Malcolm X (83 page)

The police were well aware that New Jersey Muslims might have been involved in the murder. MMI guards had mentioned the presence of Linwood Cathcart in the Grand Ballroom, and he was interviewed by the NYPD on March 25, 1965; Robert 16X Gray, a member of the Newark mosque, had already been interviewed three days earlier. However, the police did not systematically investigate Hayer’s ties to the Newark mosque, or endeavor to explain how he might have hooked up with Butler and Johnson, two Harlem-based NOI officers more senior than himself. They apparently did not consider that NOI protocol would never have allowed enforcers from the Harlem mosque to murder Malcolm in broad daylight, because such men almost certainly would have been recognized by many in the crowd. The NYPD file for Joseph Gravitt is empty, indicating perhaps that any evidence obtained from the Mosque No. 7 captain had been destroyed years ago.

Within Malcolm’s organizations, suspicion quickly rose over the truth of the NYPD’s assertion, and murmurs could be heard about the possibility of an inside job. Since the day of the murder, some inside the MMI had started to revise their estimation of Reuben X Francis as the day’s hero, for shooting Talmadge Hayer. If the NYPD had been asked to relocate their detail outside the Audubon to a location several blocks away, there were only two individuals, other than Malcolm, who had the authority to negotiate a pullback: James 67X and Reuben. In addition, many began to wonder why Charles X Blackwell and Robert 35X Smith had been assigned to guard Malcolm that day when neither man had much experience in a forward defensive position, and when a usual rostrum guard, William 64X George, was present but assigned to guard the door. Reuben’s position as Malcolm’s head of security, responsible for both communicating with the police and arranging Malcolm’s guard detail, had some brothers believing that he might have been involved in the killing.

Gerry Fulcher was convinced that Reuben Francis “was
the
guy. He organized it. And he wanted to get out of Dodge when he knew things were going to get hot. It would come back to him.” The key question for Fulcher was whether Francis was an informant for either the FBI or the NYPD. If Francis had been involved, Fulcher believes, “he had to have contacts within the agency [FBI], or with our office.” But Francis’s role remains uncertain; even the police records are unclear because BOSS and the FBI rarely shared important information about undercover operatives. “The last thing the FBI would ever tell BOSS,” Fulcher said, “is that Francis was an informant.”

Francis began telling others that things were too hot to stay in New York. Released for bail of $10,000, he began expressing fears that New York district attorneys intended to prosecute him for the Hayer shooting, so he decided to flee the country. Anas Luqman, who had also been dragged in by police and then released, thought this made sense, and the two men hatched a plot to drive to the Mexican border and hide out in the desert. Francis recruited three other men with NOI connections who, for different reasons, also wanted to leave the United States. Luqman insisted that one of them, a seventeen-year-old boy, be left behind. “So we started driving,” Luqman recalled more than forty years later, and after several days on the road the group crossed the border.

Whether or not Malcolm’s own men played a role in his death, nearly all Malcolmites were convinced that law enforcement and the U.S. government were extensively involved in the murder. Peter Bailey, for example, charged in a 1968 interview that the NYPD and the FBI “knew that brother Malcolm’s destiny was assigned for assassination.” Bailey believed that both Thomas Johnson and Norman Butler were innocent. Although he himself did not witness the shooting—he was waiting downstairs for the arrival of Reverend Galamison—he developed a strong theory on how the assassination had occurred. “I think that brother Malcolm was killed by trained killers,” he said, not “amateurs.” Bailey doubted that “the Muslims were capable of doing it.” Consequently, most OAAU and MMI members decided not to be cooperative with the police. What they failed to understand was that there was intense competition and mistrust between the NYPD and the FBI. Even within the NYPD itself, BOSS operated largely above the law, shielding its own operatives and paid informants from the rest of the police force. Consequently there was no unified law enforcement strategy in place to suppress the investigation of Malcolm’s death. In the end, cooperation with police detectives might have increased the likelihood that Malcolm’s real killers would have been brought to justice.

Ultimately, the police’s version of events gained credibility from the media’s sensationalizing of Malcolm’s antiwhite image. A
New York Times
news article, for example, was headlined “Malcolm X Lived in Two Worlds, White and Black, Both Bitter.” In its editorial, the
Times
described Malcolm as “an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose. . . . Malcolm X had the ingredients for leadership, but his ruthless and fanatical belief in violence not only set him apart from the responsible leaders of the civil rights movement and the overwhelming majority of Negroes. It also marked him for notoriety, and for a violent end.” The editorial implied that Malcolm’s break from the NOI was due to jealousy rather than political or ethical differences. It also suggested that black nationalist extremists, whether in the Nation or in some other group, had been responsible for the murder. “The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark,” the editorial concluded. “But he made it darker still with his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of that darkness that he spawned, and killed him.”

Several days later,
Time
magazine left no doubt regarding its interpretation : “Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred.” The magazine also concurred with the NYPD’s theory of the assassination. “Malcolm’s murder [was] almost certainly at the hands of the Black Muslims from whom he had defected.” But it was not enough just to condemn Malcolm on ideological grounds;
Time
went on to invent a story to ridicule his character. The Sunday afternoon program at the Audubon had started late, the magazine declared, because “characteristically [Malcolm] had kept his followers waiting for nearly an hour while he lingered over tea and a banana split at a nearby Harlem restaurant.”

Other publications expressed similar sentiments. The
Saturday Evening Post’
s obituary was more sensitive than most, but expressed frustration and confusion over the murdered black leader. “The ugly killing of Malcolm X prompted many people to attempt an assessment of this violent and baffling young demagogue. Was his death an inevitable part of the struggle for Negro equality?” the obituary asked. “His death resembled a martyrdom less than a gangland execution. But Americans have had too much of assassination, too much of the settlement of conflict by violence.”

The
New York Herald Tribune’
s initial headline story on Malcolm, printed that Sunday evening but dated as the first edition of February 22, read “Malcolm X Slain by Gunmen as 400 in Ballroom Watch: Police Rescue Two Suspects.” An accompanying article stated that Hayer had been “taken to the Bellevue Prison Ward and was sealed off by a dozen policemen. The other suspect was taken to the Wadsworth Avenue precinct, where the city’s top policemen immediately converged.” Several hours later, in the
Herald Tribune’
s late edition, the subhead of the article was changed: “Police Rescue One Suspect.” References to a second suspect being taken to the Wadsworth Avenue police precinct were deleted. Black nationalists and Trotskyists would subsequently charge that the NYPD “covered up” its own involvement in the assassination by suppressing evidence and witnesses, including the capture of one assailant who may have been a BOSS operative. The NYPD and mainstream journalists such as Peter Goldman ridiculed such speculations. Goldman attributed the confusion to the fact that reporters debriefed Officer Thomas Hoy “at the scene and Aronoff at the station house,” not realizing they “were talking about the same man. . . . [T]he confusion lasted long enough to create a whole folklore around the ‘arrest’ of a mysterious second suspect—a mythology that endures to this day.” However, Herman Ferguson’s 2004 account of a second man who had been shot being taken away by the police lends some credence to the “second suspect” theory. If an informant or undercover operative of the FBI or BOSS had been shot, or was part of the assassination team, the police almost certainly never would have permitted his role to become public. Another possibility was the presence of more than one assassination team in the Grand Ballroom that Sunday. Although Ferguson and many eyewitnesses saw three shooters, some observers, including FBI informants, claimed that there were four or even five.

Within twenty-four hours of the assassination, nearly every national civil rights organization had distanced itself from both Malcolm and the bloody events at the Audubon. To Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, Malcolm’s assassination “revealed that our society is still sick enough to express dissent through murder. We have not learned to disagree without being violently disagreeable.” The NAACP leader Roy Wilkins deplored Malcolm’s “gunning down” as a “shocking and ghastly demonstration of the futility of resorting to violence as a means of settling differences.” Speaking on behalf of SNCC, the young desegregation activist Julian Bond informed the
New York Times
, “I don’t think Malcolm’s death or any man’s death could influence our deep-seated belief in nonviolence.”

From London, James Baldwin responded by linking the crime to the involvement of the U.S. government. “Whoever did it,” he speculated, “was formed in the crucible of the Western world, of the American Republic.” Much more explicit was CORE’s James Farmer, who was well aware of Malcolm’s metamorphosis and had expressed doubts that the leader’s murder was the product of a feud with the Nation of Islam. “I believe that his killing was a political killing,” he declared. It was hardly “accidental that his death came at a time when his views were changing [toward] the mainstream of the civil rights movement.” Farmer’s demand for a “federal inquiry into the murder,” however, found virtually no support. To the public, the Nation of Islam was evidently responsible for the shooting.

Malcolm’s death set off a chain reaction of violence and intimidation that kept his supporters in fear and left his organizations crumbling. On the night of the murder, a fire ignited in Muhammad Ali’s Chicago apartment, but the fire was later determined to have been accidental. Ali informed the press that Malcolm had been his friend “as long as he was a member of [the Nation of] Islam. Now I don’t want to talk about him.” Perhaps still suspicious about his apartment fire, Ali protested, “All of us were shocked at the way [Malcolm] was killed.” Ali denied that Elijah Muhammad, or others in the NOI, had any involvement in the murder.

Two days later, early in the morning on February 23, unknown parties ascended to the roof of a building next door to Mosque No. 7 and tossed Molotov cocktails into the mosque’s fourth floor, igniting a fire that soon raged out of control, with flames soaring as high as thirty feet. The fire quickly spread next door to the Gethsemane Church of God in Christ, and soon seventy-five firemen were working frantically to put it out. As a section of the mosque’s wall collapsed, five firefighters and a civilian were injured. Within an hour the entire building was gutted. The Fruit of Islam was mustered, and soon about three hundred people were watching the fire blaze away. As the crowd grew and emotions surged, the police became worried and called in reinforcements. In the frigid night air, Larry 4X Prescott huddled next to Captain Joseph, who had begun to weep. Larry was shocked to see the almost stoic, deeply private Joseph now overwhelmed with grief.

The destruction of the mosque greatly increased public perceptions that an open gang war was imminent. The NYPD policed the Nation’s Brooklyn mosque and the ten businesses it owned in the surrounding neighborhood; the mosque in Queens was similarly protected. In Chicago, squads stood an around-the-clock vigil to protect the life of Muhammad, still cloistered in his Hyde Park mansion. Captain Joseph characterized the Harlem firebombing as “a vicious sneak attack. . . . The worst thing a man can do is tamper with your religious sanctuary.”

The Nation would exact its revenge not in Harlem’s streets, but in Chicago at the Saviour’s Day convention. In preparation, administrators worked closely with the Chicago police to carry out extraordinary security measures around the convention hall. A police bomb squad thoroughly checked the facility; attendees were processed through police barricades before entering. Elijah Muhammad himself “will not make a move unless accompanied by at least six members of his security force, the Fruit of Islam brigade,” reported the
Chicago Tribune
. Twenty-five hundred members were present as the convention began on February 26. The event was orchestrated as a triumph of the victors. “Malcolm was a hypocrite who got what he was preaching,” Elijah Muhammad proclaimed. “Just weeks ago he came to this city to blast away with his hate and mudslinging. He didn’t stop here, either, but then went around the country trying to slander me.”