60 years after assassination of Malcolm X, a lawsuit aims to uncover the truth

The outcome of this lawsuit will have broad ramifications for movements facing state surveillance and repression today.

By Tyler Walicek, Truthout

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump stands next to Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X's daughter. Photo: ABC7 New York.

A major lawsuit has been filed by leading civil rights attorneys on behalf of the daughters of Malcolm X in an effort to litigate claims of state complicity in the 1965 murder of the Black revolutionary leader.

The suit comes in the wake of a reinvestigation that led to critical exonerations of two of the alleged killers in 2021. The outcome will turn on proving the U.S. government’s role in allowing the assassination to happen — to the extent, new evidence suggests, of actively facilitating it.

The Shabazzes’ lawsuit is being pursued by a vaunted and highly regarded legal team, at the head of which are attorneys Benjamin Crump and G. Flint Taylor. In the $100 million suit, known as Malcolm X Shabazz et al. v. USA, the defendants are listed as the United States of America, the City of New York and none other than J. Edgar Hoover, among many more named NYPD, FBI and CIA agents or their estates. These organizations are accused of obscuring and influencing, by various means, the circumstances around Malcolm X’s death.

As such an imposing set of defendants would suggest, the lawsuit is a legal gesture of historic proportions. Winning this complaint will require challenging an edifice of complicity, corruption and secrecy, and ascertaining truth in the face of both intentional concealment by state agents and the blurring of objectivity that accompanies such long reaches of time. Nevertheless, the legal teams are pursuing the case with vigor — for Malcolm X’s living family and for posterity, accountability and historical justice.

When Malcolm X was assassinated by volleys of gunfire 59 years ago, on February 21, 1965, he was standing onstage to speak before a crowd in New York City’s Audubon Ballroom. His wife, Betty Shabazz, and his daughters, including then-2-year-old Ilyasah Shabazz, were both present at that horrific scene.

Yet also among the audience that day, recent investigations have indicated, were a number of government informants, federal agents and police officers. Their failure to stop the killing, as well as glaring signs of state influence over the circumstances, has long cast official narratives in considerable doubt.

Whatever the ultimate outcome — if state complicity can be proven in open court, if these renewed hopes of justice can outlast the impositions of time and unaccountable power — the consequences of this lawsuit will not be confined to posterity alone; its concerns remain resonant with contemporary politics. After all, despite falsely reassuring claims to the contrary, coordinated state surveillance and subversion, particularly of leaders on civil rights and racial justice, is far from a thing of the past.

Taking Up the Mantle

Benjamin Crump, a lead attorney on the Shabazz case, is one of the nation’s most prominent and accomplished civil rights lawyers. Crump has previously taken on the cases of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, residents of Flint, Michigan, harmed by the water crisis, and many more.

“Anytime you fight for justice for people of color, it’s an obstacle,” Crump commented to Truthout by phone. “And if you think about the fact that we’re bringing a case 59 years later, then you add in all kinds of hurdles and impediments to justice. But we’re up for the job.”

Crump’s team is working in collaboration with veteran advocate G. Flint Taylor of the People’s Law Office, along with members of the Innocence Project and other collaborators at the firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman. Taylor is known for successfully winning litigation against Chicago police and the FBI on behalf of assassinated Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, as well as reparations for victims of the Chicago police torture cases.

Ominous Signs

In the weeks before his death, Malcolm X had known — and had been claiming to the media and all those around him — that attempts on his life were imminent. Indeed, initial attacks were both threatened and attempted over that timespan — until on February 21, when the worst outcome, as so many had feared and Malcolm X had predicted, was ultimately realized.

The longstanding narrative, based on the findings of the original prosecution, was that the murder was the work of Malcolm X’s former comrades in the Black separatist Nation of Islam (NOI), who were infuriated by his condemnations of his onetime organization and the failings of its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Yet, while the surface-level threat did emanate from the NOI, and it was NOI associates that ultimately fired on him and took his life, Malcolm X himself had already warned his inner circle and the public that there would be more to the story of his own impending death.

“This case is about the corrupt, unlawful, and unconstitutional relationship between law enforcement and ruthless killers that went unchecked for many years and was actively concealed, condoned, protected, and facilitated by governmental agents.”

Three killers were initially implicated. But after six decades, during which significant doubts were raised about the guilt of two of the three men convicted for the killings, startling new evidence came to light. Despite their alibis and strong evidence of their innocence, within days of the murder, Thomas 15X Johnson (aka Khalil Islam) and Norman 3X Butler (aka Muhammad Aziz) had been arrested by the NYPD; both were later convicted. The third arrestee, also convicted and never exonerated, was Thomas Hagan (aka Talmadge X and Mujahid Abdul Halim), who was caught at the scene after firing at the civil rights leader. In 1977, Hagan testified to the other two men’s innocence, and long maintained that they were not involved.

Nevertheless, it took over half a century and nearly two years of investigation by New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., together with the Innocence Project and other attorneys, to prove the innocence of Johnson and Butler, producing a remarkable reversal: in 2021, both of their convictions were overturned. Johnson had already died in prison as an innocent man, but Butler was freed and later awarded tens of millions in a settlement. Their exoneration was made possible by newly presented evidence indicating that crucial facts substantiating their innocence were deliberately obscured by prosecutors, the FBI and the NYPD during the trial.

Per the current lawsuit’s complaint filing, which was reviewed by Truthout, “Vance took the unprecedented step of apologizing for ‘serious, unacceptable violations of law and the public trust,’ and revealed a number of crucial NYPD and FBI documents that had been fraudulently concealed for more than 56 years.”

Beyond Exoneration

This proof, at long last, of the state’s efforts to frame Johnson and Butler naturally raised serious uncertainties about government motives and the real forces behind the killing. The current lawsuit undertaken by Crump, Taylor, and their legal team is based on new evidence that includes unearthed documents from COINTELPRO (the FBI’s infamous “Counter-Intelligence Program”) and other agency and NYPD sources; the discovery of this evidence has empowered the plaintiffs and their attorneys to credibly allege that those organizations had a directing role in the assassination, and in later covering it up.

In the complaint filed by the legal team, they elucidate their claims against the state in great detail. “This case is about the corrupt, unlawful, and unconstitutional relationship between law enforcement, including the Defendants herein, and ruthless killers that went unchecked for many years and was actively concealed, condoned, protected, and facilitated by governmental agents,” reads the introductory text of the complaint, with the perpetrators “including, but not limited to, the Defendants and their agencies, ultimately leading to the orchestrated murder of Malcolm X.”

Attorney Benjamin Crump elaborated on these charges during his conversation with Truthout. For instance, the false accusation and arrests of Johnson and Butler, the legal team alleges, were “part of the manipulation of the FBI and COINTELPRO. That’s not only our theory — there’s very strong COINTELPRO documents that lead to that conclusion. And that’s why J. Edgar Hoover and many of his agents and important supervisors in Washington are named as defendants in our lawsuit, because of COINTELPRO and as it was directed against Malcolm and Elijah Mohammed of the Nation of Islam,” Crump said.

As Johnson and Butler were exonerated by the separate 2021 investigation, this lawsuit enters new terrain. To begin with, the complaint charges that the NYPD was aware of the imminent threat to the life of Malcolm X, “yet failed to intervene on his behalf.” Ominously, the NYPD revoked the police detail that had been afforded to Malcolm X in the wake of death threats. In addition, the complaint alleges, “the NYPD, in coordination with Federal Defendants, intentionally removed their officers from inside the ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated.”

More egregiously still, there is evidence that the state coordinated to neutralize Malcolm X’s own nonpolice security detail. As Crump further explained to Truthout, Raymond Wood, a police informant and infiltrator, “implicated Malcolm’s bodyguards. Two of them have now come forward and given us affidavits. These are older Black men, who’d never really spoken publicly at all about this. But he implicated them in some plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty.” The guards were arrested on suspicion of this cartoonish plot.

Not only was this accusation outlandish — police would later recycle the farcical idea and attempt to pin it on others. Said Crump, “It’s crazy. They used the same allegation to go after so many Black leaders in New York. They can’t come up with anything new. They used it on his two security guards, a week before he got assassinated — we argued, to get them out of the picture. And then they used it on the Black Panthers in New York!”

Wood, the informant, was the one who had in fact urged the bodyguards to pursue this attack. “We believe it was entrapment,” added Crump. A deathbed confession by Wood of the orders of his NYPD and FBI handlers is a key piece of evidence in proving that claim and the agencies’ broader involvement.

It turned out that Malcolm X’s entourage, his bodyguards, the Nation of Islam, and many parties involved had been thoroughly infiltrated by police and the FBI. (In general, COINTELPRO had files on and prosecuted campaigns against effectively all major rights organizations and Black civil rights leaders and even cultural figures.)

As a result, both informants and official agents of the police and FBI were present at the assassination. The lawsuit complaint charges that “the Federal Defendants had personnel, including undercover personnel, in the ballroom during the assassination and they failed to protect Malcolm X from a known harm.” Taken together, and on the evidence of irrefutable disclosures, the complaint claims the state’s actions point to clear motive: “the Federal Defendants encouraged the assassination of Malcolm X.” Then, “they engaged in a decades-long effort to cover up their malfeasance.”

Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X's daughter, speaks at a press conference. Photo: WCTV.

Long Odds on a Long Road

Despite the reams of evidence available, charging the nation’s most powerful and secretive federal agencies will be no easy feat. Yet the significance of such an effort, to the Shabazz family and to history, justifies the inordinate difficulty. Reached by Truthout, G. Flint Taylor of the People’s Law Project, co-counsel on the case, said, “We’re definitely up for the task. An admission, with some kind of significant compensation to the daughters and family of Malcolm X, would go a long way towards righting the grievous human rights wrong that we all agree on at this point. There was a grievous wrong here, the government was implicated, the NYPD was implicated.”

Taylor continued, “Just because they have destroyed some of the evidence over these many decades, and some of the witnesses may have died over the decades, doesn’t mean that at this point the powers that be can’t look at this, particularly as a question of reparations and ultimate justice, rather than just a legal case.”

Despite what many mainstream commentators would insist, the state has not willingly and compassionately changed its ways. Campaigns like COINTELPRO have not ceased; they have only mutated. Police and federal investigators remain the instruments of an oppressive state. As Crump commented, “You talk about them targeting these identity groups, these racial identity groups, and with Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference 50 years ago. But today, it’s Black Lives Matter and other young Black leaders who have been targeted. That’s why it’s so important.”

Indeed, there is abundant evidence of the continuation of similar tactics against Black organizers and the left by federal and local law enforcement (to say nothing of the incessant daily barrage of murders of Black people by police.) Rule changes and loosened protections have enabled all manner of tactics, from warrantless surveillance, infiltration via the use of informants and agents provocateurs, and countless other schemes known and unknown.

Kamau Franklin is an organizer with decades of experience and the founder of Community Movement Builders, as well as a writer, former attorney and campaign director, among other things. As Franklin commented to Truthout by email, “From the position of someone who organizes today and has done some study of how COINTELPRO worked, it is obvious that the campaign to disrupt and destroy Black organizing (as well as left organizing in general) has never stopped. We continue to see stories of informants attempting to entrap organizers, the labeling of Black organizing as ‘Black Identity Extremists.’”

Franklin brought up the case of the Uhuru 3, Black socialist organizers raided and arrested late last year in Florida on spurious charges of spying for Russia; they were convicted on one charge of conspiracy, but, in a victory for free speech, received only probation. (Police carrying out such raids on leftists inevitably evoke the days of A. Mitchell Palmer.)

Franklin also cited the egregious charges of “domestic terrorism” levied against Cop City protesters.

Such practices are “a clear extension of COINTELPRO tactics and strategies into the modern era,” Franklin said. Programs resembling COINTELPRO are “deployed against our movements today.”

The Shabazz case evinces these longstanding tensions. As Benjamin Crump concluded, “Black people in America have got to have some account for the intentional violence and discrimination and oppression against them. The fact that Betty Shabazz went to her grave never ever getting any real measure of justice. … Nothing will replace what was taken from them, and what they’ve had to experience for all of these decades. But I believe it would give some small measure of vindication to get justice.”

Thanks to the efforts of Betty Shabazz, the very same Audubon Ballroom where the event took place has been partially transformed into the Shabazz Center — a museum and a memorial to Malcolm X. There, standing beside Benjamin Crump at a November press conference announcing the lawsuit, Ilyasah Shabazz spoke of her mother Betty, who “turned this place, which represented trauma and tragedy,… into a place of triumph — not for herself but for others, to be the beneficiaries of my father’s work. For this young generation to carry his work forward, so we can get a semblance of truth and justice for all of those who have been wrongfully murdered.”

She continued, “I’m grateful to stand here with my sisters, and with a competent group of legal experts, as we seek justice for the assassination of our father. The truth will be recorded in history.”

This article was originally published in Truthout. Truthout is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues.