The Truth of Malcolm X’s Murder

Michael Steven Smith

Malcolm X being interviewed by reporters in 1964. (New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Library of Congress)

MALCOLM X WAS assassinated 60 years ago in the Audubon ballroom in Harlem. Assassination is a political murder. Will the truth about the role of the New York Police Department and the FBI in the murder and coverup finally come out?

Malcolm X’s daughters are plaintiffs in a lawsuit in Federal District Court in New York City to expose the NYPD and the FBI. What will the New York mayor do?

The daughters have retained some of the great police misconduct litigators in the country including Chicago attorneys Flint Taylor and Ben Elson of the Peoples Law Office (PLO), Jonathan Moore and Luna Droubi in New York City, nationally recognized civil rights attorney Ben Crump and his associate Nabeha Shaer, and Newark attorney Ray Hamlin, who has represented the family for years.

The PLO got into the case because of their reputation in successfully suing the Chicago Police Department and the FBI years ago for their role in the murder and coverup of the 1969 assassination of the charismatic Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton.

In a recent interview, PLO attorney Flint Taylor told this writer that he believes Malcolm X, like Fred Hampton, was targeted, in the words of FBI director Hoover, “to prevent the rise of a Messiah who could unify and electrify the militant Black Nationalist movement.”

The Assassination and Frameup

Malcolm X was 39 years old. He lived in Queens with his wife and four daughters. On February 9, 1965, just 12 days before his murder, he was denied entry to France because the French government was tipped off, likely by the CIA, about the plot to kill him and did not want it to happen on French soil.

Five days later, Malcolm was back home in Queens when the house he lived in with his family was firebombed. They barely escaped.

He was finally gunned down on February 21 as he was about to speak before his Organization of Afro-American Unity about his potentially very effective plan to bring the United States in front of the United Nations for its record of genocidal racism.

The story we were led to believe was that Malcolm X, formerly a member and leader of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, had developed differences with Elijah Muhammed, left the group, and was then killed by members of the Nation who were in the ballroom and shot him as he began to speak.

As we recently learned, this is far from the full story. The truth started coming out when Netflix did a six-part documentary on the assassination. This was followed up by a collaborative reinvestigation of the case by the Innocence Project and the New York County District Attorney’s Office (DANY), resulting in the exoneration of two of the falsely imprisoned supposed killers.

These two men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, sued the NYPD and the FBI. They settled their lawsuit with the City of New York in 2022 for $26 million and their case against the FBI remains pending.

Documents in the Hampton murder revealed that the police in Chicago had an informant provocateur planted in the Black Panther Party. It was this person who drew up the floor plan of Hampton’s apartment where he lay sleeping when he was killed. The informant was given money as a bonus for his good work.

The patterns revealed in the Hampton murder and the Malcolm X murder are substantially the same. It is suspected that the NYPD and the FBI collaborated in killing Malcolm, just as the Chicago police and FBI would do four years later in the murder of Fred Hampton — and that they did not prevent the assassination of Malcolm X but rather encouraged it and then covered up who the real killers were.

The man who fired the shotgun blast that killed Malcolm X is now widely believed to be William Bradley, a member of the Nation of Islam’s Newark mosque. According to Attorney Taylor, there is evidence that Bradley may well have been an FBI informant.

Attorney Taylor told this writer that the FBI had a substantial file on Bradley and that several years after the assassination, Bradley was arrested for robbing a New Jersey bank, and when he appeared in court for his plea hearing, he passed a note to the judge, who then reduced his bail. The Department of Justice later dismissed the charges against Bradley but not against his co-defendant.

Status of the Lawsuit

Where does the daughters’ suit stand now? It was brought a year ago. The defendant FBI has filed a motion to dismiss based on the statute of limitations having run out. After all, the case is 60 years old.

In their response, plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that the FBI cannot claim the statute of limitations bars the claim, because it was their coverup that prevented the true facts from coming out and thereby denied Malcolm’s family their constitutional right to access to the courts.

The NYPD and the FBI have been slow to reveal the documents that were produced to the New York District Attorney during its reinvestigation that resulted in the exonerations of Aziz and Islam.

Recently, however, a large batch of documents were produced by DANY and the FBI, heavily redacted with black lines striking out names of informants, and other witnesses, sources, places and events.

Malcolm‘s family wants accountability and transparency. They want to lift the veil on what the federal and city police have done to them. And they want the truth taught in New York City public schools.

This is a form of reparations, as was awarded to the community in Chicago where now both eighth and tenth graders are taught that the Chicago Police Department tortured Black people to get false confessions. This was a victory won by community activists and the People’s Law Office.

Malcolm’s family and their lawyers are now calling on the newly-elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York City, 60 years after the assassination, to give proper compensation to the family, and in the form of reparations some measure of restorative justice to New York City, the nation and the world.

Six decades later Malcolm X has been relegated to a harmless icon — the fate of many revolutionaries, as V.I. Lenin, the leader of the Russian revolution, once wrote. Malcolm‘s picture is even on a U.S. postage stamp. But this is now, who can tell the future?

It is altogether possible that what Malcolm X stood for, Black consciousness, unity in action, identity with those struggling against imperialism worldwide, independence from the two capitalist parties, self-defense by any means necessary, and a deep sense of love, as Che Guevara famously said, will be part of the consciousness of people in the struggles that are now unfolding.

March-April 2026, ATC 241