of misdirection, he steps back, and then you see him walk across the frame very calmly, closing his coat, and he just walks away. This is how he got away.”
The documentary also points out that a second affidavit was filed by an NOI member named Benjamin Goodman (aka Benjamin Karim), who claimed that Butler and Johnson were not present at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965.
But when Kunstler in 1978 tried, on the basis of the two affidavits, to get the case reopened in an effort to vacate the convictions of Butler and Johnson, a judge rejected the motion on grounds that no new evidence was being brought forward. As David Garrow says in the Netflix film: “There would need to be some corroboration of these claims in order for a court really to be satisfied. So, on its face, it didn’t seem to have enough substance.”
The Netflix documentary asserts that “on the street” in Newark, it was an open secret that Bradley was the gunman who killed Malcolm X. He fit the FBI’s description of the assailant, based on eyewitness testimony, as a dark-skinned 28-year-old black man who stood 6-foot-2, weighed about 200 pounds, and was wearing a gray overcoat.
In the years following Malcolm’s murder, Bradley spent a great deal of time in prison for other, unrelated crimes. Eventually he was released in 1998, at which time he opened a boxing gym in Newark and began to develop a reputation as something of a mentor to young people in the community. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad was prepared to track Bradley down and confront him with questions regarding his whereabouts on the day of Malcolm’s murder, and whether he may have been an FBI informant at the time of the murder. But Bradley died in 2018, so the interview never took place.
The Netflix Film’s Emphasis on America’s Intransigent Racism
A theme that weaves its way conspicuously throughout the fabric of Who Killed Malcolm X?, is that white racism – in the form of misconduct by the FBI and NYPD — not only played a major role in Malcolm’s death in 1965, but continues to be a toxic force in American society to this day. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, for his part, candidly explains that the reason why he himself became a “black militant activist” as a young man was because of Malcolm’s confrontational, rebellious message. At various times in his film, Mr. Muhammad passionately lauds Malcolm as a “black man that wasn’t gonna take this shit anymore,” and who told his fellow African Americans that “it’s time to stop singing and start swinging!”
At one point, the Netflix documentary shows black-and-white video footage of a white newsman, shortly after Malcolm’s murder, asking a black citizen on the street if he believed that “this [killing] was paid for by whites.” The man replied: “Yes, by white people. Anytime a black man in this country stands up for his constitutional rights, he dies.” Another clip shows a black woman at that time stating: “The white power structure in America is behind it. And they were quick to capitalize on it by saying that one of his [Malcolm’s] own kind did it, but they [the whites] put it up to be done.” Yet another clip shows a black commenter saying that “the hidden hand behind Malcolm’s assassination was the big boys down in Washington.”
Also presented in the Neflix series are video clips of various statements and scenes whose very obvious purpose is to drive home the notion that the same racist forces that allegedly contributed to the killing of Malcolm X in 1965, are still very much alive today. For example, the film shows Malcolm saying in the Sixties that “black people in this country have been the victims of violence at the hands of the white man for 400 years,” juxtaposed with a clip of Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for The New Yorker, saying in 2018 that “white supremacy in the United States” has “not really” diminished at all in the “53 years after his death.”
While these and other quotes are being recited, the Netflix documentary displays a series of photos whose common theme is the notion that white police officers routinely abuse blacks in present-day America. One scene, for instance, shows black demonstrators holding up signs bearing the names of black people like Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and Renisha McBride, who lost their lives in highly publicized conflicts with police in recent years. Other protesters are shown raising their fists in Black Power salutes or holding placards that call for “Reparations,” denounce “Environmental Racism,” assert that “Black Lives Matter,” advocate “By Any Means Necessary” as a motto for racial rebellion, and assert that “The white man is the devil.” Additional scenes show images of NYPD officers in August 2014 grappling with Eric Garner, a black man who died shortly afterward; NBA start Lebron James wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt in homage to Garner; former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who became famous for kneeling during pre-game national anthems as a way of protesting America’s purportedly ubiquitous racism; and black urban rioters violently destroying a police car. Yet another scene in the documentary treats us to an interview with a young black man recalling how white police officers had once singled him out as a “ni**er” and “terrorized” him for an extended period of time.
In the final analysis, Who Killed Malcolm X? does a competent job at making the case that the late William X Bradley was in fact intimately involved in the killing of Malcolm X but was never punished for that crime. It does a less effective job of proving its claim that Norman 3X Butler (aka Muhammad Abdul Aziz) and Thomas 15X Johnson (Khalil Islam) were innocent.
But clearly, the film’s objective was not simply to exonerate these men. Its larger purpose was to bang the drum of white racism loudly enough for all the nation to hear. If not for the white power structure dominating the FBI and the NYPD, we are told, Malcolm may well have been able to escape assassination altogether, and a pair of innocent men might have been able to avoid spending two decades apiece in prison. We see Butler/Aziz himself articulate this message with crystal clarity in the film: “When the white man say you guilty, you guilty. Why? Cause he says so and he got a gun, or he got a key, or he got money, and it’s that simple.”
It is remarkable that Who Killed Malcolm X? – while purporting to be a nonpartisan search for truth – says not a word about Louis Farrakhan’s admission, many years after the 1965 murder, that he himself had “helped create the atmosphere” that led to the killing of Malcolm. Nor does the film mention the historic 60 Minutes interview of May 2000, where Farrakhan, seated across from Malcolm X’s oldest daughter, Atallah Shabazz, stated quite candidly: “Yes, it is true that black men pulled the trigger. We cannot deny any responsibility in this. Where we are responsible, where our hands are a part of this, we beg God’s mercy and forgiveness.”
Malcolm X was a marked man. The Nation of Islam detested him for his disloyalty to Elijah Muhammad and was determined to murder him. And it did. Neither the FBI nor the NYPD were responsible for that.
(Front Page Mag)
