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57 years ago, this week, the world lost civil rights activist Malcolm X when he was assassinated while speaking at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom.
This tragedy was exacerbated by the wrongful arrests and convictions of Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam. Despite no physical evidence linking them to the assassination of Malcolm X, Khalil and Muhammad were still convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Finally, in Nov. 2021, the same district attorney’s office that brought the charges against Muhammad and Khalil five decades ago declared that their convictions should be thrown out and all charges against them dismissed, officially exonerating Muhammad and the late Khalil Islam, who tragically did not live to see his name cleared.
At the hearing, Muhammad said, “I am an 83-year-old man who was victimized by the criminal justice system. I do not know how many more years of creative activity I have. However, I hope the same system that was responsible for this travesty of justice also takes responsibility for the immeasurable harm it caused to me during the last 55 or 56 years.”
So many questions about the murder of Malcolm X have gone unanswered.
Aside from the four individuals ultimately identified by Thomas Hagan — who admitted to taking part in the assassination — who else was involved in the plot to kill Malcolm X? Why wasn’t more done to prevent his assassination? What is the extent of the government’s involvement? And how were two innocent people sent to prison without a shred of physical evidence?
Years after his assassination, it was revealed that there were undercover NYPD police officers and informants present in the ballroom during the crime, but their existence was unknown at the time of Muhammad and Khalil’s trial.
During the recent reinvestigation into the case, unearthed NYPD documents included information about a call to a New York Daily News reporter on the morning of the shooting indicating that Malcolm X was going to be killed, yet no uniformed officers were present at the event to stop it or warn him.
“If Malcolm X cannot get justice — if we cannot get justice in one of the most high profile assassinations in U.S. history, what does that say about the capacity of our criminal legal system to provide justice to the thousands of Black people who are murdered everyday or the tens of thousands of Black men who have been convicted of crimes that they did not commit,” said Elizabeth Hinton, an associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University.
